'Despite all its flaws, the Beeb is still deserving of worldwide respect'
HUW Edwards lies in a hospital bed after seedy allegations of a non-criminal nature against him drove the depression sufferer into a mental health crisis.
Because he is seen as the journalistic face of the BBC, a claim he paid a young person for sexually explicit pictures and the fact that his managers reacted woefully when notified of it, has been manna from heaven for the corporation’s powerful enemies.
The usual suspects in the right-wing media popped up to demand its instant defunding, pundits on Rupert Murdoch’s TV channel gleefully hailed it the beginning of the end for the BBC and Lee Anderson declared the organisation a “safe haven for perverts”.
And with the amount of underage assaults, sexual harassment, rape charges and tractor-porn watching involving Tory MPs recently, the party’s deputy chairman should know all about pervert havens.
Huw Edwards on BBC News (BBC)But as the hysteria dies down, the BBC does appear seriously damaged. Following the Martin Bashir scandal and Gary Lineker’s ludicrous suspension over an inoffensive tweet, its management come across as petrified, helpless rabbits waiting for the next juggernaut to crush them.
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Once again it looks like the BBC can’t run the BBC. That its executives are mediocre, buck-passing timeservers stuck in a corporate fog, scared of upsetting politicians, unable to handle their biggest talents and paranoid about accusations that they waste the £159 that pensioners have to pay each year on pain of jail.
And when they are paying the likes of Zoe Ball £980,000 a year to warble inanely on an audience-losing radio breakfast show, their paranoia is justified.
If the BBC were to be defunded, there would be much I wouldn’t miss. Does it really need to spend our cash on reality shows, soaps, endless internet sites, the casts of thousands it sends to foreign events, all those national radio stations and the endless layers of bureaucracy that makes it look ancient and dysfunctional?
But I would badly miss its superb drama, comedy and documentary output, all of which contributed to £2billion in commercial sales last year. And to lose its journalism would be a travesty.
It was BBC reporters who asked the hardest questions of BBC management over Huw Edwards and broke allegations from a second claimant knowing that, although it would be hugely damaging to the organisation that pays their wages, the truth is more important. What other media company on Earth would have allowed that to happen?
In this age of trial by social media and emerging TV channels with political agendas, BBC News’ independence and integrity are vital to democracy. And not just ours.
Almost half a billion people a week globally get their news from the BBC because it is the world’s oldest and most trusted news brand. At a time when so little about this country is held in high regard, the BBC still undoubtedly is.
I’ve been on jobs abroad when foreign politicians, film stars and sports icons have stopped in their tracks to talk to the BBC because it has kudos and demands respect.
A respect and a trust that has been hard-earned over the past century and as we saw this week is still jealously protected.
Radically reform the BBC by all means, but to totally destroy it at the bidding of its politically driven, commercial rivals would be a sad day for Britain and for the truth.
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