Love of money at the BBC

The nationally funded broadcaster fought ‘tooth and nail’ to keep the secret.

But in July the salaries of some of the BBC’s most famous presenters were finally published. The top earner was the Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans, who pockets £2.2 million per annum, then came Match of the Day frontman Gary Lineker with £1.7 million. Among journalists and interviewers, Jeremy Vine’s annual ‘haul’ is £700,000, while the most highly paid woman Strictly Come was Dancing’s Claudia Winkelman with around £450,000.

The real scandal

It was the pay gap between men and women that hit the headlines. This is indeed unjust. But in some ways isn’t this really a diversion? The greater scandal is surely the scale of all these salaries. Who honestly needs to be paid such ridiculous sums – and this during a time of austerity when many families who pay the licence fee are struggling to make ends meet? Even the Prime Minister, with so much responsibility upon her shoulders, is only paid £150,000 a year.

The cry from women presenters was understandably for equal pay. They were not asking for male salaries to be reduced to the female level, but that women’s pay should go up. Not much hope of reining in the expenditure of the BBC there then. It all reeks of greed. The argument about needing to pay the ‘going rate’ to retain these ‘stars’ is nonsense when no doubt there are equally talented people who would happily front these broadcasts for a tenth of the money. ‘Celebrities’ are actually easy to replace. Anyone can become a celebrity, as Big Brother so clearly proved.

Hypocrisy and bias

According to the Bible, the love of money goes with many other evils (1 Timothy 6.10). Questions of plain integrity must be raised. How can anyone now take John Humphrys seriously on Radio 4’s Today programme? His stock-in-trade has always been the moral high ground, as he interviews and seeks to corner politicians and the movers & shakers of the moment. But he has negotiated a deal of over £600,000 a year for himself as he bangs on about the Utilities ripping off customers or the government allowing the gap between rich and poor to expand so much. (Perhaps he gives 80% of his booty to charity? Let’s hope so).

This personal capitalism sits hypocritically with the evident left-wing mindset of the BBC. Peter Sissons was a former BBC man himself. His biography When One Door Closes exposes much. ‘When I was presenting on the News Channel I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told “it’s all in there”.’ He even says that anti-capitalist campaigners generally get sympathetic and uncritical coverage and ‘Islam must not be offended at any price, although Christians are fair game because they do nothing about it if offended’. The one thing guaranteed to damage your career prospects is to be at odds with the BBC’s prevailing line on Life, the Universe and Everything. ‘And the BBC does have views on everything.’ Over the next month or so viewers are being fed with the Gay Britannia season: given that the percentage of gay people in the BBC is apparently far higher than in the general population that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

The worry is of course that this evidently biased broadcaster has such influence over people’s attitudes and votes. Who really runs this country?