for the musical of meatloaf s life. for me there is something about meatloaf. thanks very much for giving that warm tribute to meatloaf whose death was announced today at the end of the net age of 7a. how do you follow that? only one way with newswatch. hello and welcome to newswatch with me, samira ahmed. not for the first time the bbc s political coverage comes under fire for an alleged lack of balance. we asked fran unsworth, soon to lead the corporation after four years after leaving its news division about impartiality, accountability and making the most of a shrinking budget. it s been a significant week for a bbc with monday s announcement from culture secretary nadine dorries that the licence fee would be frozen for the next two years. bbc s chairman richard sharp
i think the teams now know that actually they could of avoided it by doing some kind of more considered handovers to each other on it. and we admitted it was a mistake and dealt with it. mistakes happen, they do. but i don t necessarily think there are any more of them now than when ijoined the bbc nearly a0 years ago. or if there are is probably a factor of having so much more output. after this week s announcement on the licence fee, bbc news is going to have to make more cuts, it s a tough time. is it time to just cut a whole programme or a service like say, newsnight? well, it might be something we would want to look at. obviously we are in the early stages of what this licence fee settlement means. we have planned quite carefully over the past few years. as you ve alluded in news, part of our plan, wasn tjust about taking money out it was in order to us to shape news for the future so that we could have more impact with what we were doing
under your tenure there s been a number of controversy on bbc management such as, at the revelations of martin bashir and the row over naga munchetty s comments on breakfast about donald trump. what s your biggest regret? i ve got quite a few, to be honest. hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn t it? you look back and you say oh, if only a taken a slightly decision there. i m not going to go into them here but believe me there are some things i wish i had done differently over the course of my career. it would be arrogant and blind of me not to recognise that. fran unsworth, thank you for coming on newswatch. thank you very much. and thank you for all your comments this week. if you want to share your comments on what you see, hear or read on bbc news on tv, radio, online and social media e mail newswatch. or you can find us on twitter. you can call us.
how would you answer that? we obviously don t take the view that 99% of the time were always right. and i will admit we don t always get everything right. we actually, i think, executive from news do appear on newswatch quite frequently. we checked, the big story is you re not coming on. we normally would give a statement if an existing a statement if an existing isn t available. i would also say is not the bit of accountability that the bbc has in place, of course. we have feedback on radio. and we have the most robust complaints process as well. which means that anybody can write in a complaint and get an answer to it.
very difficult for some of ourjournalists who are repeatedly subjected to online abuse of the most horrible, vicious nature, quite often. misogynistic, laura kuensberg, mari spring, i think that s what i have seen changed over the course of my career. it s interesting you say that because we do get complaints from viewers that they feel bbc politicaljournalists are often putting a personal spin on stories. i wonder if that compromises the bbc s commitment to impartiality. yes, it would do and that s why we brought out social media guidelines to remind our staff that we need to be cautious in the social media space about your insertion of your own political views and political opinions. because if we are not impartial