BBC

Often called the Beeb or Aunty. The BBC is often accused of bias, and being lazy in its reporting, although it strongly rejects such accusations. Beyond the BBC TV news, and their internet home page, they do produce some good work e.g. Radio 4. However, most viewers never get the time to get this far, so the BBC has to recognise that its main bulletins must be accurate and stop resorting to just printing what the Government or Institutions want people to hear.

When Gordon Brown was planning (October 2007) to announce the start of the Governments re-election campaign he planned to provide the BBC with exclusive interviews. Their is no such thing as a free lunch, and in return for these exclusives Gordon would want the BBC to publish nice words about the strength of the U.K economy, as opposed to stating that the economy was built on Booming House prices and Booming Debt. Such deals will lead the public to loose its trust in the BBC.

In the day of the internet people can now access far more information direct from the source e.g. company press release. The BBC has to move away from simply repeating what the press release states to analysing it and pointing out to viewers how the press release may have been spinned. This is what viewers pay the TV licence fee for. However, it will require the journalist to earn their salary something most of them seem to have forgotten how to do. The real problem is that as the government sets the BBC licence fee then the BBC is not really independent - it is always in fear that if it says something nasty then the government will cut the licence fee. In addition, the journalists are often on a gold plated final salary pension scheme, and with virtually no risk to being sacked, they have no need to work to earn a living. Finally, as their pensions insulate them from the real economy the BBC political and economic journalists have little knowledge of how the real economy works. To be fair the BBC was vigorously attacked by the government for reporting that a "top leading weapons scientist" had stated that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and the report has been sexed up - subsequent events proved that the BBC was correct. The BBC can move beyond the accusations of bias and lazy reporting be educating the viewer. But for now the BBC political and economics journalists will be viewed more as comedians - something to watch when you need a bit of light relief from redundancy, declining pensions, recession and falling house prices!

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