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Spurious betting game
Who will take over at the Beeb when Mark Thompson gets a call from a search firm specialising in thankless tasks and decides to call it a day? I’m not given to betting, but were I the wagering type I think I’d see what odds I could get on news boss Helen Boaden being Director-General…
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Play our new game: BBC moral equivalence
Mark Thompson writes about trust in the BBC. After condemning the children’s programme editor who apparently believed a poll had been rigged and changed the name of a cat (yes, really), Thompson lets off senior BBC manager Alan Yentob for filming reaction shots to interviews he didn’t actually show up for. Yes, according to the…
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Jeremy Paxman: regional news fan
[J]ust look at almost any regional news programme, with its tawdry catalogue of misfortune, recited in deadbeat vocabulary. You’d think that every child in the city was being sexually abused, every journey every day disrupted, resulting in ‘pure misery’, every teenager a drug-crazed psychopath. Does it alarm? Sure. Does it help us understand? You must…
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Alan Yentob: unforgivable
Alan Yentob, BBC Creative Director and self-basting arts turkey, uses an Observer diary piece to bury his contribution to the cut-away crisis. Yentob is in the dock for being filmed nodding approvingly to contributions from people he hadn’t actually interviewed. The impression being given to viewers that he had actually interviewed them. …on occasion, I…