Ding dong

Dyspeptic former BBC correspondent Martin Bell expounds his thinking on broadcast journalism, once again, in the Daily Mail. 

"The Beeb has forgotten that it's the news that matters, not who is delivering it.... The best-paid journalist, newsreader Huw Edwards, is on £490,000. To reporters of my generation, that sum is unthinkable.

Bear in mind that veteran newsreader Kenneth Kendall's final salary at the BBC in 1981 was £16,000 a year – just over £60,000 in today's money. That's an eighth of Edwards' salary and Kendall commanded audiences of eight million compared to around five now.

Admittedly, yesterday's figures do reveal that some trimming of salaries has begun. Jeremy Vine, John Humphrys and Steve Wright – all paid many hundreds of thousands a year – have taken pay cuts of between £85,000 and £150,000. That's a start but it must go further.

If the BBC loses some of its best-known performers as a result, then so be it. There will be no lack of talented volunteers to take their places.

What isn't widely known is that the overall earnings of the BBC's high-flyers are often in considerable excess of published figures. These presenters can enjoy additional windfalls from so-called 'corporates', including after-dinner speeches, videos and conferences.

While MPs have to declare these things on a register, journalists and presenters working for the publicly-funded national broadcaster do not.

Yet if a presenter is 'let go' by the BBC, such engagements dry up very quickly. What these men and women are worth outside the BBC is entirely dependent on the 'face-time' conferred by the broadcaster. Why isn't that fact part of hard-nosed salary negotiations?"