OPINION: BBC hits back at Charlie Flindt column
Jeremy Hayes, rural affairs editor of BBC Radio, has written the following in response to Opinion writer Charlie Flindt’s article on the BBC’s rural coverage:
Charlie Flindt’s article (Opinion, 2 August) made me wonder what he thinks Farming Today is about. In the past few weeks we’ve looked at blowfly strike, the differences in what Welsh and English farmers get for beef slaughtered in the same abattoir, soil compaction, sugar beet crop failure and a new vaccine for foot-and-mouth.
The edition of the programme in which he appeared rounded up a comprehensive week of reporting on rural crime, which we undertook in collaboration with BBC local radio and NFU Mutual, from locations across England, taking in tractor theft, hare coursing, monument theft and farm security.
He was interviewed by our presenter, Charlotte Smith, an accomplished broadcaster on agriculture with more than 15 years’ experience of farming programmes at the BBC. To refer to her as a “Beeboidette” is casual misogyny.
One of Charlotte’s more impossible tasks this year, which won her admiration from many quarters, was to make the interminable and mysterious process of CAP reform comprehensible to the whole of our audience. Why did we do that, if it only matters to the recipients of farm subsidy? It’s because taxpayers across Europe are subbing the bill and UK listeners want to know what changes to environmental schemes might mean for the countryside and wildlife.
As the NFU tours England to raise awareness of changes in the CAP settlement and the risk of farmers losing more income through modulation, it is important for the general public to learn about the realities of the farming life. That’s why we at Farming Today prefer to avoid terms like Hagberg and OBM which might trip up a listener.
More than a million people in Britain tune in to our programmes every week. More download the programme. There are fewer than 300,000 people working on farms.
Fortunately, the many farmers, who willingly give their time to talk to us and keep us informed, understand that.
Jeremy Hayes
Rural affairs editor, BBC Radio
OPINION: BBC’s farming show should be about farming