21/10/2016 Newswatch

Coming up at 10pm, Sophie will be here with a full round-up of the

news. First it is time for news watch.

Hello and welcome to Newswatch, with me, Samira Ahmed.

After years of Newswatch complaints about the cost

of sending news presenters out to foreign locations,

And is coverage of the US presidential campaign as edifying

First, the extent of coverage of the Olympics on news programmes

and bulletins caused some consternation back over the summer

and that issue was back on Monday when a parade of Britain's Olympians

and Paralympians took place in Manchester.

Again we sort of take it for granted now, but it is so so difficult

and Rebecca Adlington is a multiple medal winner.

When you look at what athletes do in other disciplines, you must have

Every single athlete, even the ones that aren't here today.

Obviously some of the athletes have decided just to go to the London

one, but it is like every single person has their own

There was more than two hours of that, broadcast not just

on the news channel but also in a special programme on BBC One.

Some viewers wondered if all that airtime was justified,

including one who left us this telephone message.

I would just like to show my disgust at the BBC's simulcasting once again

I do not think that my licence fee should be

Either have it on BBC One or on the news channel,

or better still hit it on the red button.

It is not news and it certainly should not be taking over two

After the first US presidential debate, we discussed on this

programme if too much coverage had been devoted to the insults

and bickering exchanges between Donald Trump

This week saw the third and final TV debate between the two candidates.

The Russians have engaged in cyber attacks against

She has no idea if it is Russia, China...

Then Donald Trump was questioned about the procession of women that

have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault.

These women, the woman on the plane, I think they want either fame

Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger.

Last Sunday, Trinity Gay, the 15-year-old daughter

of Tyson Gay, was killed after an exchange of gunfire

One aspect of the BBC's reporting of her death annoyed

a number of viewers, including Grace Bradley who left

I'm just reading on the BBC website that he tested positive for a banned

substance and was banned from the competition

You think, the man's daughter has been murdered,

what relevance does that got to the coverage of that story?

I'm horrified by the insensitivity of the BBC in this case.

When a major international story breaks, we've become used to the big

beasts of TV news being dispatched to present programmes from abroad.

like the fall of Berlin Wall or the release of Nelson Mandela

from prison, but it has become much more frequent.

Newswatch viewers have often objected to what they see as a waste

of licence fee money, for instance just over a year ago

when three BBC One anchors were sent to three different

Were the migration crisis has brought more scenes

A very good evening to you from Munich's

main railway station, where throughout the day hundreds

of migrants and refugees have been arriving from Austria.

Tonight at ten we are live in Lebanon, just three miles

from the Syrian border in one of the thousands of refugee camps.

BBC's bosses would come on Newswatch insisting that such

deployments added value to news bulletins, while many

viewers complained that they were just profligate

windowdressing with money wasted flying presenters across the world

mainly to read links that could've easily be done in the studio.

One of those viewers posted this comment on Thursday:

There has also been criticism of the number of BBC reporters sent

to cover foreign stories, with tales of

corporation journalists battling for positions with each

other at news conferences around the world.

So prompted by the need to save money, the BBC has this week

announced new restrictions on the deployment of reporters

A move greeted by Max Johnson as being:

Jonathan Munro is with me now to explain the changes.

Jonathan, what exactly are you proposing change

I think the summary is we are trying to raise the bar on the judgments

made about the deployment of numbers of people overall

and presenters and the teams that work with presenters in particular.

Obviously sending people away is a big expense for the BBC

and secondly when we spend that money we want to ensure

we are spending it on generating meaningful content and obviously

that involves sending lots of people on big stories,

including presenters, and we will carry on doing that.

But we will not do it as often and we will not do it

Can you give examples of the kinds of stories you would not send

I think the best example recently and we've used this

when briefing our own staff is the summit David Cameron went

to when he was still Prime Minister just after the vote to leave

You may remember he went for dinner in Brussels to the summit,

he was there for a few hours, it was contained in the same

building, we knew it was called to happen in advance,

We ended up with 17 English-language reporters, correspondence

and presenters in Brussels carrying that summit.

I think that falls below the bar I'm trying to raise, otherwise,

But on a big breaking story, like the attacks in Paris a year

ago, you do need a volume of people to make products as very

as breakfast in the morning through to Newsnight in the evening,

the World Service is a major consumer of global news,

so I don't want anyone to get the impression that we are no longer

deploying on foreign news, we absolutely are, we're going to be

more careful and more restrictive about the numbers.

Viewers have been complaining for years the presenters

It sounds like you're admitting the BBC has

Presenters can add a lot but they don't always add

I think, for example, if you're going to the location

of this story and you are doing live interviews with someone who's

involved in a story, you're calling someone to account,

you are analysing the events, you know better than anyone that

you only do that effectively if you can look at the whites

of the eyes of the people you're talking to, and it is real added

If, on the other hand, you're going merely to interview

other BBC people who are already there, that appeals to me

On reporters, though, what is the plan, because the BBC

has talked about avoiding duplication, but it is

understandable that different programmes have got their

own take on the story for the different audiences?

Those audiences are really varied in different and we will absolutely

continue to be conscious of that will be sent.

So in a sense, this becomes an issue about the numbers, how many people

physically getting on a plane, for example, one of breaking

There comes a point where the number of reporters actually becomes

a problem on a story because you have too many

people there to manage, but you want a distinctive take

For example a programme of late night this analysis is different

from a breaking news story in the morning.

The demands of rolling news are different from the

Radio is different from television and so on.

But we can do better at making some of that distinctive journalism

You must have thought to a model, for example, of how many TV

reporters would be sent, presuming there is a correspondent

on location in a foreign country to supplement that for TV outlets?

We are lucky to have correspondence around the world in lots of places.

They are the starting place, and the nearest person

there is probably the expert and what we are dealing with.

We also have a lot of people who work for the non-English

language services at the BBC, but whose English is excellent

and we use them more and more on our services the UK.

Putting a model in place is really hard.

No single story is the same as any other story, so it

depends on time zones, it depends on other news

that is happening in the world, it will depend on whether it's

a story that has actually happened and is over or if it

has just happened this would move any further,

or whether it is quite a dynamic situation,

including whether it is a situation where safety is an issue.

So all those factors make it difficult to come up

Is there a danger of the BBC not being there for those landmark

Things like Newsnight which are late at night, Jeremy Paxman

being there when the Berlin Wall fell, is that the kind of thing

that is potentially under threat because of costs?

The Berlin Wall falling was one of the iconic news stories

of the last few years, last few decades.

They come around every so often and when they come around we're

going to be absolutely resource of those stories.

We may have one and a couple of weeks when the Americans vote

on the new president, that is the next big thing

I don't think I'm giving away anything too confidential to say

that Newsnight will be there, lock stock and barrel and reporting

It is a very important story, a defining story, potentially,

in the politics and diplomacy of the world.

Finally, BBC One's lunchtime bulletin included news of a freak

accident in which Harry Redknapp's wife Sandra was injured

when she was dragged along the road by a car driven

Duncan Kennedy was live at the couple's home.

Obviously a very dramatic moment for Harry and Sandra,

It was from this house that the couple went

to do their shopping trip yesterday and when this tragic

After the report that followed, a number of viewers got in touch

with us about that item, with Brian Winter describing himself

That is all from us, thank you for your comments this week.

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