Paul Dacre
Peter Wilby, over on the Guardian’s site, is complaining about Paul Dacre (editor of the Daily Mail and set for much grander things as he celebrates his 60th birthday this week) complaining about the BBC. Apparently Dacre’s comments are ’self serving’ (and worse).
Now there’s a surprise. Editor of major news outlet gives speech in which he says something that is true to his (and his employers’) interests. Hold the front page.
The various titles down at Wapping seem equally happy to take a poke at the BBC whenever possible too. Both the Times and the Sun (and their respective Sunday iterations) have been known similarly to attack Auntie on sometimes flimsy grounds. Witness the News of the World’s (pernicious? self-serving?) lead last weekend about the amount of money paid to top execs over at the BBC. I noted that no mention was made on the packages paid to senior execs over at Wapping – or indeed at sister company Sky.
So does Dacre have a point? The Daily Mail is part of a larger group that has a large swathe of regional papers (Northcliffe Media) who are falling on harder times at the moment, not least because of the rise of decent online content, and the BBC is investing heavily on 65 ‘ultra-local’ websites. This won’t help Northcliffe Media any – and it’ll be interesting to see what they try to do with their ‘ThisIs…’ brand website extensions to those local papers.
It is Sandlines’ view that the local markets are the next really interesting battleground online. I’ll be watching with a great deal of interest. Who knows, perhaps something will come out of it that actually helps the people these sites are trying to reach – and the advertisers who are trying to talk to them. Sandlines lives in hope.
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To be fair, the BBC is taxpayer (well, licence payer) supported – i.e. public money, whilst the newspapers aren’t.
The bbc is therefore expected to maintain higher standards (though our publicly funded employees don’t necessarily – politicians anyone?) of neutrality and behaviour (yadda yadda) than privately funded enterprises.
Having said that, I’ll happily Daily Mail bash at any opportunity.
While it is of course true that the BBC is publicly funded, it is also true that they compete for talent with organisations who are not. The expectation that public sector employees would work for less than private sector ones is surely evaporating? Is it appropriate to underpay public servants simply because the tax payer is responsible for the bill?
There’s an interesting piece on The Economist about that question.
There will be public applause for doing so initially – until we recognise that the quality of output will likewise suffer… just consider the reputation for PBS in the US. Is that what we want the BBC to end up as?
That said, I do find Jonathan Ross’s salary a little hard to justify… but I’d be curious to learn the comparable salaries of top brass in News International and Sky as a point of comparison with the NOTW’s publication of salaries at the Beeb.