Moore relents......just

Charles Moore,who famously refused to pay his license fee until Jonathan Ross was removed from the BBC,describes his resignation as

a victory for those of us who thought that Ross’s obscene phone calls to Andrew Sachs, and the BBC’s decision to broadcast them, marked an all-time low in the story of our cultural decline.

in his Telegraph column this morning

adding that

We suffer from a peculiar decadence in which our cosseted Establishment grovels to whatever it thinks is “subversive” or “cutting-edge”.

As for his refusal to pay the license fee

Ross is leaving the BBC in July this year, so at that point, but not before, I shall renew. It will be amusing to see if the enforcement bureaucracy pays any attention to what is happening, or just plugs on, chasing me for my “year out”.

Yentoub accused

Arts projects to mark the refurbishment of Broadcasting House are costing the licence fee payer dear according to the Sunday Times this morning.

The paper reports that Alan Yentob, the corporation’s creative director,is behind a flurry of extravagant spending projects costing £3.9m, including

£25,000 to send a remote-controlled model helicopter equipped with a camera flying over Broadcasting House for just two minutes

and

a photographer who was paid £70,000 to take pictures of those involved in refurbishing the building and three artists who received £24,000 between them to design “wraps” to hide the project’s scaffolding.

accused

Shock as it appears the BBC has shared income in the past

Yesterday's FT picked up a bit of ammunition for those who want the BBC to share its income.

archive documents seen by the Financial Times reveal that, from the inception of the licence fee in 1928 until 1962, up to 12.5 per cent of the licence fee went straight to the Treasury as part of its general revenue.

This being an argument firmly dismissed by the corporation at the moment,the revelations will not doubt embarass the BBC.

On top of that

Richard Collins, professor of media studies at the Open University, said that, in addition to the Treasury’s share of the licence fee, around 8 or 9 per cent was kept by the Post Office, which collected the licence fee on behalf of the BBC.

License fee may end up funding ITV regional news

There is an interesting report in this morning's Telegraph which suggests that a proportion of the license fee could be used to fund ITV's regional news.

Ahead of the Carter report it is claimed that Lord Carter will

recommend that some of the BBC's annual revenue should be used to fund regional news services on ITV and broadband for all.

The money will come from the so called digital surplus

the £800 million built into the present six-year licence fee settlement, which began in 2007, to help older and disabled people complete the switch to digital television by supplying them with set top boxes. This is scheduled to be completed by 2012.

The surplus is reckoned to be around £250m

Maguire on Cameron's license fee proposal

Kevin Maguire makes it perfectly clear what he thinks of David Cameron's proposal to freeze the license fee.

Writing in the Mirror this morning he says

You know dodgy Dave’s bankrupt of ideas when his big offer in a recession is to save you less than a penny a day on the TV licence.
Even naff hosts on home shopping channels would shy away from the worthless Tory tat Cameron’s peddling.

No suprises from Ofcom

So the news from Ofcom is not unexpected.It seems that ITV would have gone ahead anyway being forced into the corner due to lack of funds.
Nevertheless the cut in local news output will mean job cuts,the NUJ reckon on a figure of 500 and some areas of the country being deprived of a certain amount of local news.

The regulator has agreed to ITV's request to cut news programming form the current 17to 9 regions as well as cuts in non news programmimg and production of programmes from outside the London region.
Perhaps more importantly the regulator thinks that both ITV and Channel 5 could well be free of all its public service obligations by 2014.

For Channel 4 the news is grim with estimates that it will have a funding deficit of around £100m a year by 2012 rejecting the idea of the so called "top slicing2 of BBC licence fee money.

You can read the full review HERE

A case of the credit obscuring our view of the Beeb

What can be made of the poll commissioned by the Guardian which suggests that the public do not find the license fee value for money.Possibly this is the effect of the credit crunch for its seems to contradict a 2006 survey which suggested the contrary.

Then Professor Patrick Barwise of the London Business School concluded

"most people would prefer a bigger, stronger BBC to a smaller, weaker one," even where some extra cost is involved.

The Mori/Ipsos poll found that

viewers enjoy the corporation's programmes - BBC1 is by some distance the most popular channel - a large proportion do not feel the licence fee is good value for money or an appropriate way of funding the BBC.

and

The further North you go in the country,the less you think the BBC is value for money.

So is this a case again for journalism that people want quality but are not prepared to pay for it.Or are we tightening our purse strings?

BBC is worth 40p a day-three cheers

At least according to Mark Thompson writing in this morning's Telegraph.

He is responding to Sir Antony Jay's Centre for Policy Studies think tank and asks

Do the British public really want the corporation to shrink back to the size it was in the early 1950s? And what would British life and culture be like if Sir Antony got his way?

In a plea from the heart,he says that

It's important first to address Jay's presumption that, with a shrunken BBC, the commercial sector would have the cash and the desire to fill the void. How big would that void be?

and its a fair point and at the centre of the debate over the BBC.How will it services be replaced,or will they be replaced.The answer to that is probably not.

Take music. The Albert Hall in August would be in darkness - there would be no BBC Proms, broadcast across television and radio. The Young Musician of the Year would remain undiscovered. Pop fans would be denied the Radio 1 Big Weekend, and Jools Holland on BBC 2. Musicians in the BBC orchestras could be busking on the street.

No doubt its critics will accuse Thompson of a pompous presumption that the BBC supplies a need that nobody else can do but so what.I for one still believe that with all its faults the BBC is good value for money.Maybe the funding structure needs to be looked but it is dificult to see in this multi platform age a better model to replace it

A solution to the jobs-lets pay more license fees

And there is a lot of comment in the media this morning,but this article in the New Statesman perhaps should sum up the feelings of journalists

The coming BBC battle is not just about thousands of jobs - it's about defending quality journalism and programmes from Mark Thompson's cuts

Here is an idea though.Lets not forget that this all comes down to money so the papers that are trumpeting repeats,redundancy etc,maybe could ask their readers whether they would like to pay more license fee.


Listening to Micheal Lyons being interviewed on the Today programme this morning,I got the impression that quality journalism was not what the Trust is trying to protect.It will be interesting to see what,if any action, the Trust takes on the reaction of journalists to the cuts.