BBC PLEDGES TO MAINTAIN HIGH STANDARDS

BBC CHAIRMAN, Sir Christopher Bland, has pledged that the BBC Governors remain committed to ensuring that the BBC maintains high standards and strives to improve accountability to licence payers.
In his foreword to the latest quarterly BBC’s Programme Complaints Bulletin he wrote: “The world of communications is changing faster that anyone expected. Against this background, the Governors remain committed to ensuring that the BBC will continue to be accountable to licence payers for the programmes and services they provide.”
The latest quarterly bulletin reports on the work of the BBC’s Programme Complaints Unit over the period July 1 to September 30, 2000. The Unit dealt with 159 complaints concerning 113 items that concerned 11 different broadcasts or series. During the period the BBC broadcast over 1,250 hours every day and placed almost one million pages on BBC Online.
BBC Director-General Greg Dyke, reporting on this quarters findings, said: “Two findings stand out in this Bulletin. The first, about ‘Top Gear’ reports a case where an effort to redress previous imbalance, in an item on the controversial Oxford Transport Strategy, went wrong. It’s disappointing that we weren’t able to make a better job of this. ‘Top Gear’ continues to provide a first-rate service to viewers interested in cars and driving, but we’ll be looking for signs of sharper judgement on the occasions when its brief leads into areas of public controversy.
“The second, about an item on the euro in ‘The World This Weekend” stands out, not because it was a particularly grave lapse – it simply took an original approach that didn’t quite come off – but because it generated an unusually large number of complaints. This reaction illustrates how highly-charged the whole issue of Britain and the EU is. It’s also a tricky one for the BBC to cover, not least because there are strands of opinion in the country which aren’t reflected in the policies of the main Westminster parties.”
Most complaints, 48 per cent of the total, were about news and current affairs, 22.5 per cent were about entertainment programmes, 20 per cent for factual programmes, three per cent fiction and drama, five per cent for other matters and religious and sports programmes were less than one per cent.
The Governors Programme Complaints Appeals Committee (GPCAC) upheld two appeals in this period.