What was the question, again ?

Paul Smith, once himself a BBC staffer, now (amongst other things) an occasional blogger at The Guardian, has a good post entitled "If the answer is shutting 6 Music, what exactly was the question?"

In the same frame of mind, who had the upper hand when the decision was taken ?

• Strategists, arguing (probably) for the maximum tolerable level of retreat in the whole approach, on the grounds that cuts will flow anyway from all three outcomes to the General Election - Labour, Tory or "Hung".
• Accountants, who can see that many running costs are rising - rates, rent, utilities, the shift to HD production, redundancy costs and probably wages, even with a freeze on executive pay. The re-investment in TV "quality" may not be quite as big as it seems...
  
• Marketing, who've never "got" radio and seem to have given up the ghost on both 6Music and the Asian Network.
• Technologists, who presumably have their eye on the release of 196kbps of DAB bandwidth for schemes to make Radio 1 and Radio 2 look more like MTV - a change of scope which I suspect the BBC Trust might worry about...
• An editorial focus on highbrow, marked by the mantra chanting of "Look at A History of the World in 100 Objects...." Mmmm, quality, collaboration, interactivity,multimedia and museums... Never a mention of a commissioning system which produced The Seven Ages of Britain at the same time.

Meanwhile it seems slightly unfair that there's no "steady state" in this period of public consultation. Messing around with Maconie and Radcliffe, and Bruce Dickinson, and all that. And now the Trust are moving in again, announcing reviews of Radio 3, Radio 4 and Radio 7; then Radio Wales, Radio Cymru, Radio Ulster/Foyle, Radio Scotland, Radio nan Gaidheal and English local radio. It's just exhausting, and no way to run a shop.