More trouble at the Beeb this week

They have hit (their own) headlines, yet again after deciding not to broadcast an appeal to raise money for those affected by the Gaza conflict due to fears it may infringe on one of their founding principles of “impartiality”. Obviously there is always going to be impartiality in news broadcasts anyway purely because of the basis on which news stories are selected and which are not – for example, while we were being informed of the Darfur crisis, ongoing instability in, say, Columbia is being ignored.

This is the second time in three months that the BBC, the medium through which we, the public, are supposed to be informed of the news has, arrogantly, decided that the goings on within it’s own organisation are more important than actual news; whether it’s ongoing wars, murders, election campaigns etc. So we had the bizarre (to me, anyway) situation over the weekend where the top story on the BBC was them trying to justify their reasons for not showing an appeal and putting the reason for the appeal i.e. Gaza crisis, to second billing.

I understand that because the BBC is publically funded and so should be answerable to the licence payers but not at the expense of other “more newsworthy” stories.

If angering the licence fee payers is set to become a regular thing for 2009, may I suggest a weekly Points of View style show? Instead of it being hosted by a jovial Terry Wogan with people ringing in complaining about how crap My Family is, we could have hard-hitting, serious journalist Jeremy Paxman grilling other media types over their shoddy decisions and dodgy judgments…and then perhaps a viewers’ phone in vote on whether they should be fired or not. Wouldn’t work would it?