Failures of judgment may not happen very often at the BBC, serious ones more rarely still, but when they do they seem to arrive in volume. Worse, in the case of Sachsgate each misjudgment seemed to reinforce the very poor public impression given by the others.

First there was the almost complete absence of anything resembling good taste or judgment by Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and their producers in the studio, which left many licence-fee payers wondering what kind of organisation they were in effect being compelled to fund….Next there was the news that senior BBC editorial executives had approved the offending material for broadcast. Having already been shocked by the antics of Ross and Brand, the licence-fee payer was then confronted with the idea that BBC managers also appeared to think this material was acceptable. For the second time in just over a year – remember Queengate? – very senior executives have either approved things without knowing what was in them or failed to understand the significance of what was in front of them. Then, to cap it all, there was the BBC’s corporate reaction to events after the story broke, when it failed to grasp that the story was more than a bit of Mail mischief-making and didn’t issue a statement apologising for the broadcast until 24 hours later. Licence-fee payers could have been forgiven for thinking that the corporation at the highest level didn’t take Ross and Brand’s behaviour as seriously as they did. Meanwhile, the BBC Trust appeared to be powerless onlookers as turmoil gripped the organisation of which they are supposed to be the sovereign body.

As Mr. Hewlett points out, those who pay for the BBC–that is, everyone in Britain who has a television–might well question whether the venerable institution is worth it, after what seems like a flood of missteps. Sachsgate as he says (although that moniker hardly seems fair, since Mr. Sachs had little to do with the situation other than to be the target of the phone calls), is the latest in a series. In particular, it focuses attention on the salaries of some of the celebrities that the BBC hires. Jonathan Ross, one of the culprits here, benefitted from an 18 million pound a year contract, and for that