BBC ‘FACES PENSIONER REVOLT’:  Paul Revoir (Daily Mail 5/8) said that the Age UK  charity had warned that the 10-page letter sent out to the over-75s to explain the new licence fee arrangements was too ‘long and complex’ and failed to make clear when the elderly would get a demand for payment. Mr Revoir reported that Age UK director Caroline Abrahams had warned that some of the recipients would be determined not to pay for a licence ‘come what may’. He said that the community organisation Silver Voices was urging all over-60s to cancel their direct debit payments and instead to send monthly, backdated cheques to TV Licensing, thereby causing administrative chaos but keeping within the law.  A group spokesman had said:

‘It defies belief that, as a second wave of coronavirus marches over the horizon, the BBC are doing this. It shows a lack of compassion, a lack of empathy, a lack of understanding.’

Mr Revoir said the BBC had said they had hired 800 additional staff to deal with queries from the over-75s and had received 300,000 calls on the matter since March.

BBC OVER-75s ‘FACE CYBERTHREAT’: David Snelling (Express 5/8) said that over-75s who were now having to pay for their television licences were facing a threat from cyber criminals, who were trying to steal their personal data by tricking them. He added that a common scam was the use of a text message which claimed to be an offer of a free year of television viewing. Mr Snelling said that the offer would be ‘hugely tempting’ because of the anger generated by the imposition of the new charge. He quoted a cybersecurity expert, who said that such messages looked convincing and were designed to make vulnerable victims act quickly.

BBC ‘SPREADS RECKLESS RUMOURS’ ABOUT BEIRUT ATTACK: Craig Byers (Is the BBC Biased? 5/4) noted that Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen had filed a report saying that there were ‘theories’ that an Israeli attack had caused the huge explosion in Beirut on the evening of August 4. Mr Byers noted that the BBC’s ‘specialist disinformation and social media correspondent’ Marianna Spring had already warned that such reports were ‘unfounded’ and risked spreading misinformation. Mr Byers added:

‘Both Hezbollah and Israel have ruled it out as an Israeli attack and the Israel government has offered to help Lebanon recover from this terrible catastrophe. Why on earth would he (Jeremy Bowen) spread rumours of an Israeli attack? Isn’t that astonishingly reckless and irresponsible from the BBC’s Middle East editor so soon after a devastating event?’

MEDIA COVERAGE OF PANDEMIC ‘IS RETRIBUTION FOR BREXIT’: Tim Black (Spiked! 4/8) argued that the media establishment, including the BBC, had generated ‘a barrage of fearmongering’ about the dangers of Covid-19 and seemed to be almost revelling in the pandemic, as if high death tolls, raising infection rates and R numbers were political points to be scored against the ‘Brexity Tory government’. He said:

“That is partially why the dominant media narrative has been so unremittingly doom-laden. It is a form of vengeance for members of an embittered media class. Retribution for the sins of Brexit. Punishment for electing the dastardly Tories. And so, Covid-related death tolls have become a daily incantation. Graphs, always curving ominously, have been tweeted hourly. And always with a sort of grim sense of vindication. No context is offered. No attempt to situate Covid in among the many other causes of death, globally and nationally, is made. There is never any admission that, say, tuberculosis, a disease for which there is treatment and a vaccine, will kill more people around the world this year than Covid. Never any willingness to admit that this nasty virus is just that — a nasty virus, and not the end of the world.”.

DEFUND THE BBC GROUP ‘LAUNCHES AGGRESSIVE AD CAMPAIGN’:  Guido Fawkes (3/8) reported that the Defund the BBC group had launched a ‘provocative’ mobile billboard campaign across the North-west of England  urging followers to cancel their TV licences to support the oiver-75s, who from Saturday (1/8) now had to buy a licence fee.  The article said sites for the posters included Salford Quays (outside the BBC’s northern HQ), Oldham and Rochdale. It also noted that Ofcom had last week published a report about audience attitudes to the media and had found there was a ‘moral dislike’ of the BBC and its licence fee among ‘the working class’.

TONY PARSONS: BBC ‘DOESN”T LIKE OUR COUNTRY’:  Author and commentator Tony Parsons (The Sun on Sunday 2/8) claimed that the BBC’s decision to scrap the free TV licence for the over-75s was ‘a kick in the head’ for those ‘who have borne the brunt of this health emergency’. He asserted:

“This was the year for the BBC to reach out to its most loyal viewers. This was a chance for the BBC to restore its diminished, degraded reputation and to start acting like the voice of the nation. And Auntie blew it. The BBC is now pathetically disconnected from the nation it is meant to represent.”

Citing recent attacks on the reputation of Winston Churchill, Mr Parsons commented that, ‘increasingly, our national broadcaster acts as though it doesn’t like our country’. He added that the BBC ‘will never tell you that the British abolished the slave trade before any other nation on earth, and that no Empire in human history was ever dismantled so peacefully, or was so willing to offer its former subjects a home.’ He continued, ‘As the BBC constantly flaunts its own political agenda, the case for the licence fee collapses.’

BBC TV LICENSING WEBSITE CRASH ‘A FARCE’: The Sunday Times (2/8) and the Mail (2/7) called yesterday’s crash of the TV Licensing website, on the first day of the re-introduced charge for over-75s, ‘a farce’. Rosamund Unwin of the Sunday Times reported that viewers trying to pay were greeted with a message that said the service was “temporarily unavailable while we update it for the changes to over-75 licences”, before the site was restored last night. The BBC had said: “To make the 75+ Plan available for customers online, the TV Licensing website was temporarily offline on Saturday, as was always planned.”

The Sunday Times (2/8) also reported that pensioners were being asked to provide their bank statements to the TV Licensing office to prove that they were in receipt of pension credit, and therefore still eligible for a free licence, It was said that this was raising concerns that the elderly would be at a risk of identity theft and fraud. It was further reported that the BBC had responded:

“TV Licensing are not actively seeking bank statements — this is simply an option and we don’t expect to make very much use of it. The TV Licensing team take extreme care with personal data and have a wide range of measures in place to protect it.”

ENDING OF OVER-75s FREE TV LICENCE ‘WAS GOVERNMENT DECISION’:   Katie Harris (Express 2/8), noting that the provision of free BBC TV licences to the over-75s had ended, quoted a BBC spokeswoman saying that it had been the government’s decision rather than the Corporation’s. Ms Harris said the axing of the free licences had happened on the day that a new director of BBC Scotland on a six-figure salary had been appointed. Expressions of concern about the appointment from pensioners affected by the new fee regime were included in the article.  One commented:

“They can’t afford free licences for over 75s but can afford to pay a six-figure salary to him and he becomes one of the very very many on six-figure salary at the BBC the BBC should be cutting back on these high earners.”

BBC PROVIDES ‘DISGUSTINGLY UNBALANCED’ MATERIAL FOR CHILDREN: Craig Byers (Is the BBC Biased? 1/8), noting that BBC director of radio and education – the former Labour minister James Purnell –  had said he wanted to give the BBC a bigger role in educating children, said he was analysing a range of material on the current BBC Bitesize GCSE pages. His first analysis focused on the BBC MIddle East history pages, and noted that the entire focus was on Israel and Palestine. Mr Byers observed that the list of contributors was ‘astonishingly biased’ because ‘not one of the seven Middle East class clips strays from the BBC’s left-of-centre, Israel-slamming narrative’.  He concluded:

“And is this disgustingly unbalanced material typical of the BBC’s educational output? Especially in an age of reviving antisemitism, I think we urgently need to know.”

BBC SLAMMED FROM WITHIN FOR USE OF ‘N-WORD’: The Daily Telegraph (£ 31/7) reported that the use by  BBC social affairs correspondent Fiona Lamdin of the n-word an item broadcast on the BBC News Channel had come under fire from the BBC’s gender and identity correspondent, Megha Mohan, who had stated:

“By not saying the N-word, you send a clear signal that you will not normalise the most violent of language. It blows my mind that this is open for interpretation or being justified – especially at this of all times.”

The article said that the BBC had initially defended the use of the word because it was justified in the context it was broadcast, but had since removed the item from its archive.

THE BBC ‘WANTS TO PLAY A BIGGER ROLE IN CHILDREN’S EDUCATION: Anita Singh (£ Daily Telegraph 31/7), said James Purnell, the BBC’s head of radio and education, had signalled that he wanted the BBC to increase its ‘reach’ by making the Corporation take ‘a greater role in children’s education, and had said  ‘the BBC’s online resources’ should ‘replace some of the “traditional” elements of teaching’. This, he claimed, would ‘free teachers to concentrate on pastoral care’.

Joseph Hearty, in the top-rated comment on the story, asserted: “Good God, no! If anyone wonders what sort of approach to education they would adopt just take a look at the Newsbeat section of the BBC website. It’s written by semi-illiterate children and promotes all the usual history-denying, trans-promoting, hijab-wearing, body positive, liberal guff that is exactly the reason people are turning against the BBC in their droves. Do they really think we want them teaching children this cr@p?”

THE BBC ‘IS LIKE A DISAPPROVING RELATIVE’: An article by Susannah Goldsbrough in the Telegraph (£31/7) headlined ‘The BBC is like a disapproving relative – it doesn’t get entertainment and doesn’t want to’argued that the Generation-Z age group (16-24) is turning away from the BBC towards streaming services because ‘their easy-come, easy-go attitude to entertainment’ is something the BBC ‘doesn’t get’ and ‘doesn’t want to’. For them, she claimed, ‘the BBC is like a disapproving relative’. Though the BBC is ‘serious about holding onto younger audiences’ and ‘wants to compete for [their] day-to-day viewing habits’, she argued that ‘the pillar of the British establishment’ needs to remember that ‘entertainment shouldn’t be a dirty word’.

BBC AXES AFTERNOON NEWSROUND AFTER 48 YEARS: Joe Kasper (Sun 29/7) said the BBC was axing its afternoon live television edition of the children’s news service Newsround – shown currently on kids’ service CBBC , but formerly on BBC One – after almost 50 years. Mr Kasper reported that the BBC wanted to transfer more of its children’s content online – and now had Ofcom’s permission to do so – because they were watching increasingly less live television. He added  that despite the lockdown, audiences for the Newsround bulletin had fallen from 37,000 children aged between 6-12 in 2019 to 24,000 in May this year. Mr Kasper noted that Ofcom had earlier warned that if audiences did not engage with the BBC, support for the licence fee could be eroded, and had now said it made sense for more children’s content to be provided online. It had also decided to impose safeguards to ensure the quality of programmes on CBBC was maintained while allowing the amount of news content on the live television channels to be reduced from 85 to 35 hours a year.

BBC ‘SEEMS SWEPT UP IN AN EMOTIONAL TIDE’:  Former Guardian political editor Michael White tweeted (28/7), ‘. . . .Lots of anti-racist talk on BBC Radio 4’s Today (again) today, much of it muddled, conventional thinking (again). It’s an important issue, but BBC seems swept up in an emotional tide. I switched to R3 where there are no complaints (yet) that music is too dominated by dead white Germans.’

THE BBC’S BROADCASTING MONOPOLY: At The Mallard website (28/7), Serena Lit argued that the BBC is essentially a ‘broadcasting monopoly’ with a ‘stranglehold’ on the industry, saying that the Corporation uses its size and licence fee funding to win advantage against commercial rivals. Where they have to earn their income from adverting the BBC ‘only advertises its own projects across the entire network’.

‘For decades’, she wrote, ‘the BBC has been failing to uphold its charter obligation to provide original services by choosing to create outlets and produce content remarkably similar to what is already being provided by the commercial sector’, and she wondered if top-rated BBC shows would have proven able to compete with Netflix or Apple ‘without help from the licence fee and the BBC’s free in-house advertising’.

‘The bulk of BBC iPlayer’s traffic is a direct result of the licence fee’, she stated. ‘Given we are all obligated to fork out £157.50 a year for it, many feel (understandably) compelled to get their money’s worth. Consequently, we have no meaningful indication of how popular the BBC and its content actually are with the British public’.

BBC’S ‘CHURCHILL TRASHING’ POLL LAUNCHED: Kathy Gyngell (Conservative Woman 29/7) argued that recent BBC reports about Winston Churchill, in which he was said to have caused the death through famine of three million people in the Bengal Famine of 1943,  felt like dangerous ‘dog-whistling’ to appease the most ignorant and aggressive end of the so-called anti-racist movement, and she invited readers to vote on the question “Is it time to stop calling Churchill a racist?’. Kathy asked:

‘Is trashing Churchill’s reputation deliberately fuelling the fires of division and prejudice? Is it time to stop denigrating the man who courageously led the West’s battle for freedom against the unspeakable evil of the Nazis?  We want to know what you think.’

SKY ARTS ‘TO FILL GAP LEFT BY BBC CUTS’: Luke May (Daily Mail 28/7) reported that satellite broadcaster Sky had decided make its dedicated arts channel available from September on the Freeview platform with no extra charge because cuts on the BBC Four television channel meant there was an important gap to fill. Mr May said that the BBC had cut the budget for BBC Four because it had decided to focus instead on a more youth-focused service on BBC Three. He added that Sky had also announced a raft of new commissions for the arts channel, including Landmark, designed to bring communities together to create the next ‘great British landmark’, as well as a programme about the playwright Harold Pinter. It would also be offering a series of arts bursaries.

BBC CHURCHILL REPORT ‘WAS OUTRAGEOUS CALUMNY’:  Henry Getley (Conservative Woman 28/7), analysing further a BBC news report which posited that Winston Churchill had killed three million Indians by triggering the 1943 Bengal famine, asserted that  to ‘anyone with the slightest knowledge of history and an ounce of humanity and common sense, the BBC’s outrageous calumny beggars belief’. Mr Getley, noting that ‘ironically’ a 2002 BBC poll – responded to by 1.6m viewers – had found Churchill the greatest Briton ever, also argued that in siding with the mobs who had defaced Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, the BBC had sold its soul to Left-wing creeds of progressiveness, virtue-signalling, identity politics, diversity, race, gender and man-made climate change’.

BBC ‘FINALLY ADMITS’ PANORAMA BREACH: Guido Fawkes (27/7) said that the BBC had finally admitted – after receiving 800 complaints –  that its April Panorama programme ‘Has the Government Failed the NHS’ had breached editorial standards by not labelling one of the contributors, Dr Sonia Adesara, as a Labour activist. But the article also declared:

‘The organisation, however, refuses to apologise for not labelling other left-wing campaigning contributors accurately, including ‘Docs not Cops’ member Irial Eno, Labour member of 53 years John Ashton,  or Corbyn-rallying Unison steward Libby Nolan.’

BBC CORRESPONDENT APOLOGISES TO STURGEON: Freddy Mayhew (UK Press Gazette 27/9) said the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU) had ruled that a report by Scotland editor Sarah Smith on BBC One News at Ten had inappropriately said that Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon was ‘enjoying’ the opportunity to make her country’s own lock down rules.  Mr Mayhew noted that Ms Smith had apologised via a Tweet for her choice of word the following day and claimed she had meant to use the word ‘embraced’ but mistakenly used ‘enjoyed’. He reported that the ECU, in its ruling in response to seven complaints about the ‘biased’ report by Ms Smith, said it had been appropriate to issue apologies, and on this occasion via a Tweet because Ms Sturgeon had registered her objection via a Tweet.  The ECU had also ruled that no further action was required.