Gloves off

BBC Newsgathering boss Jonathan Munro has gone all Joey Barton, using his latest monthly staff email (rodomontade is not a strong enough word for his prose-style) to attack former BBC executives Roger Mosey and Mark Damazer.

"There has been an outbreak of armchair general commentary in recent weeks, reflecting that everything was fine and dandy in their day. Of course it was."

“Five years ago, we had zero female editors in newsgathering. Yes, zero. None of our staff correspondents in Europe was a woman. Yes, none. So when they’re thinking that it was so much better when they ran the place, they’re thinking back to the days when male, pale and stale was good enough. We’re proud to have moved things on.”

Jonathan rejected a range of critical points from the "male AGs who, when they had the chance to modernise the BBC, chose instead to leave us with a legacy which became popularly known as ‘men at 10’.”

“What a shame that they didn’t trust in some appointments not in their own image, to allow people to grow into their roles, to mix the cast list so it began to look and feel a bit like the audience – you know, a few women here and there."

 “In fact, if they’d done their job a bit differently back then, the BBC wouldn’t have even needed a 50-50 project [improving gender balance of contributors on-screen], but we did. The figures for the monitored month in April are now out. What progress we’ve all made.”

BBC DG Lord Hall was in charge of News until 2001, and appointed Mosey and Damazer to various top jobs. Mosey left Auntie in 2013, and Damazer was a Trustee until 2017. In my view, Munro would do better to read their stuff more carefully and calm down; others disagree.... 

Delighted that the BBC’s Jonathan Munro has strongly defended it from querulous attacks by former BBC bosses. Failure to stand up for yourself when unfairly criticised looks like real timidity — & is just asking for more of the same.

— John Simpson (@JohnSimpsonNews) May 31, 2019