What in god's name is going on at the BBC? Surely the the last 12 months has been the nadir of this once great broadcasting giant. Now it stumbles from one disaster to another.
A few months ago it was rubbing its collective hands with glee as Rupert Murdoch's empire was dragged through the Leverson Inquiry. Virtually every BBC news bulletin led with this "story" irrelevant of what was going on and, most shamefully, the conflict in Syria often became a foot note.
Auntie then decided to cover the Queen's Jubilee with a populist slant, so rather than have Dimbleby et al giving us some gravitas and informing the viewer we had the vacuous Ferne Cotton droning on about the most fatuous nonsense.
Summer wore on and the Beeb had a triumph; the Olympic coverage was splendid and all credit. However all that credit was washed over the precipice by the Jimmy Saville crisis. It is all well and good saying that the crimes were committed decades ago, but the handling of the situation after the news broke was pathetic.
So now we have the tawdry spectacle of the same organisation having to perform a massive climbdown in light of the accusations made against Lord McAlpine. What is even more incredible is that again it is Newsnight at the centre of the storm. Did they learn nothing from the decision to shelve the 2011 investigation in to Saville? Are they just allowing any old hack to feed them unsubstantiated information? Who is in charge? Who is accountable? It does a disservice to the thousands of BBC employees (or are they? No, let's no go there!) who work tirelessly to produce some of the best global media output. Watching the News at 10 last night, I felt genuinely sorry for Fiona Bruce having to lead with....the BBC makes another apology.
A couple of years back when the BBC announced that they were scaling back in light of the continuing global economic climate I was disappointed, the Corporation had grown massively over the preceding decade and had become a global superpower, recognised around the world as the foremost provider of unbiased and accurate news. Now I am of the belief that the BBC is far too big and should be scaled back further until someone can get this particular house back in order. The only saving grace this week for Auntie was when Phillip Schofield decided to hijack the Prime Minister over the same paedophile story on ITV on Thursday's This Morning.
It appears that shabby ethics are catching.
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