Word: bbc
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...past few months, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has itself resembled a superannuated soap, with the long-term future of the 85-year-old institution called into question as it lurches from embarrassing revelations about editorial lapses to high-level resignations and job cuts. Management has apologized for such breaches of trust as falsifying the results of a public vote held to name a cat on the children's show Blue Peter (producers rejected the winning entry, Cookie, in favor of Socks) and showing a trailer for the documentary A Year with the Queen with scenes shown out of sequence...
That scandal claimed the scalp of BBC1 boss Peter Fincham, who resigned on Oct. 5. Two weeks later, BBC director-general Mark Thompson announced plans to kill off some 2,500 jobs, mostly in news and nonfiction programming, and to sell the BBC's iconic West London headquarters, Television Centre. Management is now trawling its staff for volunteers for layoffs. Says Roy Greenslade, a former editor of the Daily Mirror newspaper and currently a journalism professor at London's City University: "The BBC's problems are manifold. There are more dramas at the BBC than ever get shown...
...institution revered for the quality of its output, a global role model for public-service broadcasting, the backbone and guardian of British life--"monolithic and ingrained into our culture," in Greenslade's words--suddenly seem so vulnerable? One source of the BBC's problems can be seen on EastEnders: only 9 million viewers tuned in to the finale of the hostage plotline--far shy of EastEnders' record episode in 1986, when more than 30 million watched nothing more dramatic than the marital breakdown of a pub owner and his barmaid wife...
Back then, viewers had only four channels to choose from and no cable, and all the channels were required to include some socially redeeming content: BBC1, home of the BBC's most popular output; the more esoteric BBC2; the commercial network ITV; and Channel 4, then only four years old and set up to break the duopoly of the BBC...
...menaced by the same digital revolution that's wreaking global havoc in newspapers, magazines, film and music. Challenged by technologies that allow anyone to read news, watch TV or listen to music on a variety of devices, these businesses are frantically scrambling to reinvent themselves. Mark Byford, the BBC's deputy director-general and head of journalism, says there's particularly a noticeable "falling away" of TV viewers who are "under 35 and especially under...