The phoney war over BBC charter and licence fee renewal has lurched into one of its not infrequent hot phases (though battle will not be properly joined until after the general election in May). Lurking behind stories of the chancellor and prime minister criticising the corporation’s political coverage, or apparent outrage at Christmas TV repeats, is always the implicit threat that if it doesn’t buck up its ideas, there’ll be consequences down the line.
In this context of sporadic gunfire, Monkey was wondering if the BBC corporate comms team has been reading Alastair Campbell’s New Labour PR playbook.
Monkey only asks because the BBC PR machine appears to have started up a rapid rebuttal unit, which on Wednesday returned fire on Twitter over a couple of Sun editorials this week sniping at the corporation’s alleged ‘fat cat’ executive pay deals and the ‘inherent [left wing] bias’ of its output.
.@TheSunNewspaper have shown a lot of interest in the BBC recently – here’s what we think: http://t.co/G1ZbhBeDhu pic.twitter.com/Nkq44Y8MbV
— BBC Press Office (@bbcpress) December 3, 2014
Dig your foxholes good and deep, people - it’s going to be a long war ...
