The BBC is giving its licence fee payers a say on a new draft version of its editorial guidelines – the first review of the guidelines since the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand scandal.
The BBC’s Editorial Guidelines will be open to a public consultation, which will run until December 24.
The Guardian’s Media Monkey reports at least one official vacancy in the wake of the Brand/Ross saga: ‘Compliance editor, Radio 2 and 6 Music’. This is to replace Dave Barber, who resigned after finding Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’s prank calls ‘very funny’. “Applications from more senior grades will be actively considered and the renumeration package will reflect this,” Media Money reports.
The New York Times has now decided to update on the Brand/Ross fiasco, just as the British press had moved onto other things – such as ‘is Obama really black’ (see today’s Comment is Free at Guardian.co.uk).
Little did the architects behind the office/hotel complex at the heart of the Nixon affair (doesn’t sound right does it?) know what an impact the building’s name would have on the British media.
It’s a legacy which has given British newspaper journalists an easy way to coin a name for the latest ‘scandal’ (scandal defined in its broadest sense: we have Flakegate, after all).
But when it comes to last week’s BBC outrage no-one seems to know which gate to stick with:
Media Guardian alone refers to Sachsgate, Granddaughtergate and Manuelgate.
We’ve seen Rossgate from the Telegraph, Brandgate from the Independent. For readers’ sake, since the coverage really doesn’t seem to be letting up, let’s have an agreed gate.
And some consistency please: should the named gate namesake be the perpetrators, or the victims of the ‘scandal’? That particular detail often bothers me: we’ve had Queengate, but also Cherie and Camillagate (Nipplegate of Justin Timberlake fame is a particular favourite).
Reuters and most of the papers/blogs are going with Manuelgate but my vote’s with ‘whatnewanglecanwepossiblytakenowgate’ (she says, fully aware of the irony as she pens her own tenuous angle for this blog post).
Mainly because Rossgate could lead to confusion for the poor pupils at this school in Hemel Hempstead.
Any gates on this particular story I’ve missed? For those that care and are thinking of writing their Masters thesis on the subject, there’s actually a Wikipedia page dedicated to ‘scandal-gates’ (which actually already lists Manuelgate, fyi).
The editor of Radio 1’s news programme, Newsbeat, says the reaction to prank phonecalls made by radio presenters Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross is more varied across the BBC’s audience than media coverage of the incident suggests.
The Shadow Culture Secretary, Tory MP Jeremy Hunt, today made a keynote policy speech on the subject of public service broadcasting, at a Polis event. He talked about opposing BBC local plans, in a wide-ranging speech. You can download Hunt’s full speech here.
@bowbrick on Twitter reported that: “Nothing radical in Hunt’s analysis. Presumably a great relief to the BBC”.
Of most interest seems to be Hunt’s take on the story du jour (economic downturn returning to our screens next week): Brand, Ross and the BBC.
Over at Polis Director, Charlie Beckett’s blog, we read:
“Hunt was careful not to call for anyone to be sacked. He believes that politicians shouldn’t go around trying to get private individuals fired. But he was scathing about the BBC response to the incident and the outrage it has provoked.
Hunt said this was not risky comedy, it was ‘offensive, juvenile behavour’. But what worried him was that the BBC’s slow and limited public response indicates that “the BBC doesn’t understand the huge influence the stars they employ have on the public”.”