Punchy

One naughty aspect of journalism is looking for a punch-up when there isn't one.  It's been the subject of debate between the Today programme and writer Graham Linehan - was he "ambushed" by the appearance of Michael Billington (a highly unlikely rottweiler) when interviewed about his stage version of The Ladykillers ? (Miranda Sawyer gives the item a clever review in The Observer)

I think the Sunday Telegraph subs are more culpable, with their headline today "Lord Patten vows to save the World Service from cuts".  There's no such phrase in any direct quote from the interview - and, indeed, this experienced politician and mandarin seeks deliberately to avoid the language of confrontation.

Here are the relevant direct quotes. "I hope that with the Foreign Secretary we can successfully mitigate the effects of some of the decisions which were taken. I'll be talking to him reasonably soon. I know he regards the World Service as an important part of this country's soft power and I'm sure that with goodwill and without megaphones we'll be able to sort it out. I'm hoping on Arabic services we will be able to protect that as something that is at the core of what the BBC is doing. I'm very keen on the Somali and Hindi services as well. The issue is can we restore some of what was going to be lost and I hope we can."

So just a reminder of what is gone and unlikely to return: five full services - Macedonian, Albanian, Serbian, English for the Caribbean, and Portguese for Africa; radio programmes in Azeri, Mandarin Chinese, Russian (save for some programmes which will be distributed online), Spanish (the remaining residual service for Cuba), Turkish, Vietnamese, and Ukrainian; shortwave distribution in Indonesian, Kyrgyz, Nepali, and the Great Lakes service for Rwanda and Burundi.

Let's that hope "Fat Pang" has already used his basic commonsense and acquired knowledge of the Foreign Office,and ascertained that he's pushing at an open door on mitigation (not reinstatement) of the cuts for Arabic, Somali and Hindi.

I'll try to take a look at Patten's domestic strategy in another post.