David Dimbleby's call for slimmer BBC angers former executives

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/nov/20/bbc-dimbleby-size-executives-hit-back

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A former controller of BBC Radio 4 hit back after David Dimbleby called for the BBC to be dramatically cut back when its charter is renewed.

Mark Damazer, who spent more than 25 years at the BBC before leaving in 2010 to head St Peter's College in Oxford, argued that the broadcaster needs to maintain its size so that it can to serve licence fee payers in the digital era.

Damazer said he had the utmost respect for the Question Time host as an "absolute justification of the licence fee" but took issue with the presenter's suggestion that it was necessary to "cut back a bit" the number of its TV channels and the size of its online news presence.

The former radio chief said despite the fact that the number of BBC channels, stations and services had increased in the digital era, the paradox was that "the BBC is less powerful and smaller than it was", because of the range of competition.

Damazer argued that " in the past there was no Sky, no Adam Boulton, no Channel 4, no CNN and no al-Jazeera. In news there was just ITN, never mind Google News and bloggers. The BBC now sits in a totally different broadcasting ecology with far more competition, albeit as a very big player. There are tremendous advantages of economies of scale with the licence fee."

He was speaking after Dimbleby – who first joined the BBC in 1962 – used an interview on Richard Bacon's BBC Radio 5 Live show on Tuesday to criticise the scope of the BBC. The veteran broadcaster turned on his own employer to argue that the corporation needed to examine whether it is "too powerful for its own good".

He proposed that it merge BBC2 and BBC4 and curtail its web presence to allow the newspaper industry to make the digital transition. "Cut out some of the gardening and cookery and all that on BBC2 and turn it back into a quality thing it was meant to be and then you have two big channels, one and two," Dimbleby said.

Dimbleby's broadside marks the latest salvo in what is certain to become a long-running debate over the scope and funding of the BBC ahead of the negotiations to renew the royal charter in 2017. Earlier this month, Roger Mosey, a long-serving former BBC executive in roles including the oversight of its Olympic coverage, said the corporation should get a smaller slice of the licence fee to promote competition and give the public wider choice.

The sharp criticism from past and present insiders led another former senior executive to conclude that "there is obviously a bit of steam saying that the BBC needs to be smaller ahead of the Charter renewal process". Richard Sambrook, a former director of BBC news who had a 30-year career at the corporation, added that he did not agree with Dimbleby.

Sambrook, now director of the centre for journalism studies at Cardiff University, said Dimbleby was "silly" to expect the BBC to curtail its online activities. "To pull back on news online is a really silly thing to argue. With convergence, all news is online. Asking the BBC to ignore convergence is to ask it to ignore consumers and that is not in anyone's interest," he said.

The former BBC boss said that the broadcaster had "a core purpose as a benchmark of high-quality news and current affairs" and it "shouldn't be pulling back on a fast-developing platform. The BBC is still one of the world's last remaining newsgathering operations of scale and quality. There is a global problem of shrinking original news gathering. The BBC's role in that is hugely important but little discussed or understood.

"For example, [China state-controlled] CCTV has invested £7bn in international news. Who's going to counter that?"

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