Was Emily Maitlis right or wrong to offer her views on the Dominic Cummings’s row? The BBC decided she overstepped the mark. But while the corporation’s investigation was concluded within a few hours of the programme being broadcast, this isn’t a debate that will go away any time soon. And the fallout from this row makes me worry about the direction in which Britain’s broadcast media is heading.
A constant of Europe’s post-1989 ‘Velvet revolution’, which I helped cover for ITN, was the way those rising up against communism fought so hard for control of TV and radio stations. Information is power; control of it helps secure it. A number of my ITN colleagues went on to turn a shilling advising those brave souls of Berlin, Prague and Bucharest on how to create news outlets that better served the people than had the sons and heirs of Isvestia and Pravda. The central tenet of their pitch was ‘impartiality’.
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