Weekly round-up: BBC, RTVE, RAI

Three items this week, in descending order of importance, increasing order of triviality:

1. The cost of a BBC licence fee was set for the next six years. The fee will increase 3% for the next two years, and 2% for the four following years. The figures roughly follow projections for CPI, but there is no inflation link. The BBC is annoyed, because they think the settlement is below RPI (which is below industry-specific inflation for broadcasting, which may be subject to Baumol's disease), and because they thought they would get extra for spearheading the switch to digital terrestrial. They do (a £200m side-payment), but the DCMS is sure that there are cost-savings to be made. [Historical data on licence fee]
2. RTVE revealed its new executive line-up. According to Formula TV, Director-General Javier Pons has kept Fran Llorente and Pablo Carrasco as directors of News & Current Affairs and Content respectively, but Carrasco loses control over Programming, which goes to Carlos Fernandez. The RTVE union in Madrid opposes against Carrasco's nomination, claiming he favours external production far too much.
3. RAI councillors complain when people criticise them. The five right-wing members of the Rai board - Urbani, Petroni, Bianchi Clerici, Malgieri, and Staderini - denounced the "campaign to delegitimate their action" - roughly, criticism that they acted in a partial manner damaging to the company when they appointed Alfredo Meocci as Director-General in violation of rules of conflict of interest. One interesting tid-bit: the CdA had wanted to give Siniscalco [Minister of Finance at the time, and thus sole shareholder] a list of names; Siniscalco refused and said he only wanted one. Good on 'im
   

Dyke didn't jump but was pushed

Minutes of the BBC Governors' meeting of the 28th and 29th January reveal that Greg Dyke was sacked by the Board of Governors, rather than resigning. As Torin Douglas wrote,

For those who have read Greg Dyke's book Inside Story, there are few surprises in the minutes of the BBC governors' meetings.

Still, nice to have it confirmed officially.

Newspapers didn't disappear; television might

Online video 'eroding TV viewing'

Rehearsals for departures

One departure, one arrival, and one return from the brink:

1. Michael Grade left the BBC. The decision was broken, as I understand it, in the Telegraph, and confirmed this morning. No news yet on salary, but it may top £2m. No news yet on how how he will be replaced. A former surgeon, acting Chair Chitra Bharucha looks unlikely to step up to the top seat. I suggest the BBC will go from someone outside of the media who is happy with a regulatory rule. A former financial regulator, for example, would be a wonderful touch in the run up to the licence fee settlement.
2. Luis Férnandez was designated President of RTVE. In a boost for the broadcaster, Fernandez was nominated with the agreement of both the main parties. The remaining nominations to the council will be made on Monday. The rapid turnaround - one month of inter-regnum - augurs well for RTVE's future governability; though the demand of the United Left and nationalist parties to be represented on the 12 member party may still mean that nominees are closely identified with particular parties.
3. Silvio Berlusconi collapsed at a campaign rally before recovering. Rai quickly apologised for a comedy sketch mocking Berlusconi. Having not seen the sketch, I can't comment on whether it was in bad taste or not. I suspect it was (it would be hard for it to be otherwise), but Rai has certainly done well to applaud fulsomely and quickly.
   

Five ways to get the right answer from your independent review of coverage

The BBC announced today a review of its coverage of business. The review - which follows previous reviews of coverage of the European Union and the Middle East - will be conducted by a panel of six of the 'great and the good', and forms part of the new Trust's ongoing Impartiality Project.
These reviews are an invaluable source of data, and, assuming their investigative reach is great enough, may contribute to a more sophisticated understanding amongst BBC content producers of the nature of impartiality across a number of fields.
However, I suspect that the use of these reviews is as much symbolic as actual. In other words: the review process is structured so that clear-cut findings of partiality will be avoided and positive-sum findings of insufficient understanding emphasised. Influenced greatly from a presentation by John Downey and Dominic Wring at a recent conference, here are five ways in which you, the humble public service broadcaster, can structure your inquiry.

1. Issues that the BBC is already confident about, or which have already been the subject of some previous enquiry, are chosen. In the case of the BBC's review of its coverage of Israel-Palestine, the Governors' review followed a much harsher review conducted by BBC Management (the Balen report). The Governors therefore already had an idea that BBC Management was trying to improve its coverage, and was therefore not concerned that a potential blind-spot might be unearthed. The review of EU coverage had already been fore-shadowed by numerous content analyses by a strange Eurosceptic outfit called Global Britain, which generally arrived at rather tendentious conclusions, but signalled the issue quite clearly.
   
2. Panels are 'representative'. In other words, where the issue is x, pick one or two representatives who will be portrayed as pro-x, one or two representatives who will be portrayed as anti-x, and the remaining representatives from unconnected areas of public life who will be perceived as having no axe to grind in any contest between pro-s and anti-s. The Europe review included two Europhiles (Stephen Wall and Lucy Armstrong), and two Euro-sceptics (Rodney Leach, Nigel Smith). The business report includes two notionally pro-business members (Alan Budd; Chris Bones) and two notional skeptics (Barbara Stocking; John Naughton).
3. Quantitative research is commissioned. All reviews so far have carried out content analysis: one by John Morrison (former BBC Television news editor) on the EU; one by Loughborough University on Israel-Palestine; and one now by Leeds University.
   
4. ... and then deprecated. The Loughborough report found that the BBC tended to give more screen-time over to Israeli representatives than Palestinian representatives; due, argue the authors, to the weaker development of Palestinian civil society and its correspondingly lower capacity to provide vox-pops. This finding of a 'direction' of partiality was smoothed over in the report.
   
5. 'Greater understanding' emerges as a common solution. Both EU and Israel-Palestine reports found fault, not with the direction of partiality, but the problems for impartiality of insufficiently deep coverage. In other words, a verdict that any side can interpret as favouring its position, since, ultimately, the historical record, as interpreted by the dogmatic reader, tends to favour the dogmatic reader.
   

Distribution of screen-time on Today

I'm just back from the PSA Media and Politics Group conference in Sunderland, where I presented a paper on the screen time given over to Italian politicians. Whilst there, I found out that Guy Starkey has compiled similar data [Powerpoint] on the screen-time given over to different parties on the BBC's Today programme during electoral periods. The trend revealed over the period 1997 - 2005 [not shown in the Powerpoint] was for the party in government to receive a greater share of interview time. There was, however, no indication whether this increase in time was associated with increased ferocity of interviewing technique, although the Powerpoint linked to suggests, if anything, the reverse for 1997, with Blair subject to particularly strong attacks.

Business as usual

Whilst the BBC struggles to clarify its position on news-readers wearing the veil, Rai nominates a number of office-holders. In short, business as usual. For completeness' sake, here are the nominees:

• Luigi Meloni (Unione, allegedly) - vice-director, HR;
• Alessandro Zucca (CdL, allegedly) - vice-director, HR;
• Valerio Fiorespino - vice-director, TV Resources;
• Giancarlo d'Arma - vice-director, Acquisitions

I continue to wonder where journalists get alleged party affiliations of Rai employees. It seems to be a sort of common knowledge open to those in a certain field. Certainly, I doubt any of these individuals are card-carrying members of any party; affiliations seem to imputed based on friendships and career progression. For example - Valerio Fiorespino's career did well under the left (until 2001 he was director of Human Resources); it did poorly under the right. Therefore, runs the logic, he must be of the left. A very slender basis for such a judgement.

Leaked BBC minutes on impartiality

This is London takes up this story about the BBC's 'impartiality summit'. The paper's spin is that the summit was an admission that the BBC is 'biased'. In particular, "the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism".

If the minutes of the meeting are accurate, and if the quotes reported are correct, and if they are given in their correct context (and some of them are not - Andrew Marr's quote about the BBC being a liberal institution is meant in a philosophical or epistemological sense, not a political one), then what are we to make of it?

1. the fact that the BBC is dominated by left-wing people should not surprise: journalists across the world are more likely to support left-wing parties than right-wing parties, and journalists in the UK One 1996 study by Tony Delano found that 55% of UK journalists were Labour voters, and only 6% Conservative voters;
2. ... but this is irrelevant because journalists' values don't matter that much. People who've spent time studying the production of the media have emphasised how journalists' output is often conditioned more by the organisation they work in than their own personal beliefs. Change the organisation, and you start to learn the ropes there; eventually, what you write changes;
3. If an excessively politically-correct mindset is now pervasive in management and the structures they create, this is more worrying. In particular, the write-up of the article suggests that the beast has a life of its own. Why in God's name should Mark Byford, Head of News, have to secretly agree to help Justin Webb shore up the BBC's coverage of America instead of calling a meeting to discuss the issue?
4. This 'problem' concerns cultural issues more than (party-)political ones. The BBC has had decades of negotiating between positions on the left and right of politics. It has become adept at assuaging the fears of both sides. These points, although not fixed, have established reference points (Labour and the Conservatives). Cultural issues are much more difficult. Cultural viewpoints rarely have authoritative spokespeople who enjoy the kind of substantial rapport with their base to mute criticism. Additionally, cultural issues are much more heterogeneous, and difficult to satisfy all at once. If the BBC lets its news-readers wear 'whatever they want', is it being pro-Muslim (by allowing news presenters to wear veils), pro-Christian (by allowing news presenters to wear crucifixes), or merely liberal (by allowing them to wear whatever they like)?
   
5. This bias, however, is not 'sinister'. Those people who comment on Biased BBC often write in what Richard Hofstadter called the 'paranoid style' - they assume that, behind every manifestation of bias or impartiality, there is a conspiracy which created the impartiality, which desires to further some aim. This seems unlikely at the BBC - and the very fact of calling an impartiality summit should help critics to recognise this. (Which is, of course, why the BBC is doing it).

RSS feed about the BBC

I've only just noticed that the BBC Press Office has an RSS feed for news about the BBC itself. It contains links to notices on appointments and other useful things.

The current items are rather confusing, because many of the 'appointments' are either (a) posts which have been re-named as part of Mark Thompson's re-shuffle; or (b) posts which replace existing posts. The proliferation of titles - Controller, Heads, Directors - makes the appointments difficult to understand without an organigram.

Of the nine appointments, only one - Peter Salmon, Chief Creative Officer (BBC Vision) - is an external hire. He comes from Channel 4 after several years at the BBC. Five had had experience working with ITV or Channel 4. Three - mostly in MC&A - have come from outside the media (Coca-Cola, Bass Brewers). None are BBC 'lifers', but all have some experience at the BBC - from four to around twenty years', to be more precise. Those involved with content - as opposed to marketing or HR - seem to have been around the BBC for longer.