Impartiality and the battle for broadcast

Two big kites were launched by the Sunday Times that could, should they fly, redraw the broadcasting landscape. ‘BBC critics set for top jobs in broadcasting’ its front-page headline announced.

The Prime Minister, it suggested, has offered Lord Charles Moore the chairmanship of the BBC and Paul Dacre, the chairmanship of the media regulator Ofcom. Both are former editors of newspapers of the right and neither has much love for what the BBC has become.

For some, it is simply an obscene Tory stitch-up. The former Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, was perhaps the most succinct: ‘No process. No joke. This is what an oligarchy looks like.’

Well, ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper’, to borrow the line from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, the celebrated satire of print journalism. As Peter Riddell, chair of the Commission for Public Appointments, was quick to point out:

The search for new chairs of the BBC and Ofcom, both regulated by the Commission, have not yet been launched.