`Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman has said that working with the BBC is like living in Stalins Russia.
London, Aug.25 : `Newsnight' presenter Jeremy Paxman has said that working with the BBC is like living in Stalin's Russia.
Paxman accused the corporation of staking its future on "one five-year plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another".
He said management initiatives such as One BBC, Making it Happen and Creative Futures all "blur into one great vacuous blur".
"I can't even recall what the current one is," The Telegraph quoted Paxman as saying during the landmark MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival.
"Rather like Stalin's Russia, they express a belief that the system will go on forever," he added.
He went on to claim that the BBC could not count on winning the licence fee again, especially in light of the recent scandal over premium-rate phone-in competitions and the furore over a wrongly edited trailer of the Queen.
He said the licence fee was in danger of being scrapped because it is an outdated concept that belonged to the 1950s.
Paxman also attacked senior broadcasting executives for allowing younger producers to take the blame for the fake phone-in competitions, saying this had undermined viewers' trust.
He said anyone found guilty of defrauding the public should face prosecution and be sacked.
He also spoke out against the BBC's current budget strategy, known in the industry as "salami slicing", in which every channel and programme suffers a limited cut in its budget to try to save two billion pounds over the next six years.
Paxman has criticised his employer before.
He recently accused the BBC of hypocrisy in reporting on the environment while engaging in "laughable" recycling practices.
He has also been outspoken about the BBC's management, criticising the cost-cutting drive by director-general Mark Thompson, and has raised an eyebrow at some of the innovations, such as podcasts.
ANI