Media Brief
I'm the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on in the industry.
Labour has demanded that ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ chairman designate Lord Patten should cut back on his business activities and leave the Conservative party, . On Thursday, the peer appears before MPs tasked with ratifying his appointment to the £110,000-a-year role.
says the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's budget for foreign news is so stretched by the uprisings in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt that it is having to cut back on less pressing events - including the Oscars and the Cannes Film Festival. Fran Unsworth, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's head of newsgathering, told the in-house magazine Ariel: "We can't just say that there's not enough money to cover these stories. The way round it is to take money from somewhere else."
a row has broken out between the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and the Labour party over the corporation's use of the word "savings" to describe what senior Labour officials insists are government cuts. Labour lodged a complaint after ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ London News ran a report about NHS cuts in a bulletin broadcast after the 10 O'Clock News on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ1.
Pinewood Shepperton, the film and TV studios group, has unveiled a 31% rise in pre-tax profits to £5.8m, and said it will invest millions of pounds in British films. In 2010, Pinewood's facilities were used for the latest Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter films. But the firm has unveiled an investment plan for small-budget British films, reports the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ.
As featured in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's newspaper review the Sun says it has every sympathy with police who are about to take a pay cut - but "Labour left Britain on the brink of ruin and cuts are being made everywhere". The Times says the government has no choice but to be resilient on the question of pay. The Daily Telegraph agrees that "the time has come to reform police pay".
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