The management had 'communication problems' he claimed, and said that news needed to go 'back to basics' and free itself of too much opinion and analysis by self-important correspondents.
Sissons was speaking at a Media Society Dinner in London in his honour to an audience of 90 - just two of them from the BBC. His interviewer was a fellow recent retiree Andrew Harvey, the former editor of Ariel, the BBC internal newspaper.
The veteran journalist said that young journalists at the BBC were overworked 'poor kids working gruelling shifts' who 'lacked role models'.
'Indeed, you can count the role models in the BBC newsroom on the fingers of one finger,' he added. Bosses were remote and overpaid, he said: 'they have put public service secondary to pecuniary ambition'.
Journalists, whose moniker of 'correspondents' should revert to the more noble 'reporters,' were encouraged to have too much opinion and to speculate too much, Sissons argued.
Speaking fondly of his days at ITN, where he worked for over 20 years before moving to Channel 4 and then the BBC, he quoted his ITN Editor and mentor Sir David Nicholas, who was at the dinner along with many other former senior ITN executives. "'You might need to go to the Middlesex Hospital to get an opinionoctomy'," Nicholas told the young Sissons, he said.
"Tough bastards but you learned your journalism there," he said of ITN. Leaving in 1989 after rescuing Channel 4 News and being poached by the BBC 'for shed loads of money' had been not easy, he said.
"ITN sent me a writ accusing me of damaging the brand (...) I fell out with David Nicholas for at least two weeks over that," he said.
His last ITN Editor Stewart Purvis, now an OFCOM partner, was present at the top table. Sissons was hired by the BBC in 1989, not just to present the news, but also to take over from Sir Robin Day presenting Question Time.
Although Sissons spent five years at the programme, he lamented that he 'seemed to have been airbrushed out of Question Time History!' Day briefed him on the vagaries of the then producer. Sissons' relations with her were just a little less fraught: 'she did not want me to be there' was his opinion.
On the vexed question of ageism and the BBC director-general Mark Thompson's recent diktat to find a female presenter over 50, he was quite clear: "Admit your mistake, give Moira Stuart her job back. She was a great loss to the BBC."
Sissons has engaged in much public sniping since leaving the BBC in June. For the last four years he has presented on News 24 having been taken off the flagship 10 o'clock programme in 2005.
There could be more fireworks to come: he said he had completed three chapters of his autobiography so far, and had written 1,000 words on the day of the event.
John Mair produced the Media Society Event 'Forty-three years on screen and they give you a purple tie!' in London on September 30. He is events director for the Media Society and a senior lecturer at Coventry University.
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