Paxman: BBC is too PC ‘
Why is the story always about the disabled refugee from Syria, rather than the demands that the disabled refugee from Syria might make upon our taxpayers?
JEREMY Paxman has criticised the BBC for being too politically correct – and branded the licence fee old-fashioned.
The ex-Newsnight presenter said the Corporation was too focused on problems of the ‘metropolitan elite’.
He claimed it looked at issues facing refugees, rather than the pressure they put on British taxpayers.
His comments came as presenter Andrew Marr made a plea for impartiality on the BBC.
Paxman, who left the BBC in 2014, said it was a ‘parastatal organisation’ – serving the state indirectly – and ‘of course there is a political correctness’.
On how the Corporation differed from news organisations that were not state- funded, the 67- year- old added: ‘The BBC has a weakness for endless meetings with executives you’ve never heard of and don’t know what they do.
‘There is a way of looking at the world if you are part of the BBC and a different way if you work for a commercial organisation. Why is the story always about the disabled refugee from Syria, rather than the demands that the disabled refugee from Syria might make upon our taxpayers? ‘That’s all too common. It’s a metropolitan- elite problem, isn’t it?’ And he said the ‘antediluvian’ licence fee was ‘a tax on a piece of electronic equipment’.
Paxman said: ‘Some other mechanism has to be found – and it seems to me that if Amazon and Netflix have the ability to do that, it’s not beyond the BBC to do the same thing.’
He spent more than 20 years on Newsnight before leaving in 2015 after former Guardian deputy editor Ian Katz took over.
Speaking to the Sunday Times magazine, he criticised the show’s ‘pretty stupid’ sketches, highlighting when presenter Emily Maitlis was ‘forced’ to interview Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster and an occasion when Kirsty Wark danced to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
He said: ‘They did do some pretty stupid things. I think it’s very patronising to think this is the sort of thing that appeals to the young.’
Meanwhile Marr, who hosts a political show for the BBC on Sundays, highlighted the need for impartiality from the Corporation.
He said he reminded himself when presenting that ‘all these people have paid their licence fees… and they all have the right to have questions asked of their heroes or zeros in a fair way’.
It follows a furore over Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow reportedly chanting ‘F*** the Tories’ at Glastonbury. In the Sunday Times, Marr said: ‘I do know Jon Snow just a little bit. Over the years, I have come to doubt whether he is, to his boots, a naturally Ukip kind of fellow. Jon is sure he said nothing of the kind. He’d probably have been out if he had. But, anyway, Channel 4 News isn’t the BBC. It has found its own niche.’