THE BBC has toughened its complaints system – or so I am told. This ‘shake-up’ was reported by the Telegraph at the weekend. Any expectations crashed at the next sentence that read ‘Tim Davie, the BBC director general, is to take on direct responsibility for overseeing its complaints unit.’
You’d laugh if you didn’t cry: as DG Davie was already directly responsible for this benighted unit, just as he is for the BBC’s news, current affairs and entertainment output. So what is new exactly? The Telegraph reporter, Edward Malnick, seems blissfully unaware that the transfer of responsibility for complaints has simply gone from one BBC figure (David Jordan) to another (Tim Davie). They are simply shuffling the deckchairs and they are still marking their own homework. The Culture Secretary should not be bamboozled into believing otherwise.
Meanwhile the Corporation that allowed Martin Bashir to prosper there as its Religious Affairs editor after his fraudulently based Diana interview, that gave us the Cliff Richard outrage, and that denies climate change or Net Zero sceptics a seat in its studios, remains hopelessly lost in its own bubble.
Whether the changes outlined will make any difference following the latest avalanche of complaints, about the BBC’s atrociously biased coverage of the Israel-Hamas war following Hamas’s pogrom on October 7, remains to be seen. While we are told that the BBC has ‘removed’ several Middle East reporters from the air amid allegations that they posted support for Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel, they do not appear to have been sacked.
Meanwhile a BBC journalist’s letter to Tim Davie telling him that BBC reports should use the term ‘settler colonialism’ to describe Israel has come to light. https://www.thejc.com/news/news/bbc-correspondent-advocates-using-settler-colonialism-to-describe-israel-6SUIuvXcSPrWXAWbhd9JZH If Tim Davie publishes his considered answer to this, we might get an inkling of who he is really listening to and whether he understands what broadcasting hatred means.
