John Stonborough F.C.I.P.R.

M&S (Marx and Stonborough)

Big excitement on the business front, we have teamed up with Nici Marx, the former BBC news anchor and reporter. Nici has been at the sharp end of news and current affairs, anchoring live programmes for BBC World TV, BBC News 24, CNN International and Sky News for more than two decades. You can read more about her on the Air Supremacy website.
Nici has her own successful consultancy with clients anyone would be proud of. Last week she was training senior Ministry of Defence personnel. She was in the Middle East recently for the EU, advising on raising the profile of a major EU humanitarian project in Gaza and the West Bank. All fascinating stuff.
Nici will concentrate on Media Training and Broadcast Media Relations consultancy, bringing new insights to the wisdom and experience provided by Jane Renton and the rest of my excellent team. I am delighted to welcome her.

Just A Minute*

I worked with a woman at the House of Commons who said that she would like to have BBC Radio 4 as her boyfriend. Because, she said, its usually interesting, sometimes spectacular but you can always switch it off. Well, not always Liz. Not if you suffer from ‘Can’t Switch Off Syndrome’.
Paul Donovan, who writes the thoughtful, often amusing Radio Waves column in the Sunday Times (see Culture p77) is offering a bottle of Bolly, for the best ‘CSOS’ story from R4 addicts who’ve been glued to their cars to catch the end of something, even if it meant being late for something else.
Paul mentions the Afternoon Play but I can add: Analysis, The Now Show, Start the Week, Excess Baggage, Law in Action, Woman’s Hour, Midweek, FOOC, the News, File on 4, Crossing Continents, PM, The News Quiz, Today, I’m Sorry I …,  The Moral Maze  and anything at all with Fi Glover (left).
I remember once driving down Park Lane enjoying something Radio 4ish. Stylish, witty, slick, topical, relevant, provocative, essential. It was only after a few minutes I twigged it was a repeat of a prog I’d made some years earlier.  Glued? No, bolted. 

     

 * I am going to miss you Clement Freud.

Help Yourself!

I was very flattered to see my last blog entry The Sinking of the Met I Know re-printed almost word for word in the Sunday Times last Sunday, sadly without a source credit. But I am very flattered nonetheless. Yes, very flattered.

The Sinking of the Met I know.

He was walking away. He had his hands in his pockets. He was walking away. I was a Metropolitan policeman in the early seventies. I speak with some knowledge having policed football crowds and rent a mob ‘rioting’ student and anarchist groups. So to witness a British policeman, dressed like an OMON trooper, with his face obscured, running up and striking a defenceless man from behind makes my blood run cold. What possible excuse or defence can that officer from the Territorial Support Group have. (And what an unfortunate name for those who remember the excesses of the SPG in the 1970’s). It will be our Rodney King moment.
I expect the copper will claim he was ‘provoked’ or something by this homeless drifter, apparently trying to get back to his hostel lodgings and not part of the G20 demo at all. And equally I fear that the officer ‘will have got his story straight,’ with his colleagues. Cautious fair British voices (and the police) say we must not pre-judge, but must await the outcome of the inquiry. I say thank God for the video evidence, it doesn’t leave much doubt in my mind, that a terrible criminal assault took place that evening.
And there is the rub. If this government has its way, technically the cameramen who shot this vital footage are guilty now of a serious criminal offence. Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act, which came into force in February, permits the arrest of anyone taking photographs of the police, the armed forces, or the intelligence services which are “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. The police claim they will only enforce it in the public interest. The real assault here is not just on poor Mr Tomlinson but on our civil liberties in the name of terrorist prevention. I believe that the public interest is far better served by photographing the police at every occasion. If they do nothing wrong, as they are keen to say, they have nothing to fear.
So what to do, well, one small step that everyone can do to stop the march of the police state, where the policeman demands your name, rather than you his, is to: • take his picture. (snap a cop) • and demand the repeal of S76.
And while we are about it, the police must be prevented from wearing balaclavas. Let us see their faces. I opened my paper this morning to find every picture of a policeman had a black bar across it. Who is the terrorist now? The chances of them being tracked down by a terrorist are as nothing compared to the risk we run by not being able to identify them. If they are frightened of being hurt by a terrorist or anyone else, they should not be a policemen. One of my friends was killed by an IRA bomb while on duty in December 1983 and I had a couple of scrapes myself. The risk of being hurt is part of the job, I don’t believe Inspector Stephen Dodd gave it a moment’s thought, and if he did, he would have gone to work just the same.
Newspapers snappers whose livelihoods depend on their freedom to photograph are beginning to protest, but it should not be only professional photographers. We all have a civic duty to observe and report on our law enforcers. Ask a foreigner about Britishness and they list, unarmed police, ‘bobbies on bicycles’ as unique and definingly British. Ian Tomlinson’s death blows that quaint notion out of the water. Thank God for the video evidence.

(This is from Wikipedia: Rodney Glen King was an African-American man who, on March 3, 1991, was the victim in an excessive force case committed by Los Angeles police officers. A bystander, George Holliday, videotaped much of the incident from a distance. The footage showed LAPD officers repeatedly striking King with their batons. A portion of this footage was aired by news agencies around the world, causing public outrage. Four LAPD officers were later tried in a state court but were acquitted (which) sparked the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.)

BBC Fined £150,000 - Ofcom Press Release

Ofcom has today fined the BBC a total of £150,000 for breaches of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code (“the Code”) in two episodes of the Russell Brand show broadcast on BBC Radio 2 on the 18 and 25 October 2008. 
The scale of the fine reflects the extraordinary nature and seriousness of the BBC’s failures and the resulting breaches of the Code.
The BBC broadcast explicit, intimate and confidential information about Georgina Baillie, the granddaughter of the actor Andrew Sachs in both programmes without their consent. This not only unwarrantably and seriously infringed their privacy but was also gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning.
Broadcasters must be permitted to enjoy the creative freedom to explore issues and ideas without undue interference. Creative risk is part of the BBC’s public service role, however, so is the management of that risk. In this case, Ofcom’s investigation revealed that despite the Russell Brand show being considered by the BBC to be “high risk” prior to these episodes, the broadcaster had ceded responsibility for managing some of that risk to those working for the presenter, Russell Brand. The presenter’s interests had been given greater priority than the BBC’s responsibility to avoid unwarranted infringements of privacy and minimise the risk of harm and offence and to maintain generally accepted standards.
Ofcom identified six underlying flaws in the BBC’s compliance systems:
·         a lack of clarity about the exact role of a senior figure at the agency that represents Russell Brand, as the Executive Producer, on behalf of the independent production company;
·         the failure of the Executive Producer to attend a BBC Safeguarding Trust compliance course, despite this being a condition of the production contract;
·         the failure of the Executive Producer to sign off compliance forms for these programmes,despite this also being a condition of the production contract (it was not known whether he signed off previous forms);
·         no proactive testing and insufficient monitoring of the compliance systems in BBC Audio and Music in general, but especially after Russell Brand became an independent production from May 2008;
·         an unacceptable conflict of interest for the Line Producer seconded from the BBC on a part-time basis to the independent production company making Russell Brand; and
·         a lack of clarity about who at the BBC had editorial oversight of the series.
These overall weaknesses set the scene for the very serious failures of the BBC’s compliance systems that resulted in the repeated broadcast of exceptionally offensive, humiliating and demeaning material. These failures included:
·         no senior manager at Radio 2 listened to the pre-recorded programme of 18 October 2008 in its entirety before broadcast;
·         there was a failure to obtain the informed consent of Andrew Sachs;
·         there was no attempt at all to obtain consent from Georgina Baillie as required by our Code and the BBC’s own Editorial Guidelines; and
·         the failure to complete and submit the compliance forms for Russell Brand before the broadcast on 18 October 2008.
Ofcom welcomes the BBC’s assurances about improving compliance. However, Ofcom was concerned that it had received similar assurances as recently as the summer of 2008, following its investigations into competitions and voting in BBC programmes. Ofcom therefore expects BBC management to ensure that these latest improvements are fulfilled effectively and quickly.
Specifically, Ofcom found the following rules of the Code were breached: Rule 2.1 (generally accepted standards must be applied programmes); Rule 2.3 (offensive material must be justified by the context); and Rule 8.1 (the ’standard’ requiring adequate protection for members of the public from unwarranted infringements of privacy).
A fine of £70,000 was imposed for the breaches of Rules 2.1 and 2.3; and a fine of £80,000 imposed for the contraventions of Rule 8.1.
Ofcom has also directed BBC Radio 2 to broadcast a summary of its findings.
The full statement can be found here: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/obb/ocsc_adjud/BBCRadio2TheRussellBrandShow.pdf
ENDS

My Clever Friend and Colleague

My clever friend and colleague Jane ‘Rentgirl’ Renton has a new book out in August called Coaching and Mentoring. The clue is in the title. It’s published by the Economist and available at all good Amazons. You can pre-order it now. That’s me on the front; quite an old picture though.