BBC美国之音裁员 西方传媒精英转投中共怀抱

美国之音和英国广播公司（ BBC）因财政不支大裁员，引起外界关注。总部设在美国的中文期刊《外参》披露，部份被裁的员工正申请加入中共官方的外宣队伍。中方的高薪厚遇不但吸引这些曾在反共媒体工作的精英，亦令欲挻揽人才的西方媒体自叹不如。

报道指 20多年前，中共培养的一批驻外记者，在六四事件后纷纷拒回国，投入美国之音、 BBC、法国国际广播电台、德国之声等西方媒体，成为「反共媒体」对华广播骨干，但 20年后风水轮流传，美国之音、 BBC大裁员，一些被辞退的电台工作人员，正申请加入中国官方外宣队伍。

报道引德国之声电台一位主管指，该台最近有意招聘几位 BBC中文部前职员，但她发现自已开出的条件，远远不及中国官方媒体，无论是薪水还是其他待遇，都比不上中共将在欧洲开张的英文媒体，只有眼睁睁看着这些媒体精英投靠中共。

《外参》报道没有透露北京以何代价吸纳这些西方媒体精英，但据了解，在欧洲以银弹挖角的是《人民日报》属下的《环球时报》欧洲版，中方允诺年薪起点至少五万欧元（约 53万港币），远高于德国之声的开价。中共数大喉舌包括央视、新华社、人民日报及中国国际广播电台，都计划扩大欧洲业务。

内地资深媒体人士指，中央媒体派驻外国记者的薪金待遇，据不同地区水平而定，与所在地同类人士收入水平相若，另有一些驻外津贴，如交通、伙食津贴等；聘请当地人士通常代价更高，对精英更是因人而异。央视早前扩张港澳台驻站，延请当地新人，其中本港所请新人，月薪高达三万港币。

近年不断有西方媒体名人加盟中国官方传媒。去年 1月， BBC前资深女主播苏珊．奥斯曼（ Susan Osman）加盟中国国际广播电台，轰动一时； 2008年 1月，美国广播公司（ ABC）着名体育记者、后任教美国印第安纳大学（ Indiana University）新闻系的托尼．普金斯（ Tony Perkins），加盟中国央视，成为央视英文频道主播。

早在 2004年，澳洲广播公司新闻主播埃德温．马尔（ Edwin Maher）加盟央视，后来还获得中国政府颁发「友谊奖」，一度被西方媒体指为「新闻叛徒」。 CCTV英文频道还有一位港籍名人，他叫周柳建成，在伦敦长大，曾在本港电视台任主持， 03年投身央视，是英文频道新闻担钢主播之一。

what an asshole, this ben brown

BBC Anchor Attacks Abused Disabled Protestor As “Revolutionary Cyber-Radical”

DARRYL MASON
Your New Reality
Dec 14, 2010

You don’t need to know too much background to get the full horror of what this BBCNews host is doing to a young man with cerebral palsy, who is unable to operate his wheelchair independently, simply because he dared to turn up at a recent student protest in London:



The blood-chillingly unemphatic journalist actually asks a severely disabled man if he was hurling chunks of concrete at police, and asks him again even after Jody says he can’t operate his wheelchair without the help of his brother.

Note the way interference or the host manage to cut off Jody every time he starts making valid, vital points about the police brutality inflicted on him and hundreds of other students in the streets of London, some students beaten by police, and charged with horses, were as young as 12 years old.

Note also the way the BBCNews host tries to get Jody to admit on air to things that may prejudice his official complaint later on.

Scary stuff.

Jody is becoming a hero of the what’s called the UKUncut student movement, who are opposing massive cuts to education and public services to protect the wealth of England’s richest, and for good reason. He has a lot of powerful things to say.

But after that interview, and the powerful reaction from the thousands who found it through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and began complaining to the BBC, you probably won’t be seeing Jody back on BBCNews anytime soon.

They don’t like ‘student leaders’ or ‘revolutionaries’ to be quite so articulate, and in control of what they’re saying.

England under austerity is a powderkeg, and when the public sees police are prepared to assault even people in wheelchairs, well, everything changes.

Jenni Russell: This is the BBC - ruled by greed at the top

Belt-tightening, cuts, insecurity, restraint. It’s the theme for every public service, and for a great many private companies too. But at the BBC the chasm between what’s being demanded of the vast majority of the staff and the cushion of privilege that protects its top executives has resulted in a level of rage that I have not seen since I joined the corporation as a trainee 25 years ago. “I’ve never
known anything like it,” one very senior producer said to me. “It’s outright fury. Every meeting is packed. Five hundred people turned up at one meeting at Bush House; you couldn’t get into the room.

We hate them, really hate them.” The staff I talked to are realists. They know that the BBC pension scheme has a hole in it and that salaries and jobs will all be badly
affected by the national squeeze on spending. They understand that the coalition government is planning to cut the licence fee. What incenses them is that their wages are being limited or frozen and their pensions slashed by a management elite whose own incomes and comfortable retirement arrangements leave them utterly detached from the lives and the fears of their employees.

It’s the Mark Byford pension that’s become the symbol of what’s gone so wrong. At 51 the deputy director-general not only earns almost £500,000 a year but — simply by staying in the same organisation all his working life — he has accumulated one of the largest pension pots ever seen in the public sector. It is currently worth £215,000 a year, which means that even if he left the BBC tomorrow, he would retire on an income that was almost 50% higher than the prime minister’s salary.

Buying that same pension on the open market would cost at least £3.6m. In the public sector it’s thought that only the governor of the Bank of England has accumulated more, and he has an entirely different order of responsibility.

What Byford and his colleagues have benefited from is a revolution in the ssumptions about what those who run the BBC should earn. When Michael Checkland became director-general 23 years ago, he earned around £200,000 a year. At that point a producer in the first year of their first job (me) earned £18,000.

In the intervening years top salaries have soared away from those of the rest of the staff. From the time that John Birt arrived as DG and was discovered to be contracting his services as a freelance in order to minimise his tax and maximise his income, the idea that running the BBC was a privilege deserving a healthy salary, but no more, was dead.

First the governors and then the BBC Trust bought into the argument that there was a worldwide shortage of talent and that the BBC had to compete for it in the marketplace. The corporation declared that executive pay was benchmarked against the private sector. The basic salaries of those on the executive board rocketed.
In 2006 the current director-general, Mark Thompson, had a pay rise of 9%, Byford got 15%, and the director of television’s pay went up by 25%. The staff got 2.6%. In 2008 the board got pay rises of up to £100,000, taking Thompson’s salary to £816,000. He remarked that the BBC’s wages were “in many cases a tiny patch on what other broadcasters pay” and that “when you get out into the external world,
some potential candidates almost roll on the floor laughing when you talk about potential levels of pay”.

That year the staff got 2%. Last year Thompson’s salary, including pension contributions, was £834,000. A journalist in my old job earns £30,000. Thompson and his colleagues have secured a remarkable deal: salaries approaching those in the harsh commercial world, but with public sector pensions and job security.

The staff have long been bewildered by the rewards at the top, while they deal with flat wages and incessant budget cuts.

The catalyst for the rage is the change to pensions announced in June. Most staff belong either to the final-salary or career-average scheme. In future the link between salaries and pensions is to be snapped.

Pensionable salaries will grow by a maximum of 1% a year, no matter what promotions or wage increases are earned. A typical 30-year-old producer on £25,000, who might have expected to retire on £27,000 after a couple of promotions in his working life, will now get about a third of that. Except for the lucky few who are towards the end of their employment, or who have already reached the peak of their earnings, everyone’s retirement income will be savagely reduced.

“It’s sheer betrayal,” one editor told me. “The whole country’s in a dire state and we know we have to make sacrifices; but the management have been so greedy they’ve surrendered their moral right to leadership. The executive board have each given up a month’s salary for two years, and we’re told this will hit them in the pocket, but for God’s sake, on their salaries how can that hurt? They’re on a different planet.”

That sense of different rules for the staff and the elite was reinforced last week when it turned out that the executives who have driven one of the BBC’s major projects, the moving of 1,500 staff from London to a Salford base next year, won’t actually be making the move out of London themselves. The director of BBC North, Peter Salmon, has decided to keep his family in London and rent a flat in Salford during the week at the BBC’s expense. He says his children are at a critical stage in their education.

The controller of 5 Live has made the same decision. The BBC says the strategist behind the Salford move, Richard Deverell, has not yet decided whether he will move. Meanwhile, the employees affected have been told that while there will be attempts to redeploy them if they don’t go, they may face redundancy if they refuse.
The BBC has never felt like a well-managed organisation. I worked there for 10 years, and its crassness in handling its staff was bewildering. But neither the executive board nor the trust seems to have grasped the hostility they now face. The unions will be balloting on strike action — and they say applications to
join them are running at an unprecedented level.

The BBC has to accept that it is not and cannot be compared to a commercial organisation. Commercial employees live or die by whether they can survive in the marketplace. Michael Grade left the BBC for a huge salary at ITV, only to be forced out when he didn’t deliver sufficient profits. The BBC is insulated from those pressures.

As one trust member told me, there is nothing like looking at projected income for the next five years and seeing those repeated, reassuring figures: £3.4 billion, every single year.

The era in which private-sector greed could be carried into the public sector is over. The governor of the Bank of England has just announced that when the Bank takes over regulation of the financial system, he won’t be offering high salaries. Instead, he’s looking for people who are motivated by public service.

That’s just what the BBC should be doing. It has to cut those stratospheric alaries and understand that executives who have won the lottery with their pensions should either surrender part of them or move on. They are in no position to lecture the staff on austerity and restraint. The DG’s salary could be set at the same level the coalition is proposing for the rest of the public sector: 20 times the lowest London wage, some £400,000. If current board members think they are worth more elsewhere, let them leave.

Nothing is more important than that the BBC, which is an essential part of our cultural and political life, should be led by people who care more for what they can achieve than what they can earn themselves.

jenni.russell@sunday-times.co.uk

BBC chiefs pension of £400,000 a year

MARK BYFORD, the deputy director-general of the BBC, is in line for pension payouts of almost £400,000 a year when he retires.

Mr Byford, 51, has amassed a pension pot worth £3.4million, one of the biggest ever seen in the public sector.

The latest estimate, published in a Sunday newspaper, was based on an analysis of figures published by the BBC and follows controversy over Mr Byford's travel expenses.

He claimed £4,878 for business class flights to the World Cup as well as almost £4,000 on flights to America last year.

Mr Byford, who joined the BBC at the age of 20 in 1979, received £485,000 in pay and other benefits last year. That could rise to almost £600,000 by 2019 in line with average wage inflation. With 40 years' service he would be entitled to two thirds of his salary as a pension, or £395,000 a year.

If bought as an annuity on the open market, this would require a total pension pot of at least £7million.

But the BBC is currently in consultation about plans to cap pay rises in pensionable pay to one per cent a year.

Although the cuts would curb his potential payouts, even if he left the corporation tomorrow he would be in line for a pension worth £215,000 a year, according to projections in the BBC's annual report.

The corporation defended the potential payout as "typical" of final salary schemes, which are still commonplace in the public sector. A spokesman added: "Mark Byford will be treated no differently from anyone else."

John Bingham
The Daily Telegraph (London)
July 19, 2010 Monday
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