The nice/odd thing about the BBC is that whenever there’s a story about the BBC, BBC reporters love doorstepping senior management.
And of course, since they work there, they tend to know where the managers are, where they are going to be and so on. Makes the reporters very hard to avoid.
And because the Beeb has to maintain a certain veneer of impartiality and accountability, managers can’t really discipline reporters for asking annoying questions or criticising management.
So oddly enough often the best place to find out about whatever the BBC has cocked up is the BBC.
I was in the in November 2001 and remember noting to some new American friends, with whom we had spent a nice day kayaking on the Youghiogheny River, that the propaganda coming out the radio reminded me of cold war communist broadcasts, and that I had the impression the government was building up to something. So it wasn’t just the …
The current guidelines clearly don’t have any “grey areas”. They are perfectly clear that people who aren’t directly in news & current affairs are able to express their own opinions. And even then, people like Andrew Neil held down senior political interviewing jobs whilst also editing a political magazine and making public statements on political issues, and he wasn’t asked to ‘step down’ from presenting roles. (A similar current example would be Matthew Syed who has a column in the Sunday Times that frequently covers political issues and yet he still presents quite a few BBC programs.)
Any tighter revision to the guidelines will likely result in the exodus of a lot of next generation people, which won’t be damaging to the BBC in the short term but will utterly destroy them in the medium term.
in November 2001 and remember noting to some new American friends, with whom we had spent a nice day kayaking on the 
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