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Rule one of politics, as Barack Obama's former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once remarked, is: "Never allow a crisis to go to waste." Right-wingers in the UK have heeded his words: they certainly aren't allowing the crises engulfing the BBC "to go to waste". And their strategy is as brazen as it is cynical and opportunistic: to magnify and exaggerate the sins of the hated Beeb while quietly minimising the crimes of their friends at News International.
A case in point was Boris Johnson's Telegraph column of 12 November. After blithely declaring that the "real tragedy" was the "smearing [of] an innocent man's name" by BBC's Newsnight (and not, as you might think, the sexual abuse of children), Johnson claimed that Newsnight's reporting had been "more cruel, revolting and idiotic than anything perpetrated by the News of the World".
Sorry, what? Dare I remind the Mayor of London that more than 4,000 people have been identified by police as possible victims of phone-hacking, including the families of dead British soldiers, relatives of the 7/7 victims and a murdered schoolgirl? Yet the cultural vandals on the right only have eyes for the BBC, whose existence has always been anathema to their free-market, anti-regulation ideology.
Hysteria and hyperbole
The Newsnight debacle has provided the perfect cover for an attack on the corporation that has been a long time in the making. Remember, in opposition, the Conservative Party in effect allowed James Murdoch and NewsCorp lobbyists to write its media policy. And on coming to office, the Tory-led coalition froze the BBC licence fee for six years. An unavoidable cost-cutting measure, perhaps? Not quite: a gleeful David Cameron let the mask slip when he referred to the BBC "deliciously" having to slash its budget. (For the record, the BBC costs each licensed household less than 40p a day.)
In recent weeks, conservatives - both big and small 'c' - have queued up to denounce the broadcaster and demand that it be downsized or even broken up. "The BBC must do less, and do it better," declaimed the Telegraph on 13 November. The defence secretary, the Conservative Philip Hammond, suggested in (where else?) a BBC radio interview that the future of the licence fee might be in doubt.
What we are witnessing is a shameless, co-ordinated assault on the BBC's reputation and output by Conservative politicians and by their outriders in the right-wing media echo chamber. Don't believe me? Ask yourself: where were these doughty Tory defenders of media ethics when Christopher Jefferies, the landlord of the murdered architect Joanna Yeates, was being smeared as a "creepy" killer by the press? Eight newspapers, including the Sun, the Mirror and the Daily Mail, had to pay "substantial" libel damages to the former schoolmaster. None of those papers' editors quit his job; none "stood aside" from his post pending an independent inquiry.
It is also worth asking why so few Tory MPs and Tory-supporting columnists have gone after ITV - the network on which the presenter Phillip Schofield idiotically ambushed the prime minister, live on air, with a list of alleged paedophiles culled from the internet. Schofield is still in his job. So, too, are the chairman and chief executive of ITV.
To try to delegitimise or dismantle the BBC, the world's biggest and best broadcaster, on the basis of Newsnight's double failure - first over Jimmy Savile, then over Lord McAlpine - is unfair both to the corporation and to Newsnight itself. Ask the brave people of the besieged Syrian city of Homs what they think of the show. Newsnight's acclaimed film Undercover in Homs, which reported their plight to Britain, won an Amnesty media award in May.
The BBC is bigger than Newsnight - though you might not have guessed it from the recent hysteria and hyperbole in the press. Consider some of the award-winning and popular BBC output of the past 12 months: Panorama, David Attenborough's Frozen Planet, Andrew Marr's History of the World, Strictly Come Dancing, The Archers, Sherlock, the Today programme, Children in Need, the Proms, Woman's Hour, CBeebies . . . the list goes on. Figures released by the corporation suggest 96 per cent of the UK population consumes BBC services every week.
The inconvenient truth for right-wingers is that their hatred of the taxpayer-funded, publicly owned BBC has never been shared by the tax-paying public. As the Financial Times noted on 12 November: "In a survey by Ofcom, the media regulator, in November 2011, 59 per cent of people said the BBC was the news source they most trusted. The next, ITV News, scored 7 per cent." The reporters added: "No newspaper beat 2 per cent."
Beware the Rupert
The BBC has bent over backwards to hold itself to account. How many other media organisations would have allowed their editor-in-chief to be flayed in public by one of his own employees, as EntÂwistle was by the Today programme's John Humphrys on 10 November?
Full disclosure: I was once a BBC employee and I now do paid punditry for various BBC programmes. But I am no dewy-eyed defender of Auntie: I have, on these pages, condemned the Beeb's "establishment bias . . . towards power and privilege, tradition and orthodoxy" and its "stomach-churning" coverage of the monarchy. And I agree that the corporation's "bonkers" (© David Dimbleby) management structure is stuffed with "cowards and incompetents" (© Jeremy Paxman).
But what is the alternative? Death by a thousand Tory cuts? The Foxification of the British media landscape? Make no mistake, Rupert Murdoch - who incidentally hasn't had to resign as chief executive of a media company where phone-hacking was conducted on an industrial scale - is waiting in the wings.
The BBC, despite its many faults, must be protected from its right-wing enemies. In the battle to preserve high-quality, non-partisan public-service broadcasting, Auntie is our last line of defence.
Mehdi Hasan is political director of The Huffington Post UK and a contributing writer to the New Statesman. This post also appeared on the New Statesman.
Follow Mehdi Hasan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mehdirhasan
Des Freedman: The BBC: Is This the Corporation's Hacking Crisis?
I'll deal with a few points to explain what I mean:
Hasan quotes the equally ridiculous Boris Johnson, saying basically that what Newsnight did was worse than thousands of phone hacks by the News of The World. I don't generally have much time for Boris, but this time he has a point. If you smear someone as a paedophile, particularly if you're an organisation like the BBC, that person is labelled, and that's worse than any amount of phone hacks.
It was not the Newsnight dabacle on it's own that left the BBC open to attack, it's it's history of biased and lazy reporting on a variety of subjects, and it's self-important and politically correct management system, which have all weakened it over the years.
When Christopher Jeffries was smeared by the papers, I have absolutely no doubt that the lazy and incompetent police in some way were behind the stories.
I repeat, one wrong paedophile smear is worse than any number of phone hacks.
Bad as the hacking was/is by News International, I don't believe for a second they were the only papers or organisations at it.
Remember this, if the police had done their job properly in the first the place instead of the usual lazy incompetence we're used to, this would have been dealt with properly a long time ago.
The impetus for the Leveson inquiry to be set up, came from a false story in the Guardian, publicity seeking celebrities, incomplete evidence and witnesses have long ago lost my interest, as it became a circus.
Seeing Rupert Murdoch's dementia riddled old man act fool a bunch of showboating MPs, told me all I needed to know about the way things would go.
Start to use the advertising model like every other successful station. Companies will be tripping over themselves to come on-board, revenues will increase and they can then pay their presenters whatever they like. They will also be able to compete against companies like Sky rather than stuck in a pit where they are at the moment.
Also let us not forget that the BBC have stations that operate all over the world as BBC America, BBC Canada, BBC Algeria, BBC Arabic, BBC Persian, the list goes on but the question is how have they set up these stations and why should these stations exist as we are the ones who pay the license fees?
Still far too much fore a rather inane fool who just happened to have been viewed by someone in the BBC as a worthwhile contractee.
Personally I wouldn't have offered him anything more than the salary of a cleaner or canteen assistant, that I have to say is my opinion of his 'talent' Maybe I should add, I think a cleaner or canteen assistant would actually be more worthy of their salary than he was of his.
".. the BBC costs each licensed household less than 40p a day" ....however, if you are one of the poorest in the UK then you will find it hard to pay something which just comes across as a stealth tax from your £10.12 a day which also has to pay your gas/electricity other household bills and of course provide you with food.
Sky wanted the government to continue the license fee because it limits the amount of revenue that they can make per annum as opposed to the model which obviously works better and has produced hundreds if not thousands of commercial television stations all over the world. This means that lucrative programming like sport cannot be afforded by the BBC as Sky are prepared to pay amounts which the BBC can no longer challenge but are making Sky billions worldwide.
BBC cannot even afford to show football highlights on it's football highlights show! It broadcasts audio behind pictures of what happened!!! How pathetic is this? This is our national sport and the most watched sport in the world!
What purpose does the BBC serve? In the 40/50’s the BBC had a purpose to inform the general public about what is going on at home and in the world but nowadays there are alternative forms and some would say better commercial world news channels such as Al Jazeera, CNN, SKY, RT News where you can formulate a more rounded picture as to what is happening in the world.
With today’s austerity measures which the government is bringing in next year such as Welfare Reform and the localisation of council tax (poll tax version 2) people on low income will struggle to pay for a TV licence, this will result in an increase in the number of fines and imprisonment.
The questions I would ask, if the BBC was sold off are; would we miss it apart from the nostalgia? is it a top heavy expensive white elephant? Would there be a more levelled playing field for the likes of Sky and Virgin?
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I exempt John Humphries (a godsend) from any criticism
Maybe a new DG with a free hand, to launder the mess at the screen, can b ea a boon , and one that can set the Corporation on a far more rigid path, and break the grip that a certain hierarchical set up has established, thereby retuning the BBC to a position that can be endured.
Instead of all the whingeing about the licence fee, maybe we should do far more whingeing about the present establishment, and the direction it has taken the BBC
I will opt for any sensible manoeuvre, just as long as I am not inflicted with advertisement breaks every few minutes that are the curse and bane of our TV viewing on other channels.
Which brings me to the licence fee, you may not realise it, but the licence fee is actually less a drain on you pocket than the charge being made on the products advertised,
on those adverts on average you pay around twice the licence fee, but as it is not a direct charge you don't realise or know it is there.
So for all the carping about the licence fee, it is cheaper than watching the 'free; ITV, and certainly far cheaper than paying the subscription channels, which in effect are charging you double all told.
If they had done the same to the water,gass or oil companies,this would have help the British public.
I cant help thinking,other than murdoch,who would bennifit from the slow death by stranglulation of the BBC?
We do not even get to hear how much some of their employees are paid that is a sign of their arrrogance!