Jerry Springer and the BBC
The BBC's new Director-General, Mark Thompson, has come through his first major crisis pretty well, I think. The shock horror over-reaction to the broadcasting of Jerry Springer The Opera has been ridiculous - and often from newspapers whose drama critics praised the show when it was winning awards in the theatre, as my MP Chris Bryant has pointed out.
It's the day after now and the world does not appear to have caved in.
However, the BBC can expect more of this kind of flak in the future. As it has acknowledged, the immediacy of email allows organised groups to undertake coordinated campaigns quickly - a large number of the complaints to the BBC used the same wording. In this case of course, the campaign has been fuelled by tabloid papers whose media owners have their own agendas. Fortunately for the BBC, the influence of such publications will diminish as their circulations fall.
Pre-war, British society was significantly more diverse than the BBC's 'official' culture acknowledged. Today the BBC is better at reflecting the diversity of the UK -but it does so in a stormier climate of conflict on social values.
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4 comments:
Re the decline in BBC viewing figures, I am afraid it is back to school for you Leighton as you are confusing percentage points and percentages. A drop from 38.3 per cent to 36.2 per cent is a drop of 1.7 percentage points and is equivalent to a a fall of 4.5 per cent (the sum of 38.2 miunus 36.2 divided by 38.2). The Observer got this right.
No, what you say is the same as my interpretation of their real meaning. You seem to be agreeing with what I said. My point was that their opening sentence did not make sense in the way it was presented. The Observer used the same phrase percent, to cover the two observations it was making. They failed to make the distinction that both you make, and I made in my original posting.
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