BBC News — “This is London”

The BBC Trust has just issued its report assess­ing “the impar­ti­al­ity of the BBC’s net­work news and fac­tual cov­er­age of the four nations of the United King­dom.” (Yes, North­ern Ire­land is — and I’m being impar­tial here — a nation.)

Well, like all reports the inter­est­ing stuff is not in always in the answer provided, but in the nature of the ques­tion asked.

Scot­land (pop. 5m), Wales (pop. 3m) and North­ern Ire­land (pop. 2m) all now have rep­res­ent­at­ive insti­tu­tions that deal with stuff like health and edu­ca­tion. Scot­land, indeed, has always had its own legal system.

All of them have some demo­cratic rep­res­ent­a­tion that would like to opt out of UK PLC. But the BBC’s main chan­nel feeds them all net­work tele­vi­sion news from Lon­don at 6pm and 10pm . They get their main national news — at 6.30pm — handed out in the same way that regions, like Lon­don (pop 6m.), get theirs.

Shouldn’t the BBC be run­ning sep­ar­ate, nation­ally pro­duced pro­grammes that take Lon­don mater­ial on issues like defence and for­eign affairs? It does exactly that on radio. But to ask that ques­tion is per­ceived to be the begin­ning of the pro­cess of unpick­ing the empire of the Brit­ish Broad­cast­ing Corporation.

Instead the Trust would like to redress the bal­ance by hear­ing from BBC man­agers on how they plan to foist Scot­tish, North­ern Irish and Welsh news on Eng­lish viewers.

It’s all very polit­ical, but not very demo­cratic. Because unlike the Scot­tish Par­lia­ment and Welsh and North­ern Irish Assem­blies, there is no rep­res­ent­at­ive input into the BBC. Its charter is with the crown, and it is presen­ted to Par­lia­ment to accept or reject without the oppor­tun­ity for MPs to change a line.

Lastly, there’s the nig­gling prob­lem for all of us media-types that people don’t neces­sar­ily rush to embrace more news. I was a guest on a BBC Radio Wales phone-in this lunch­time, and the Welsh listen­ers who made it on air didn’t seem par­tic­u­larly thrilled at the pro­spect at being super-sized with a double help­ing of Welsh news.

But IMHO, prob­lems like that are best sor­ted out not by appoin­ted com­mit­tees, polls and man­age­ment fiats. They’re best dealt with by the kind of horse-trading and deal-making we asso­ci­ate with demo­cratic politics.