"Save BBC World Service" - Argument

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Subject: "Save BBC World Service" - Arguments

  [[Several people have e-mailed me, eager to write letters of protest about the
damage to BBC World Service - but asking for extra material and arguments.  Here
are three articles - one from today's Daily Telegraph on the Dalai Lama's
support; John Tusa's original furious article that kicked off the debate; and an
article summarising the protest so far by Peter Beaumont, in Sunday's Observer.
Derek B-Wavell]]

"A HEAVENLY THUNDERBOLT FOR MR BIRT"
(Peterborough in today's Daily Telegraph - 12.7.96)

	I hate to alarm John Birt, combative BBC director general, but the
campaign to stop his reforms of the World Service (Birt proposes ending the
service's traditional independence, merging its news operations with those of
the domestic BBC) has gained its highest-placed member yet.  Not a former BBC
governor, like protester Baronness James of Holland Park.  Not even a former
Prime Minister, such as her fellow agitator Sir Edward Heath.  This time, Birt
faces a man revered by millions as a deity: the Dalai Lama.

	The Dalai Lama has - I can disclose - just faxed the Bush House offices
of the Campaign to Save World Service to offer his support.  He does not mince
his words.

	"I am appealing to the British Government, to the BBC's Board of
Governors and its senior management to save the BBC World Service's distinct and
independent entity," he writes.

	"The only people pleased to see the BBC World Service damaged or
destroyed," adds the Dalai Lama (exiled in India since China's invasion of
Tibet) "will be the dictators and authoritarian regimes whose policies deprive
their citizens - for whom the BBC is a lifeline - of freedom and information."

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			A MISSION TO DESTROY
    by John Tusa              Published in The Guardian on 10th June 1996

Sub-head: John Tusa says the BBC's reorganisation is all wrong.  After reading
the document he found himself thinking something he never believed he would
think: "I'm glad I'm not in the BBC"
(John Tusa was managing director of the BBC World Service from 1986-1992)

	The document setting out the BBC's new structure makes dreary reading.
Indeed, it is impossible to read.  Set out in the landscape layout beloved of
the new management jargonocracy, with dots replacing the traditional instruments
of punctuation and meaning - commas, full stops - it is a set of commands for
the march into the digital age.  But join up the dots and you will not like what
you see.  The instructions are all too clear in their intention.  Tolling like
Donne's bell, the words efficiency, resources, focus and the rest of the cliched
lexicon of management analysis sound the death of Reith's BBC.  From now on,
this is the house that Birt built, and it will be extraordinary if it lasts for
a fraction of the 75 years that Reith's BBC did.
	For Reith's BBC, at home and abroad, was informed by a vision, one that
successfully resisted re-definition because its commitment to inform, educate
and entertain was succinct, balanced, appropriate, and valid to the changing
shape of the broadcasting environment.  The latest BBC document is drawn up by
people who talk of "Vision" but possess none, and could not express it in
literate language - language that people can understand - if they did.
	They talk of "Mission".  Once it was a "Mission to inform"; now it looks
more like a mission to destroy all those programme-led, broadcasting-led,
journalistically-led structures that made good programmes and satisfied huge
audiences against tough competition at home and abroad.
	In their place, the BBC will be driven by structures whose existence is
based on tenuous assumptions; that because programme making involves those who
commission programmes and those who make them, a clear functional, institutional
and - no doubt ultimately - financial distance can be put between them.  It
ignores the fact that programme making is an integrated, creative activity
(significantly, the word "creative" is used only twice in the document) - which
consists not only of commissioning and producing but of such unmentioned, and no
doubt unmanageable and unquantifiable, activities as having ideas.  The document
may reduce some barriers to internal cooperation among the existing directorates
but creates many more on uncharted ground and untested assumptions.
Further, the record of the introduction of the last BBC "reform", "Producer
Choice", demonstrates that this management is inseparable from a huge growth in
paperwork and bureaucracy.  "If I am told that my programme is going to be
'benchmarked' once more", said a senior producer, "I shall go mad".  Another
senior executive admitted that we was leaving the BBC because of the intolerable
amount of his editorial time wasted on "proportionality" - the bizarre rules
governing an assumed need to prove that appropriate quantities of programmes are
made outside London.  In practice, the only beneficiaries have been not the
audience but the bureaucrats policing the system and British Rail's Intercity as
producers and presenters roam the regional headquarters of the BBC making
programmes that are truly regional in name only.  It is tokenism and quota-ism
gone mad.
	Each one of the new sets of relationships between the five new divisions
will he governed by a whole new set of rules, charges, guidelines, targets,
reviews, and no doubt penalties for non-performance of agreed contracts.  How
much time will be left for actually thinking about and devising programmes
rather than arguing about the non-performance of agreed targets between the five
contracting bodies?  For this document is based on the wholly erroneous
assumption that structures create programmes.  It is an engineer's view of a
perfect institution where the untidy bits - such as the BBC World Service - are
chopped down to size until they fit.
	It represents a view of broadcasting which cannot comprehend that making
good programmes is creative, unruly, wilful, untidy, inspirational,
unquantifiable and inconvenient to the tidy minded.
Others will argue and agonise about the significance of the death of the
independent radio directorate, and its chances of fighting off television's
inevitably huge demands on resources.  What is clear is that to elevate the
Controller of Radio One to be the senior representative of BBC radio in BBC
management would have been laughed out of court at any time but the present.  As
a sign of where broadcasting priorities lie in radio, it is salutary.  So, no
doubt, is the sign of services rendered in the past being so signally rewarded.
	Other radio executives are conspicuous by their absence in the new
structure.  Of the BBC World Service there is no sign worth mentioning.  Once,
the External Services headship was a stepping stone to the Director Generalship
itself.  Now the World Service is relegated to the status of a subdivision of a
division, its managing director clinging to the bottom line of a landscape-style
organogram.  This conclusive down-grading of the BBC World Service represents
the climax of a three year programme of marginalisation and reduction.  Once the
World Service's main clashes were with foreign dictatorships and the Foreign
Office and Treasury in their more parsimonious moods.  But the eyes of World
Service managers, like the guns of Singapore, were trained in the wrong
direction - the real enemies were not beyond the BBC; they were within the
gates.
In the last three years, World Service has been into BBC Worldwide; had its
right to fight its Whitehall and Westminster lobbying battles restricted by the
need to tie in with corporate interests; had the rigidities of Producer Choice
forced onto a managerial system that had been praised for efficiency by the
National Audit Office, lost missions as a result of changes in BBC internal
accounting processes; and has the integrity of its crucial overseas transmitter
system threatened by the BBC's own readiness to privatise it along with the rest
of the BBC's domestic transmitters.
	These changes might have been understandable, even if not justifiable,
had the BBC World Service failed in its mission.  But its audiences had grown
over the last few years, its standing had risen, and it had pioneered BBC World
Service Television which gave the BBC the long overdue place on the
international TV news scene.  Now, all programme making in English will come
under BBC Production; all World Service News and current affairs under BBC News.
There was no need for it, no justification for it.
	It is the biggest act of bureaucratic vandalism ever committed against
the World Service.  Some of us will never forgive those who did it or understand
those who permitted it to happen.  If the World Service was consulted about the
changes and agreed to them, it is incomprehensible.  If it was not consulted,
then surely somebody should make the only appropriate protest.
	Everybody thought that January 1993 was Year Zero for the BBC.  How naive
they were.  That was a mere excursion.  Last Friday was the real Year Zero.  As
I walked away from doing an interview on the subject for The World At One, I
found myself thinking something that I had never believed I would think: "I'm
glad I'm not in the BBC".

************************************

FURY AT BIRT'S BBC WORLD SERVICE PLANS
The Observer - 7th July 1996			by Peter Beaumont

Last month, John Birt, director-general of the BBC, was merely unpopular within
his own empire.  Today, he finds himself up against an infinitely more powerful
foe: the Establishment.
	Almost overnight, anger at Mr Birt's plans to restructure the World
Service - enjoyed by a minority in Britain but by hundreds of millions overseas
- has been transformed from internal BBC politics into an unprecedented outcry.
	Opposition has emerged from virtually very walk of British life.  Leading
figures from the church, the military, academia, the media and the arts have
united to save the service as a uniquely structured organisation and Britain's
gift to the world.
	Luminaries against the plans canvassed by the Observer include former
Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Runcie, former Defence Secretary Lord Healey and
Admiral Sir "Sandy" Woodward, commander of the South Atlantic Task Force in the
Falklands War.  Lord Healey warned Birt he will be "mounting a major campaign"
in the Lords.  "When we are running down the Diplomatic Service and - quite
rightly - defence, the World Service has never been more important in getting
across Britain's message,' he said.
	Lord Runcie said: "Throughout the Cold War and the apartheid era, the
World Service sustained Christians in eastern Europe and black churches."
	Shadow Foreign Secretary Robin Cook joined Liberal Democrat leader Paddy
Ashdown in calling for a postponement of the plans until a period of "full
consultation" had been completed.  Polar explorer Ranulph Fiennes and
mountaineer Chris Bonington have added their protests to those of Mikhail
Gorbachev and the former Archbishop  of Capetown, Desmond Tutu.
	They are joined by musician Yehudi Menuhin, conductor Sir Georg Solti,
actors Timothy West and Julie Christie and novelists Pat Barker, P.D. James and
A.S. Byatt.
	Mark Tully, the BBC's India correspondent for more than 20 years, makes a
passionate defence of the World Service in today's Observer.   He accuses the
BBC of not listening to its staff and endorses the novelist P.D. James's charge
of "arrogance, extraordinary arrogance" by chairman Sir Christopher Bland and Mr
Birt.  He writes: "The chairman says he has heard 'no sensible arguments against
what he has proposed.'  Whom has he asked?"  He adds, "The nation owns the BBC,
and the must now be a national debate on its future."
	Some opponents - such as Fred Halliday, Professor of International
Relations at the LSE - believe it is time for Mr Birt to stand down.  Others,
including Pauline Neville Jones, former political director of the Foreign Office
and a former  chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, are concerned about
the apparent lack of consultation.
	The gathering pace of the "Save World Service" campaign follows a lobby
of Parliament by three former heads of the service, led by John Tusa.
	Mr Birt says wholesale restructuring of the BBC is necessary to prepare
it for the age of "digital television" and that the World Service, facing cuts
in its Foreign Office funding of up to 12 per cent, can no longer survive
independent from network radio.
World Service supporters reply that it produces programmes 28 per cent more
cheaply than network radio and has overheads 44 per cent less costly.  Under Mr
Birt's plans, the English-language service will "buy in" programmes from the
domestic news and current affairs directorate, rather than being directly
responsible for its own output.
Critics say this is an example of penny-pinching "institutional vandalism",
which will undermine the unique ethos of the World Service.  Mr Birt says
quality will improve.
	Air Marshal Sir John Walker, a former vice-chief of defence intelligence,
said: "It seems quite incompatible to be spending money on new landing ships to
put our soldiers on other people's beaches and sort out other people's problems,
while undermining a service which is a force for international understanding."
	This weekend a decision is expected on the service's new "commissioners",
charged with "buying" programmes from within the BBC.