Back in Novem­ber 2008, I was at the Sum­mit on the Global Agenda, an ambi­tious attempt by the World Eco­nomic Forum to bring aca­dem­ics, poli­cy­makers and busi­ness people together to dis­cuss some of the more inter­est­ing chal­lenges facing all of us.

And also to see if we could make any pro­pos­als that might address some of the con­cerns we shared.

My group looked at the media — well, journ­al­ism to be pre­cise. The dis­cus­sion was wide-ranging, opin­ion­ated, and almost impossible to draw into a neat and tidy bow. As any­one involved with the news media can attest, the mes­meric effects of watch­ing the col­lapse of organ­iz­a­tions, insti­tu­tions and busi­ness mod­els can be sim­ul­tan­eously ter­ri­fy­ing and para­lys­ing.

In an attempt to cut the Gor­d­ian knot of dif­fer­ing dia­gnoses, our chair Pat Mitchell, pres­id­ent of the Paley Cen­ter for Media and former Pres­id­ent and CEO of PBS, had a bold idea to drag us together. You can see her talk about it on the clip below.

The idea was for a global news net­work, aimed at report­ing prob­lems (cli­mate change, migra­tion, etc. etc.) that went bey­ond national and regional media remits. Some­thing that might hold transna­tional insti­tu­tions and cor­por­a­tions to account, that they might do what they do a little bet­ter (e.g. not waste so much donor cash) — import­ant things.

Like any bold pro­posal sketched out briefly over a couple of pages, it met with mixed enthusiasm.

Now I see it has come to the atten­tion of Cliff Kin­caid. Cliff doesn’t allow com­ments on his blog, so I couldn’t put him right on quite how much he man­ages to get wrong (includ­ing many of the people who didn’t make it to our discussions).

But to give you an idea of where Cliff is com­ing from, or per­haps from where he’s fall­ing off, his post is titled Global Tele­vi­sion For Our Future Global Leader:

Sur­prise and even shock were among the reac­tions to my recent column about how élite mem­bers of the World Eco­nomic Forum (WEF) meet­ing in Davos, Switzer­land, were con­sid­er­ing a pro­posal for a new global tele­vi­sion net­work to usher in a state of “global gov­ernance.” It soun­ded author­it­arian, even total­it­arian, to some.

I must admit to being flattered — ok, bemused — at the thought that our group of J-school deans, media own­ers and think-tankers could act as mid­wives for a global imper­ium.

But luck­ily, we have a con­fer­ence call com­ing up in a week’s time. Now I look at Cliff’s piece, I real­ise it’s time we moved on from the rather lim­ited goal of con­sid­er­ing the media to dis­cuss­ing who our new world leader will actu­ally be. Per­son­ally, I’m going to veto Per­sian cat own­ers. Aller­gies, you know.