Trust and money

Aunty's new governing body, the BBC Trust, has unveiled proposals to give BBC audiences greater involvement in its decision making.

This is welcome news but it remains to be seen whether such measures will have any effect in providing deprived licence-payers with they actually want. Here in Cheshire, we are well used to broken promises - witness the recent abandoning of plans to provide us with a BBC Radio Cheshire...

The BBC Trust will only earn credibility if it can ensure that people are given equality of service. It's all very well promising to listen to people's views. The real test is whether the Corporation is willing to translate that into action.

The financial breakdown of the licence fee makes interesting reading. The cost per household per month for the licence is £10.96. Of this, £0.75p goes to funding 40 local radio stations - Cestrians are paying that for county stations all over the UK except in Cheshire. And the BBC's 240-plus websites cost a mere 49p a month, yet they claim they cannot afford to provide one measly news page for Cheshire because of the recent budget cutbacks. Yet it would cost not even £0.000000001p per month to give us a Cheshire page on BBC News Online.

If you want to let the Trust know how unfairly you think you are being treated as a licence payer, get in touch with them.

This campaign will be making an official representation to the Trust, but the more individuals who make their views known too, the better.

Irresponsible data collection

Back in September, we reported that the Chester Chronicle (and other Cheshire local papers owned by the Trinity Mirror group) had revamped its website to provide daily news online, in addition to the Friday print edition. The new site offers readers the opportunity to get involved in commenting on the news - citizen journalism - which is fine until you register and discover that you have to provide not just an email address but also your full name, phone number, fax etc etc, all of which may be published on the website. Somewhat irresponsible in these days of identity theft.

Worse, all comments are withheld from publication until approved by the moderator. What is the point of encouraging people to engage with their local media if their contributions are to be positively vetted?

We had hoped that the "Cheshire Communities" initiative launched by Trinity Mirror would have provided a viable alternative to the lack of news coverage of Cheshire at the BBC, but it appears not be the case.

Back to the drawing board...

Misplaced trust

Tell us something we don't already know!

The BBC Trust has acknowledged that Aunty does not do enough for licence-payers outside London. Sadly, we are well aware of this in Cheshire, where our county does not appear on the BBC's website map of England, we have no news page there and we also have no county radio station (plans for BBC Radio Cheshire have now been axed indefinitely).

The campaign will be making official representations to the BBC Trust over these issues. Watch this space...