Debate over BBC Scotland’s fate takes a turn for the worse - Bruce Whitehead
I've been pretty impressed by Stephen Jardine as a Radio Scotland presenter and host of TV Debate Night. Although he looks and dresses like a politician - all smart suits and coiffed hair - I thought him incisive and objective in his role as a journalist, particularly in party leader interviews ahead of Holyrood elections. Not any more.
Yesterday Jardine came out squarely in support of the biting cuts that will remove Scotland's only dedicated TV channel, BBC Scotland, along with BBC Three, Radio 4Extra and a tumbril-full of doomed but unique programmes found nowhere else in broadcast or online.
The Google guy brought in by panicked BBC governors to steady the ship after the Trump Panorama crisis, Matt Brittin embodies the type who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing.
BTW: the only problem with the Trump Panorama was the absence of a quick fade-to-black before the "fight like hell!" clip, signalling that the video was not in sequence.
As a journalist and BBC colleague of 70-odd staff facing the Brittin scythe, Stephen has let us all down by claiming that massive cuts (proportionally) were necessary due to the "breakneck speed" of changing viewing habits.
And he kept digging, David Brent style, dubbing his own Debate Night programme, "one of the real successes" of BBC Scotland, and promised it would continue on iPlayer. In other words: "You're all sacked... but I'm OK!".
To add insult to injury, the comments implied that colleagues' programmes were mostly failures. He's arguably compromised his integrity as an objective journalist.
His remarks might have been written by either of his bosses, BBC Scotland director Hayley Valentine or ex-head of news Gary Smith, parroting the TV management mantra that "younger audiences and changing viewing habits" give them an excuse to destroy what makes the BBC - despite manifest defects - the envy of the world.
First the "changing habits" line is simply untrue. Millennials have never been core audiences for most live broadcast output, preferring Matt Brittin's ex-employer Google to feed them exactly the views they're comfortable with. Chasing them is like seeking the Holy Grail on a pogo stick.
As Radio Scotland Off The Ball fitba' host Stuart Cosgrove says, the massive baby boomer audience, in their 50s-90s want BBC Scotland on their remote control "doofer" - not on some dodgy computer browser.
This week he doubled down on his criticism of Valentine, claiming that BBC Scotland was misguidedly targeting "younger audiences" who just don't listen or watch such programming.
Second the Scottish cuts will save just 0.4 per cent of the £500m random "savings" figure demanded by Brittin.
Worst of all is the tin-eared reaction of Valentine and Smith; she told journalists that she might be "back for more" cuts, and both thought there wasn't "much went wrong with the channel".
Ms Valentine said this week that most of the BBC Scotland TV content would still be available on iPlayer. But this casually dismisses the essential thrill and community spirit of live, "appointment-TV": doing something together and excitedly goggle-boxing on the family sofa or messaging your pals about the latest Traitors nonsense.
After all, why do people still go to cinemas? Answer: the same reason they tune in en-masse for the BAFTAS, SpringWatch or football tournaments: for shared live/live-to-air experience.
We're social creatures. Axing live programming, creating a library of past glories on iPlayer and telling elderly audiences to find it themselves is like opening the library all-hours and telling borrowers to find their own books. That's what's implied by Valentine's woefully thin plan for the future of the BBC in Scotland.
Valentine and Jardine should read the furious comments on social media about the whole fiasco. It's time we got our own autonomous Scottish Broadcast Media Service, funded by our licence subscribers.