Tag Archives: Mark Thompson

Just who is the FT’s mysterious BBC Trust mole?

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Anthony Fry, BBC TrustThe Fin­an­cial Times has a trenchant cri­tique of BBC World­wide and its impact on the pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing debate.

But who exactly is the per­son ‘famil­iar with the BBC Trust’s think­ing’ that they quote? Or the lead­ing Lon­don banker? Don’t be temp­ted by the obvi­ous jig­saw iden­ti­fic­a­tion.

A per­son famil­iar with the BBC Trust’s think­ing says: “The suc­cess of World­wide has argu­ably threatened the BBC’s future more than any­thing else in recent times, by sim­ul­tan­eously provid­ing an image – pos­sibly illus­ory, pos­sibly not – of great wealth and a yard­stick, also pos­sibly illus­ory, of sup­posedly anti-competitive beha­viour.” Con­tinue read­ing →

The Trust Obsession

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CNN bills itself as the most trus­ted name in news. Director-General Mark Thompson reck­ons pub­lic trust is the life-blood of the BBC. Politi­cians and TV presenters wail and tear their clothes in pub­lic at the public’s loss of trust in the media. “Woe is us,” wails the col­lect­ive cry from the journ­al­ism pro­fes­sion, “they don’t believe.”

Media organ­isa­tions want to wal­low in trust like hip­pos in mud. They want to roll in it until they’re covered from head to toe. When it dries up, thanks to dodgy edit­ing on a royal doc­u­ment­ary promo or phoney com­pet­i­tions, the mud cracks and it’s a “crisis”. Con­tinue read­ing →

Democracy and the BBC: more preached than practised

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Oné of my favour­ite quotes on demo­cracy (dis­owned by its ori­gin­ator alas), comes from Brit­ish edu­cator Derry Han­nam:

Learn­ing about demo­cracy and cit­izen­ship in school is a bit like read­ing hol­i­day bro­chures in prison.

Why do I trawl that quote up?

Well, BBC Director-General Mark Thompson, in an inter­est­ing and wide-ranging speech address­ing the trust gap in pub­lic life, comes up with a key goal for the BBC:

to trans­form the way we con­nect Brit­ish demo­cracy – and all its many demo­cratic insti­tu­tions – to the public.

I don’t know about you, but I’m more con­cerned about Britain’s undemo­cratic insti­tu­tions. The BBC, for example.

Until the BBC takes demo­crat­ising itself ser­i­ously, I for one find it hard to take Thompson’s mes­sage seriously.

It’s a pity really. The BBC’s own gov­ernance makes a mock­ery of the val­ues it is charged with pro­mot­ing. Discuss…

And — thanks to the Tele­graph — you’ll have a chance to ask him just that this after­noon at 1530 GMT (Wed­nes­day, 16 Janu­ary, 2008) when he joins them for an online chat.