Weekend reports stated that the BBC was undergoing a management shake-up and that the corporation planned to split the director-general's job between an editor-in-chief and a chief executive, to ease pressure on the next director-general. The reports stated that new proposals were at an "embryonic" stage.
The BBC hit back last night saying that there were no plans to split the position of editor-in-chief from that of director-general. The statement said that the director-general will continue to hold the editor-in-chief role.
"This is something on which the governors decided explicitly before advertising the post of director-general. The most important thing to the corporation is its output and as such it would be inconceivable for the person at the top of the organisation not to have overall editorial control," the BBC said in its statement.
However the roles of director-general and editor-in-chief were not combined until the 1960s when Hugh Greene, the then editor-in-chief, became director-general.
The government plans to announce the name of new chairman, who will help to select the new director-general, by the middle of next month. Favourites include former chairman of Channel 4 Michael Grade, the BBC's former vice-chairwoman Baroness Young, and broadcaster David Dimbleby.
The role became vacant during the fallout from the Hutton Report into the death of Dr David Kelly, which saw chairman Gavyn Davies and director-general Greg Dyke resign after the BBC was accused of having "defective" editorial processes.
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