As the Daily Mail publishes a hugely misleading attack, Raymond Snoddy argues that the public mood is being manipulated to make it hostile to the BBC in advance of vital talks with Government.
They don’t start shooting grouse until August but open season has already been declared on the BBC with the Daily Mail in the vanguard.
The latest assault kicked off in a reasonably rational way in the last issue of the Mail on Sunday with a page lead claiming that the BBC faces the loss of £500 million a year.
It was a reasonably rational report because it is entirely possible that new Culture Secretary John Whittingdale will indeed decide to continue to freeze the licence fee for another five years.
This would amount to less of a freeze and more a glacial period as it would mean the loss of around £300 million a year.
Add in the apparent determination of MPs to push ahead with the decriminalisation of the licence – itself a good thing apart from the likely consequences – and that could mean the additional loss of around £200 million a year.
Unsurprisingly the number of non-payers could double under such a regime.
Separately, the BBC’s director of television, Danny Cohen, has been accused of trying to hold the Government to ransom by warning that having to fund free licence fees for the over 75s or decriminalising the licence fee would inevitably mean the loss of some well-liked programmes.
The Mail on Sunday story could indeed turn out to be true, although a rather sorry truth it would be. It might be worth mentioning in passing that the political discussions on both the licence fee and a new Royal Charter have not actually begun yet.
Yet while the Mail on Sunday usually stays on the right side of sanity on the BBC issue, it’s difficult to say the same of the Daily Mail.
Monday’s edition “revealed” that the “BBC spends less than half its cash on programmes.”
Rent-a-gob MPs were quick to demand a public inquiry into this “staggering” waste.
Was this a powerful piece of investigative undercover journalism telling us important things we did not know?
The source appears to be that top-secret document – the BBC Annual Report and Accounts.
There for all to see are the monstrous numbers confirming that the Corporation spent just £1.7 billion on television programmes last year, “only” £480 million on radio programmes and a mere £106 million in online content.
The rest – why that goes on “infrastructure and support”. How wicked. How profligate.
It’s a complete disgrace. All that money wasted on offices and editing suites – there is even a human resources department. Then there are transmission costs without which licence fee payers would not be able to see or hear anything.
Last time I looked the Daily Mail had offices and a human resources department and without printing presses and vans the would be going nowhere. It’s called infrastructure and support and has nothing directly to do with the costs of the paper’s journalism.
As the BBC said – and you have to read to the end of the article to know this – more than 90 per cent of BBC revenue goes on content-related costs and “we’ve made savings of £1.1 billion a year” – savings that have also costs more than 2,000 jobs.
Trouble is, the news that the BBC spends more than 90 per cent of revenues on content-related costs doesn’t exactly make for a snappy or damaging headline.
Then there is the inevitable accompanying table; “How they fritter away the licence fee.”
And so it is that we know that the BBC controller of comedy, Shane Allen, spent £120 on 48 cupcakes to “thank production staff for doing their jobs.”
Throughout the BBC no less than £9,194 has been spent so far this year alone on booze.
It would be lovely to see the equivalent Daily Mail figure on booze just as a matter of interest.
More seriously £100,000 a week is being spent, according to the Daily Mail, on management consultants and “PR gurus.”
If true the £5.2 million a year-figure is still too high but represents around 0.11 per cent of total revenue of £5.1 billion. How many corporations spent such a percentage on consultants and PR gurus?
There is little doubt that the BBC is still far too bureaucratic an organisation and director-general Tony Hall really should have done better in this regard over his nearly two years in charge.
The attacks on the BBC should nonetheless bear some resemblance to the truth, if any attempt at fairness cannot reasonably be expected.
The trouble is that the Daily Mail’s opening salvo was then picked up by people who should know better, even if they also have vested interests.
So we got a Times leader this week with the following opening sentence: “The suggestion that the BBC spends less than half of its £5.1 billion budget on making programmes is dismaying. It is also sadly unsurprising.”
The paper goes on to repeat the items on the Daily Mail’s fritter-away list.
Equally unsurprising, Max Hastings then wades in with a trenchant attack in the Daily Mail based on the same misleading nonsense that only half the money goes on programmes.
Then of course he throws in what happened to him “a while back” on the old Parkinson Show – a while back indeed – when he was offered £2,000 to appear despite being only there to plug his latest book.
Sir Max got over his shock to keep the money after being told that all agents demanded such money for their clients as appearance fees.
It’s possible to laugh off all this rubbish but actually dangerous to do so. The public mood is being manipulated to make it hostile to the BBC in advance of vital talks with Government.
Write a factual tweet on the MoS story about the BBC facing the loss of £500 million a year and there is an explosion, largely of bile.
Some of it comes from a Tweeter calling himself Jehovah God Himself who at least has the decency to admit he hasn’t actually got a TV or radio.
The real scandal of the BBC at the moment is despite all those expensive “PR gurus” it is failing abjectly to argue its case with the British public and that could have serious consequences for us all in the end.
