Here’s the free link to Peter Hor­rock’s Oxford talk. Don’t thank me, thank the licence fee.

Actu­ally I did Hor­rocks a dis-service in my earlier post. What his talk was really about was jus­ti­fy­ing immense licence fee expendit­ure in terms of tele­vi­sion news.

It’s ironic he blogged his speech, because one of his obser­va­tions is that “the inter­net is in danger of becom­ing an enorm­ous exer­cise in preach­ing to the con­ver­ted.” Keep preach­ing, I’m not con­ver­ted. But per­haps I’m mak­ing a cat­egory error, and we are in fact both mem­bers of the small club that con­cerns itself with “journ­al­ism” (48.7 mil­lion hits on Google).

Speak­ing from my own dis­tor­ted inform­a­tion envir­on­ment (my new favour­ite expres­sion), here are some of my favour­ite bits, with trans­la­tion provided:

increas­ing shouts of bias against pub­lic broad­casters are more a reflec­tion of the dis­tor­ted inform­a­tion envir­on­ment the com­plain­ants them­selves live in. They are so con­di­tioned to their own shared per­spect­ive that they are more inclined than before to see impar­ti­al­ity as bias.

Stop complaining…

Our exper­i­ence of audi­ences is that they are remark­ably smart at think­ing for them­selves. It is often politi­cians and spe­cial interest groups that pro­ceed on the basis that the pub­lic needs to be pro­tec­ted from power­ful views.

Auntie knows best, and can pro­tect you from your pol­luted democracy!

If more people see the world only through their own prisms then the danger of lack of mutual under­stand­ing is even greater.

Per­haps some kind of care­fully seg­men­ted group­think might help…

…ima­gine if Sky, ITN and BBC all dis­ap­peared. There would prob­ably be two types of news pro­vi­sion — i) attempts to provide mass news on a low cost base through a nar­row range of sen­sa­tion­al­ist stor­ies pro­duced in a thread­bare fash­ion. And ii) spe­cial­ist inform­a­tion pro­duced by blog­gers and pres­sure groups to appeal to adher­ents of par­tic­u­lar opinions.

I’ve seen the future…cut to Charlton Heston sur­vey­ing the ruins of Wood Lane: “DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!!”

Tech­no­lo­gies that cre­ate frag­ment­a­tion could end up accen­tu­at­ing diver­gence and even hatred.

Don’t take off your ipod and chat to the per­son rock­ing slowly back and forth on the seat next to you. Watch the news instead.

the need to give ser­i­ous inform­a­tion of broad appeal is one of the most import­ant pur­poses the BBC has in the digital era – to get inform­a­tion to audi­ences who might oth­er­wise never come across it. Indeed if we fail to reach this “lost audi­ence” it is likely that they will have few sources of reput­able inform­a­tion to provide a roun­ded view of the world. Surely fail­ing to meet that oblig­a­tion would lead to a demo­cratic defi­cit – for a dis­en­gaged and dis­en­fran­chised part of soci­ety. That would be real dumb­ing down.

More stor­ies on Richard Ham­mond and politi­cians’ kids will increase voter turnout and informed decision-making. But please don’t ask for a demo­cratic BBC gov­ernance struc­ture as refusal often offends.

To an event on aca­demic free­dom in Iraq. An Iraqi psy­chi­at­rist gives a heartrend­ing account of the deaths of col­leagues and their fam­il­ies and kids. We have sev­eral Iraqi stu­dents. One of our doc­toral can­did­ates made this film for Britain’s Chan­nel 4. You can see a clip here.