Time was when being a journalist was pretty much de rigeur for network bosses. CBS President Howard Stringer was a news division product. NBC’s Andy Lack (for whom I once did a very great and unacknowledged favour) was a news exec. They knew politics. They had judgement.

In Britain, Mark Thompson was propelled into his very role by a journalism scandal and began his career, too, in news. He, like other journalists was trained to make calls on conflicts of interest, to think about responsibility and the law, the clash of politics and values. It’s what they do, to quote an old BBC trailer. But then journalism became old-fashioned and boring. Its ethical concerns and hand-wringing fell from favour. Oh dear…

The training journalists have long received needs to extend beyond the hallowed portals of news divisions and across all sectors if we want people to entertain us with integrity.

As Stewart Purvis writes in the Times:

with an increasingly shifting and casualised workforce, it becomes difficult to create shared corporate values at any one location.

At City University we are trying to do our best to help by running a training course that gives would-be programme-makers a grounding in broadcasting ethics before they get thrown into the hurly-burly of independent production.

But the course is being paid for not by broadcasters or producers but by students taking out loans or by their parents subsidising them.

Maybe it’s time we started reminding ourselves why a background in journalism was once the key to the executive washroom…