Jeremy Paxman - Paxman and The BBC

Paxman and The BBC

While John Birt was Director General of the BBC, the British press from time to time reported Paxman's criticism of his boss. The former, suspected at first to be an outsider brought in by a hostile government to supervise the BBC's break-up and ultimate sell-off, in turn publicly questioned the confrontational approach, as he saw it, of certain TV and radio interviewers. This was seen at the time as coded criticism of Paxman himself and of his BBC colleague John Humphrys.

On 24 August 2007 Paxman delivered the MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. In it he was critical of much of contemporary TV in Britain. He expressed concern that as a consequence of recent production scandals the medium was rapidly losing public trust. Speaking of prime minister Tony Blair's criticism of the mass media at the time he left office, Paxman asserted that often press and broadcasting may be "oppositional" in relation to the government of the day this could only benefit democracy. Those Reithian goals, to "inform, educate and entertain," still remained valid. Paxman took the opportunity to dismiss as "inaccurate" the attribution to himself, which was, in fact, Louis Heren, of the oft-quoted "Why is this lying bastard lying to me?" as the supposed dominant thought in his mind when interviewing senior politicians. He called on the television industry to rediscover a sense of purpose.

In November 2012, Paxman publicly defended George Entwistle after his resignation as Director-General of the BBC in connection with a Newsnight report which falsely implicated Lord McAlpine in the North Wales child abuse scandal. Paxman claimed Entwistle had been "brought low by cowards and incompetents" and criticised appointments of "biddable people" to the BBC in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry, as well as cuts to BBC programme budgets and bloated BBC management. Paxman's absence during the Newsnight crisis is due to work he is undertaking on another project but his absence has been criticised. For example the 'Oxford Student' noted "As viewers tuned in on Friday to watch Newsnight’s rudderless ship charter Twitter’s choppy seas, there was a noticeable absence on their television screens – Jeremy Paxman, British TV’s moralizing juggernaut, was nowhere to be seen". Oxford Student also quotes Piers Morgan as saying, “Jeremy Paxman gone MIA again tonight, as his show melts down before our very eyes? Wouldn’t want him in the trenches, would you?"