Good stuff, BBC

By Graeme Whitfield on Nov 21, 08 10:37 AM

The BBC Trust has announced this morning that it is its abandoning plans for an online video service - and hats off to them.

Newspaper groups around the country - including The Journal's owners Trinity Mirror - had protested that the hyper-local service put local newspapers at risk at a time when they are already struggling.

Some had even argued that if the BBC went ahead with the plans that newspaper groups should be allowed part of the licence fee so they could compete fairly.

The National Union of Journalists and broadcast union Bectur were in favour of the scheme, but in this case I think they were wrong.

Apart from anything else, quite a proportion of stories on the BBC are originated by local newspapers and they could have been in danger of harming the quality of their own output by threatening the viability of local papers.

As we have seen over the last few weeks, the printed press spends a lot of time slagging off the BBC. There is a certain amount of hypocrisy in this as media groups are protecting their own interest a lot of the time.

So after making a good decision on their video service, let's hope they make another good one in relation to the Russell Brand/Jonathon Ross affair. It was a rubbish and fairly tasteless joke, but national newspapers who are happy to publish details of people's sex lives shouldn't be allowed to use it to neuter BBC comedy.

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Dalbers said:

Hear, hear - completely agree with everything you've said!

November 21, 2008 3:19 PM

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