Standard: 'Fear and loathing at the BBC'

Some scathing quotes about management at the BBC in last night's Evening Standard in a feature article by Stephen Robinson which claims the primary cause of anxiety and alienation among staff is the "stifling, enervating effects of the vast BBC bureaucracy, and its militant new outrider, Compliance."

One news editor working at Millbank, newly promoted, recalls being summoned to a management away-day team-building exercise."Congratulations," the management trainee man told the group, "you are now part of the elite cadre of the top 2,000 BBC managers." Comments Robinson, "The journalist understandably wanted to cut his own throat."

Robinson adds: "The number of producers and researchers has been slashed so that in many current affairs programmes the reporter is working alone, without any oversight, and no back-up in the office to check facts.
"Meanwhile, reporters and editors live in fear of any sort of row which might trigger the dreaded outcome of a "Compliance Audit", which often follows a charge of bias or bad taste, when teams of officials will descend to the editorial floor to make sure that reporter, editor and producer all ticked the correct boxes."

The piece reminded me of a remark about the BBC made by Joan Bakewell giving the James Cameron Memorial Lecture at City University last week. She said that many of the creative people who used to be employed at the BBC had gone to independents or their jobs had been outsourced.

Bakewell claimed: "The people who swarm through its doors today are planners, marketing people, press officers and managers."