{"id":113738,"date":"2011-07-15T14:35:29","date_gmt":"2011-07-15T09:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=113738"},"modified":"2011-07-15T14:35:29","modified_gmt":"2011-07-15T09:35:29","slug":"bbc-journalists-in-24-hour-strike-over-job-cuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2011\/07\/15\/bbc-journalists-in-24-hour-strike-over-job-cuts.html","title":{"rendered":"BBC Journalists in 24-Hour Strike Over Job Cuts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Journalists at the British Broadcasting Corp. walked off their jobs Friday to protest planned job cuts as a result of lower government funding, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/07\/16\/business\/media\/bbc-journalists-in-one-day-strike-over-job-cuts.html\"><strong><span style=\"color: #000080;\">reports The New York Times<\/span><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>About 3,000 journalists who are members of the National Union of Journalists took part in the one-day strike, which caused some disruption to the programming.<\/p>\n<p>In a statement on its web the BBC said it was \u201cdisappointed\u201d that the strike went ahead and apologized \u201cto our audience for any disruption to services.\u201d Some programs, including its flagship radio news program \u201cToday,\u201d were cut short and the BBC was forced to run repeats of old shows in Britain and on the World Service.<\/p>\n<p>The statement said that \u201cindustrial action does not alter the fact that the BBC is faced with a number of potential compulsory redundancies following significant cuts to the central government grants that support the World Service and BBC Monitoring.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The strike is the second in less than a year at the broadcaster. About 4,100 BBC journalists went on a 48-hour strike last November to protest planned cuts to pensions.<\/p>\n<p>BBC said at the beginning of this year that it would need to cut costs by \u00a33 million, or $4.8 million, over two years, following a cut of \u00a31.4 million by government funding in April 2010. It already announced 360 job cuts at its online operation and 480 jobs would be eliminated at BBC World Service. The Albanian, Macedonian and Serbian language services would be shut.<\/p>\n<p>Michelle Stanistreet, the union\u2019s general secretary, said Friday that the situation was \u201chugely frustrating for members.\u201d The union demanded that last year\u2019s decision by the government to freeze the licensing fee paid by the taxpayer for the broadcaster should be renegotiated.<\/p>\n<p>It claimed that the cuts in state funding were a result of \u201ca shabby deal done by BBC management and the government behind closed doors.\u201d It added that \u201cRupert Murdoch and News International executives were exerting huge influence on key government figures.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>News International, which effectively controls BSkyB, and other private broadcasters in Britain have long charged that the BBC\u2019s public funding gives it an unfair competitive advantage.<\/p>\n<p>The BBC press office declined to comment beyond the statement on its web site.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Journalists at the British Broadcasting Corp. walked off their jobs Friday to protest planned job cuts as a result of lower&#8230;<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":113686,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[12722,11399,11400,29791,10410],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113738"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}