Whos Who At The Content Board

Well first of all thank you for the link which I read, some analytical views then on your post Sooty, yes I do agree with you that obviously morals, ie minors do need protection from viewing explicit material and they are protected hence the reason we have the watershed, secondly irrespective of the licence the Babe Channels have they should be allowed to broadcast 18+ material as they are pin protected so are in effect encrypted and minors are protected so morals should no longer be an issue as all measures and restrictions are in place and this is what Ofcom fail to recognize so it is definately a breach of our human rights without question, maybe future Ofcom panels might be more understanding to the situation

Good points Sootbag and thanks for the link, but I beg to differ on interpretation. Full original wording can be found here thanks to the Hellenic Resources Network (nothing about international banking though). Emphasis is mine.

Quote:ARTICLE 10
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

So, regulation is permitted, but only so far as it is necessary. Liberty go further in Sootbags link and say "necessary and proportionate".

Simply banning something by law is not sufficient. In some countries that could mean banning cartoons of religious figures. In China Bible smuffling is illegal. And pictures of Sgt Bilko are banned in Tibet due to a striking resemblence to a living God.

Philip Graf seems to have left the Content Board, and possibly Ofcom, after 6 years. His first term at Ofcom was for 2.5 years from 1 Jan 2006. He was re-appointed for 3.5 years up to 31 Dec 2011.

He joined the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo in 1983, which became Trinity Holdings in 1985. He became Chief Executive in 1993. He subsequently became Chief Executive of the Trinity Mirror Group in 1999 when Trinity merged with the Mirror Group. He was Chief Executive of Trinity Mirror from 1999 until Feb 2003.

Lord Blackwell (Noman Blackwell) appears to have been appointed to the Content Board. He was appointed to the main Ofcom Board for 3 years from 1 Sept 2009 (until 31 Aug 2012). He has been reappointed for a second 3 year term until 31 Aug 2015. He was head of John Majors Policy Unit for 2 years, is a former partner at McKinsey & Co, and holds several directorships.

As I've previously stated if Ofcom are here to stay it's hoped that future member board members look at the babe channels in a more favourable light, this latest appointment does nothing to think that any Ofcom opinion is going to change at the present time, as I've said in another thread the break up of the United Kingdom should Scotland gain independance could be enough to throw Ofcom into chaos, I'll watch with interest to see how this all play's out

Reluctant though I am to give the Daily Rant the oxygen of publicity, here is an article about Ofcom Chief Exec Ed Richards that Mrs Eccles showed me. A lot more biographical info than in other sources. (How did they get it? Should we be told?)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...n-BBC.html

Seems he was very close to Labour before being appointed, not just a career civil servant. And bugger all broadcasting experience.

Ironically they say "Has done nothing about complaints over pre-watershed soft porn" and "Ofcom, under Richards’ stewardship, has surrendered our airwaves to the pornographers". The sidebar features Kate Upton "No need for a bikini! Kate Upton covers her chest with her hands as she poses for raunchy poolside shoot"

Daily Mail Wrote:What is particularly concerning is that Richards, a former member of Tony Blair’s policy unit — he also worked for Gordon Brown — has never had a job at the sharp end of business or programme-making.

Yet he stands, incomprehensibly, on the verge of taking over one of our most important public institutions.
His only qualification for the job is, it would appear, his tainted six-year stint at the helm of the bloated and largely toothless Labour-contrived super quango.

And it is a role which has certainly attracted controversy: his cosy relationship with his former political masters once led ex-BBC director-general Greg Dyke to describe Richards as ‘a jumped-up Millbank oik’ (after the former Labour Party headquarters).

Without doubt, his credentials as a New Labour disciple could not be more impeccable.

A graduate from the London School Of Economics, the alma mater of Cherie Blair, he first worked for Blair and Brown in the early Nineties.

Astonishingly, Richards’s apparently undistinguished period in charge of the LSE’s student rag is effectively his only experience of working directly in the media, other than a short stint at a small independent TV production company when he graduated.

After his first spell working for Labour, he was appointed to the senior, if largely pointless, role of Controller of Corporate Strategy by the then BBC boss John Birt — who Blair later appointed his ‘blue-skies thinker’.

On his return to Labour ranks as Mr Blair’s senior adviser for media, telecoms and ‘e-government’ (government information disseminated via the internet), Richards helped draft the 2001 Labour manifesto.
And, in 2003, he was pivotal in writing the Communications Act which dispensed with five separate media regulators to create the vast Ofcom, which controls everything from what we listen to on the radio, to newspaper mergers, the telecoms and postal industries, and what we watch on TV.

Having effectively neatly written his own job description, Richards joined Ofcom in 2005 and a year later was appointed chief executive (what a surprise that the man he replaced, fellow New Labour placeman Stephen Carter, later returned to Downing Street as Gordon Brown’s chief of strategy).

On Richards’s watch, complaints to Ofcom about sex, violence and political bias on TV have soared from 6,375 in 2005, to 24,633 last year. And it is instructive to learn that the quango has not removed a licence from any porn channel since November 2010.

When he took up the role, he bizarrely claimed a £3,000 relocation allowance, despite the fact Downing Street is just over two miles from Ofcom’s grand modernist offices overlooking the Thames.

A spokesman for Richards told me he had made the claim because, while working for No 10, he spent only three days a week in London and the rest working from the then family home in Wales that he shared with his partner Delyth Evans, the mother of his two children, a daughter, 16, and a 15-year-old son.

(Almost inevitably, Welsh-born Miss Evans, who is seven years older, is a fellow former Labour apparatchik who worked as an assistant to Gordon Brown in the early Nineties and, until 2003, was a Labour member of the Welsh Assembly.)

Richards also charged £650 to employ a private agency, Humphrys Education, to find his children places in a London school.

Meanwhile, he has claimed generous expenses of up to £23,376 a year, including £13,000 on oversees trips and £1,787 on ‘hospitality’.

Clearly keen to claim every last penny he could, the man who earns nearly £400,000-a-year of taxpayers’ money also once claimed a £2 credit card booking fee for a flight to Helsinki.

Considering his large salary and Ofcom’s vast remit — it is responsible for more than 250 separate regulatory duties — it would seem highly odd, then, that Richards should feel able to divide his time between a series of other directorships, too.

Among his seven different outside interests — admittedly, all but one of which are unpaid — he is a non-executive director of Thames Water — which pays £42,000 a year for his services. (His other activities broadly involve charities of various kinds.)

However, an Ofcom spokesman said the money Thames Water pays him goes directly to Ofcom.

Bear in mind that Ofcoms Content Committee exercises a kind of moral authority:

Ed Richards, Chief Executive of Ofcom has been accused of a conflict of interest over his application to become the next director general of the BBC.

Two members of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee asked why he did not step aside from issues affecting the BBC until the day after the deadline for applications.

Mr Richards is the bookies favourie and applied at the last minute despite being identified as a strong contender several months earlier.

Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley, said Ed Richards should have stepped aside from discussion of BBC matters as soon as he began preparing to apply

Ofcom refused to say when Mr Richards had agreed with Collette Bowe (Ofcom Chairman) to step aside, or when he had last been involved in discussions relating to the BBC and whether he saw a draft of Ofcom's report on media plurality.
The report largely accepted the BBCs proposals including that the corporation should not itself be a trigger for a plurality review despite supplying 47% of the news consumed by the average person. Minutes from Ofcoms board meeting on April 17, which Mr Richards attended, reveal that a paper was submitted on media plurality.

The board also received an update on Project Apple, an Ofcom investigation into whether News Corporation is "fit and proper" to be the largest shareholder in BSkyB in light of the phone hacking scandal. Mr Richards stepped aside from Project Apple on May 8 because Ofcom deemed it to be of interest to the BBC as the BBC has objected to News Corps bid.
[Summary of article in The Times dated 22 June 2012. No link due to paywall]
Ofcom head criticised over BBC application
Ofcom denies The Times' claims of potential conflict of interest with BBC, plurality

Read more: Ofcom denies The Times' claims of potential conflict of interest with BBC, plurality | News | Rapid TV News http://www.rapidtvnews.com/index.php/201...z1yl5pCxv3

Meet the newest member of the Content Committee


https://twitter.com/MASieghart/status/19...2952023040

(08-08-2014 22:23 )eccles Wrote:  Meet the newest member of the Content Committee

The previous post might have been taken as a joke. It was not. Mary Anne Sieghart has been appointed to the Content Committee. I dont know much about her, and the photo above might give the wrong impression.

What I do know is that she was deputy editor of The Times, and her broadcasting experience seems to be limited to appearing on current affairs talk shows as a guest.

She is white, middle class and has a first class degree from Oxford.

In an article reproduced on RadicalProFeminist BlogSpot (with or without her consent) she is quoted as saying "What a depressing week it has been to be female." before going on about some vile scum who had a go at the former girlfriend of mass murderer Raul Moat, as if some troll is representative of society.

"the Catholic Church elevates women's ordination to the same level of offence as child abuse. Thanks, chaps." - hmm, is it realistic to expect a rational and consistent punishment scale from a religion? Does she really expect the Catholic hierarchy to say female priests are a form of blasphemy, then apply mild punishment?

Some female TV presenters get dumped "as soon as their first wrinkle begins to show"? Has anyone commented on the basic unfairness that it is much easier for a woman with a pretty face to get on TV than it is for a bloke? Is it possible that some of the women who get dumped - a good 10 years after that first wrinkle - are actually less talented than their male copresenters who had to do a lot more than smile and tilt their heads to get and keep their jobs?

RadicalProFeminist blogspot

She complained that while on BBC2s Daily Politics show, Andrew Neil favoured male guest Danny Finkelstein with twice as many questions. The Daily Telegraph comprehensively rubbish that by pointing out that Danny is much better known, in other words she was genuinely second fiddle, in the orchestral sense of the word.
Telegraph

This does not bode well.

Back to the maid outfit. What T F was she thinking? She has a 1st from Oxford, dresses up as a sexual fantasy, then goes on to complain about being marginalised.

I would.

One of her favourite women is Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism project and a public face on This Morning campaigning for Page 3 to be banned. That doesn't augur well at all.

As regards that Everyday Sexism project there's absolutely no question that women should be able to walk down the street without being told to get their tits out. Unfortunately, the project and founder appear to see sexism everywhere, even when it doesn't exist.