Breaking the news

The BBC's plans to cut its core news-gathering operations have shaken staff, viewers and listeners. But, says one veteran journalist, over-management and under-editing have already affected the output, damaging confidence in what is one of the most respected media organisations in the world

Announcing drastic cuts of up to 3,780 posts at the BBC last week, Mark Thompson, the director general, said he expected more than 800 of them would come from news and factual programme departments. That a DG, in the line of succession from John Reith, could contemplate a slash-and-burn campaign affecting the public-service obligation to provide news and information programmes shows just how far the corporation has drifted from its main purpose.

News has to take the hit, the current management argues, so that we can benefit from innovations such as the move of BBC Sport and Five Live to Manchester, digital broadcasting and an £18-million salary for three years for broadcaster Jonathan Ross.

Thompson gave some interesting reasons for cutting news. There is duplication, he had discovered, in news provided by Radios 4 and 5, News 24 and BBC1. Why, the BBC had assigned 37 different reporters to ask him about a story once, whereas Sky News had only sent one. As with the rest of the announcement, there was a distinctly Orwellian sleight of language about this. Sky has only one, quite small, audience, and the BBC has millions at home and abroad watching and listening to a variety of television, radio and online services.

Radio 4 listeners were told that the sackings are needed because of a "two-billion-pound shortfall from the expected increase in licence revenue". Put in plain language, the BBC's closure of Television Centre, the construction of the new site at Salford Quays in Manchester, and the switch to digital systems in television and partially in radio, is expected to cost an extra £2 billion.

In their naivety or arrogance, BBC managers past and present expected the Government to make them a gift of the extra money through hiking the licence fee way above inflation or through a direct grant. Yet for the Government the BBC licence is another tax, and one whose increase only brings further unpopularity at the ballot box, not least among the growing number of elderly voters.

The most serious cut in the news personnel is that of at least 100 from the BBC Newsroom itself. It is this, I sense, that has so enraged radio newsreading stalwarts such as Peter Donaldson, Charlotte Green, Brian Perkins and Corrie Corfield. The newsroom is the heart of the operation, sifting news despatches from agencies as well as the BBC correspondents and reporters to prepare the new bulletins in intelligible broadcast English, and the four above-mentioned readers know instantly when the script does not pass muster.

Some of the newsroom journalists are to be offered "retraining" in "online skills" to work on the BBC news website. Yet the website won't work if the hub of the main newsroom is not working as it should. Already, the site reads rather like a journalistic charity shop, full of reach-me-down material gleaned from elsewhere including print media.

So even before any cuts are made, the quality and approach of BBC news and journalism should be raising questions in Parliament and press, to say nothing of the millions of us in the BBC's viewership, listenership and on-line bloggership.

One of the biggest problems is the lack of trust and confidence in its own material and personnel. In short it is over-managed and under-edited. This tendency began under John Birt, who prized management-school values above those of reporting journalism. It was compounded by the debacle of the Kelly affair and the Hutton enquiry - from which it is showing depressingly slim chances of recovery.

In the past, before the communication revolution of the satellite and video phone, the editor had to trust the judgement as well as forensic skill of the reporter. In places as remote as the Falklands, the Golan Heights or Zaire, the journalist had to make up his or her mind what the story was and why it was important, with mercifully little or no editorial backseat driving from Broadcasting House or Television Centre. Good editors do not spend hours in meetings and can cover the essentials with experienced correspondents and reporters inside 10 minutes.

Visit the BBC News Centre today, and you will see glass cages full of meetings - an atmosphere as soporific as any lettuce encountered by the Flopsy Bunnies. Meetings do not make the news; good reporting does.

Then there is lack of confidence, which has bred an extraordinary variation in reporting quality. Coverage of last year's Israeli incursion into Lebanon gave a glaring example. On the Lebanon side we heard from Jim Muir and Kim Ghattas, both highly skilled and experienced, and Arabic speakers to boot, while we had a gaggle of reporters on the Israeli side seeming not to have a clue what the Israeli Defence Forces were up to.

The lack of knowledge and reporting skills in defence, military affairs and security, is particularly apparent - and bewildering. In Mark Urban, of Newsnight, we have one of the most accomplished defence analysts and military historians yet we hear far too little from him; indeed a Newsnight editor is reported to have said, "We don't do military." And this is at a time when Britain's armed forces are involved in major operations abroad. The staff defence correspondents are changed almost once a year now, giving them no chance to get to know the complex terrain of today's conflicts.

The other major factor that bedevils the quality of BBC journalism is the notion of objectivity, or impartiality as the corporation puts it. Objectivity and accuracy are equated with "balance", a notion that favours the collision of two extreme opinions or views in the hope that this will result in a synthesis of moderate mainstream understanding - a touchingly old-fashioned Marxist dialectical approach. Thus the extremists, whether on climate change, stem-cell research, right to life, nuclear energy, bombing Iran, or Intelligent Design get a disproportionate amount of broadcast time.

This year the BBC issued its own paper on impartiality in broadcasting - an oddly self-referential report. "From Seesaw To Wagon Wheel: Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century" by John Bridcut reveals an organisation as inward-looking as any Byzantine court, obsessed with its own authority and status as much as the quality of its work and the needs and expectations of its public. Most of the authorities footnoted and cited are in current or past BBC employ, rather like the Metropolitan Police always insisting it investigates its own misdemeanours.

With this latest round of cuts and reforms, the old BBC, renowned the world over for the quality of its output, is in danger of being destroyed for good. It is time to get radical and realistic. Most of the corporation's activities, the sport, the entertainment and arts, should become a self-sustaining operation - in which shareholders can vote on Mr Ross'  £18m pay deal.

Journalism of record in the interest of public service is too important to be left where it is. A separate British News Service should be incorporated as a public non-profit trust. The new British Broadcasting Commercial Company, meanwhile, would not have to forgo journalism and news altogether. They could run it as another commercial arm of their operation - like Fox News in the Murdoch empire. And who better to front it than Mr Jonathan - £18m - Ross himself? Now that really would be multi-tasking after the director general's heart.