Another Day, Another Crisis

Apparently there's a crisis at the BBC.  OK, so they allegedly made a couple of bad calls regarding the Savile business and Lord McAlpine, (who would have thought that not naming someone as an alleged peadophile could get you sued?), and the Director General has resigned, but from the perspective of a viewer, nothing has changed.  Programmes are going out as scheduled, Newsnight is still running, the news is still being reported.  The fact is that to the majority of people this entire 'crisis' seems to be something ramped up by the media, including the BBC itself.  The problem is that media-types are too wrapped up in their own little world, believing it to be the centre of the universe - they are just too insular to grasp that the rest of us aren't really interested in the internal politics of their world.  Sure, there were poor judgement calls on a couple of stories on a single news programme - but failings in one management team doesn't necessarily mean that there is anything wrong with the whole of journalism and investigative reporting at the BBC.

But for the media, it's a crisis.  Let's face it, simply saying a couple of serious mistakes were made by individuals who should have known better, wouldn't sound as dramatic.  Moreover, it wouldn't reflect the degree of importance the media regards itself with - if any part of it makes a 'mistake', it must automatically be a 'crisis' of national proportions.  So, instead of analysing what went wrong calmly and rationally, we have to endure this media frenzy and the setting up of numerous enquiries.  God, how this country seems to love an enquiry!  Most are bloated talk shops which resolve nothing and cost vast amounts of money.  I see it everywhere these days, particularly in the public sector: the slightest mistake, or a single complaint, is turned into a major crisis with endless investigations, meetings and reports.  Inevitably, it all ends the same way: a set of recommendations which make the job even more difficult and completely miss the crucial fact that mistakes do happen, usually as a result of human error.  None of us is infallible.  Luckily, most of us work in jobs where our mistakes won't have life-threatening consequences - yet they are treated as if they do.  I can understand why mistakes made by, say, medical professionals result in such high levels of scrutiny, but for most of us it is completely inappropriate - except in terms of allowing managers to look as if they are doing something, that is.  We really need to start putting things into perspective.