The death of Professor Jason Arday, following weeks of news coverage of his life and career, has prompted calls for a new inquiry into press standards. The Cambridge University academic faced an overwhelming volume of comment from traditional news organisations – both in the UK and internationally – broadcasters, digital-native publications, and the public more widely on social media. His family have made clear that it had a catastrophic impact on his life. I should underline from the start that I have enormous sympathy for what Professor Arday went through, and my thoughts are with his family and friends.

Given the demands from some politicians and pressure groups for a public inquiry into the press’s actions in reporting on Professor Arday, I think it is worth looking at how the newspapers covered the emergence of the plagiarism allegations against him, the claims he made about his life and career, his resignation from Cambridge, his death and the reaction to it.

Methodology

There is a lot of potential material to consider, and a variety of approaches could be employed. In this blog, I have looked at substantive articles published in the print editions of national newspapers. I haven’t included articles published solely on newspaper websites, nor newspapers’ social media or multimedia output. Nor have I analysed broadcaster or social media output. There is a vast amount of other content that could, and no doubt will in due course, be considered. However, given that pressure is growing for an inquiry into the press, I think it is sensible to begin with the print editions, which remain a core driver of newspapers’ newsgathering and commissioning processes.

I have looked at the number and type of articles published, and the key themes that they engaged with. I haven’t conducted a close textual reading, rather categorising the overarching themes of an article. I have only considered substantive articles produced by a LexisNexis search from 25^th July, the day the plagiarism allegations were first reported, until 20^th August. Where a story was repeated in different editions of the newspapers, I disregarded duplicates, and I discounted letters to the editor, puffs or indexes, as well as passing references in articles that were primarily about something else. I wanted to focus on articles that were chiefly about Professor Arday, his work, or the fallout from the events of the past month. That said, I don’t disregard the impact that all of these additional pieces of output may have had on Professor Arday – they contributed to the intense volume of content that has been created during these weeks.

Findings

The LexisNexis results produced a result of 553 articles from 14 publications, reproduced below in table one. Cleaning the data produced a final corpus of 242 articles for consideration. The Times produced the most articles, 53 from the daily edition and a further eight from the Sunday Times.

Table 1- LexisNexis results for articles containing the keywords “Jason Arday”

The data about the articles, the date of publication, the type of article, and its themes were coded by hand; the figures below were created using Claude to visualise the data.

As figure one demonstrates, there were two peaks in coverage: after Professor Arday resigned from Cambridge on the 5^th of August and following his death on the 14^th of August.

Figure 1 - Article publication by publisher and date

The plagiarism allegations were first reported by the Daily Telegraph, The Times and the Daily Mail on July 25^th. The Times and the Daily Telegraph continue to report the story regularly from the last days of July, with other newspapers starting to publish around the time of Professor Arday’s resignation. In the days that followed, a significant number of articles were published.

As can be seen from figure two, most of the articles are news stories about the developing situation. But there are also several opinion-led pieces, too. The Times publishes 30 news stories and 13 opinion pieces, as well as news analysis, leaders, a review of Arday’s memoir, and the only interview with the academic.

Figure 2 - Heat map demonstrating the types of articles published

The coverage begins with questions about plagiarism in his academic work, but quickly moves to consider Professor Arday’s wider claims about his life, pegged to the imminent publication of his memoir. From the very beginning, some newspapers frame questions about Arday’s work in the context of Cambridge’s efforts to diversify its academic workforce. The Daily Telegraph’s first story is headlined “Cambridge diversity pin-up in plagiarism row”. This sets the tone for much of the subsequent reporting. Figure three shows the key themes that emerge from the dataset of articles.

Figure 3 - most common themes from Arday coverage

From relatively early on, concerns are raised about the amount of reporting and comment the story is generating through both the press and social media. The Times journalist Giles Coren writes about Arday twice in his columns on the 1^st and 11^th of August. On both occasions, he raises questions about the volume and impact of the coverage. Coren has subsequently been criticised for his choice of language – he referred to everyone “slaughtering” Arday – but he is clearly critical of the way the story is being covered.

Figure 4 shows how the focus in the reporting changes over time, with the initial phase of the story peaking following Arday’s resignation, and a later peak connected to coverage of his death and the reaction to it.

Figure 4 - How the reporting’s focus shifted over time

Finally, there is the question of the proportionality of the coverage. To what extent were newspapers dealing with questions of legitimate public interest, rather than pursuing a story that had captured a degree of public enthusiasm, with consequent financial benefits to their publications?

While it is true that allegations of run-of-the-mill academic misconduct seem unlikely to interest journalists, it is also true that Professor Arday was an emerging public intellectual. His media appearances – including on BBC Question Time and guest editing Radio 4’s Today – plus the publication of a mainstream commercial memoir featuring a range of extraordinary claims, meant he inevitably had a higher profile than his peers. Many of the news stories in the sample do attempt to answer questions that are legitimate to ask.

On the other hand, some people have expressed the view that the coverage was motivated by racism from the start – Lord Woolley referred to it as “hounding him to death”. Framing associated with race is present throughout the sample, and some articles explicitly accuse Cambridge of only appointing Professor Arday because of the colour of his skin, for example The Sun’s Julia Hartley-Brewer’s article of 7^th August headlined, “Prof hasn’t been hounded from job because he is black...it looks like he only got the job because he is black”. There is no question that some journalists, opinion columnists in particular, viewed this story through the lens of wider battles over culture. Was it proportionate? I hope editors will reflect on that at some length. But as I pointed out at the beginning, the newspaper coverage is only a part of the volume of content created. All of those who’ve contributed to the firehose of comment need to reflect on their part in it.

The victim in all of this is unquestionably Professor Arday. There may have been questions that he needed to answer about his life and work. But the penalty he paid for being caught at the heart of this firestorm was out of all proportion to any offence he may have committed.

Following the long-expected news that Sky is buying ITV’s broadcast division, some details have begun to emerge about what it means for television news produced by Sky, ITV, and ITN.

Sky maintains that national news will remain editorially distinct until 2030, as ITV has a contract with ITN to supply ITV network news, Good Morning Britain, and ITV London until then. There’s no break clause in the contract, so there is no financial benefit in ending it early.

ITV’s current licence runs until 2034, as do its public service commitments to produce regional news and current affairs. What happens beyond 2034 is hard to predict at this stage. The government is currently consulting on plans to end traditional terrestrial television signals between 2034 and 2044. That could mean the end of what we think of as public service broadcasting within a decade – but anyone who remembers the palaver of the digital switchover will recall how sticky the old technology was. I would not be surprised if there was still value for Sky in keeping channel 3 on TVs into the 2040s.

What does all this mean for the TV news operations at Sky and ITN? Being editorially distinct is an interesting formulation. It could mean no changes at all, or it could mean significant off-screen changes while the on-air products remain the same. My guess is the latter. As I’ve written before, Sky/ITV will now be spending north of £200 million a year on news. That’s ripe for consolidation and cost-saving, even if editorial distinctiveness remains. And that means job losses and tough times in TV news.

So here is a modest proposal: Sky should hand ITN the contract to produce Sky News.

At the moment, Sky News is a very expensive service – costing around £120 million a year to produce. When Comcast bought Sky in 2018, it guaranteed Sky News’s budget until 2028. But insiders already expected significant cost savings once that deal expires, alongside Sky’s growing efforts to raise new revenues from news products.

Why not contract ITN to produce ITV national news and Sky News as editorially distinct services that share common facilities, as ITV News, Channel 4 News and 5 News already do? If Sky asked ITN to produce both services for, say, £100m a year, it would realise significant savings and hand over the task of achieving efficiencies to ITN, which is well placed to make them. It would also help secure ITN’s medium-term future, a company in which Sky will now be a 20% shareholder.

And with the future of linear broadcasting in doubt by the mid-2030s, it would also make life much simpler if Sky decided to end its commitment to news at that point. It could simply end the contract and walk away – leaving ITN holding the baby for service closure.

The news today that Comcast will split into two, with NBCUniversal spinning off as an independent company, raises several interesting questions.

NBCUniversal will also oversee Sky, which is in advanced negotiations with ITV to acquire its broadcast division. If the purchase goes ahead, the new company will acquire a 40% stake in ITN, the producer of Channel 4 News.

Recent media deals in the States have seen Donald Trump’s allies prove themselves keen to acquire large media properties and, in the case of the Ellisons and CBS, to act as interventionist owners. NBCUniversal could prove another tempting target for wealthy MAGA supporters.

And that could mean the ultimate ownership of the company that produces public service news for all the British commercial PSBs being tied to Trump’s MAGA movement.

Of course, I am being slightly provocative here. ITN’s programme is made to Channel 4’s requirements, and there’s no reason to suspect they want anything other than a high-quality, impartial, if somewhat ‘liberal’, news programme.

But it is something the government might consider when deciding whether to support Sky’s takeover of ITN. Currently, the CMA and Ofcom are likely to be asked to report on the acquisition plans. Come the autumn, the DCMS may have to take a view on whether it is actually in the public interest.

Spend any time talking with someone who’s sceptical about the value of the BBC, and it won’t be long before you hear the familiar refrain, “Why do they waste money on this rubbish? They could cut that for a start”

What the rubbish exactly is changes depending on the age, interests and demographic of the complainant. But the BBC are going to have to work out what the rubbish is and how they sell the cuts to audiences.

I recently met with a former BBC board member who thought BBC Radio 2 should close; another former executive thought all BBC TV channels other than BBC1 should be axed. Radical thoughts are being had, and probably have to be had, to achieve the scale of saving being proposed.

The BBC has tried and failed to close services before – 6 Music dads managed to see off plans to close it in 2010. The BBC singers won a reprieve in 2024 after a noisy arts world campaign. BBC Three was sent to live online only in 2016 before being resurrected on TV in 2022.

The trouble is that the component parts of the BBC are loved by someone, even if everyone agrees that the whole thing is too big and could be cut back. That’s the point of universalism – you pay in, and you get something out.

I think that’s a good principle. But maybe we’re reaching the end of its sustainability. Interim Director General and man left holding this particular baby, Rhodri Talfan Davies, was clear that the BBC can’t continue to be a service used weekly by 94% of households but only paid for by 80% of them.

And today’s news of cuts is probably a good indicator of what’s happening beneath the radar in the Charter renewal discussions. Would the BBC be making them if it expected new revenue streams and increased cash flow? It seems more likely they’re an indicator that the Licence Fee will stay in place for another decade and face continued freezes.

Can everyone agree what’s rubbish and what’s got to go? Unlikely, I think. Expect some vociferous campaigns against the cuts to mark the early months of new boy Matt Brittin’s tenure at the top.

Sky News usually struggles a bit at the Royal Television Society’s Journalism awards.

Yes, they’ve got a lock on News Channel of the Year - but they generally struggle to secure recognition in the big categories.

Not so this year.

Sky News nailed five wins with Yalda Hakim winning Presenter of the Year and Yousra Elbagir taking home Network Television Journalist of the Year. The citations made clear the juries were impressed by the broadcaster’s smart foreign reporting.

It prompted a series of shout-outs from the stage to Tim Singleton - the channel’s hard-charging head of international news.

It may go some way to smoothing ruffled feathers at Sky, which had been threatening to boycott the awards in protest at what they saw as unfair juries dominated by executives from the BBC and ITN.

Channel 4 News once again won News Programme of the Year - for the third year in a row. And Lindsey Hilsum was a deserving winner of the Outstanding Contribution Award. Hers was one of several acceptance speeches recorded on location, with many international reporters deployed to cover the Iran war.

It is important not to read too much into the awards in any given year. But both the BBC and ITV will be disappointed that the main bulletins didn’t do better. Although the BBC’s blushes were spared by two awards for Panorama’s undercover investigation into the Metropolitan Police. A morale booster in the face of the Trump lawsuit. ITV can also be proud of its performance in the Nations and Regions awards.

But the loudest applause of the night went to the BBC’s Russia Editor, Steve Rosenberg, who was recognised with a special award for his outstanding reporting from Moscow. The video introduction included a clip of him being memorably denounced by Russian state television as a “defecating squirrel”. That’s certainly one for the CV.

A great little scoop for The Times today with news that former Google boss Matt Brittin may be a leading candidate to be the next Director General of the BBC.

Brittin was formerly Google’s President in Europe and the Middle East, and a man so wealthy that he famously pretended he couldn’t remember how much he got paid when giving evidence to Parliament.

It tells you a lot about how the process to find Davie’s replacement is going that someone is choosing to fly a kite for Brittin.

Badly.

If you are a high-flying media executive, this is the job that you do not want. It is poorly paid (by comparison with other similar roles), a punchbag for the government, a punchbag for the press, and has nowhere near the same power to drive change as you would have in a commercial organisation.

On the other hand, all your staff will hate you.

The leaks coming from the selection process suggest that many of the widely tipped candidates - Apple’s Jay Hunt, Alex Mahon, formerly of Channel 4, and RTE’s Kevin Bakhurst – all seem to have withdrawn.

And yet, whoever gets the job this time will have a unique opportunity to reshape the BBC as a public service media giant for the next 20-30 years.

Or if they bungle it, consign it to the scrapheap of history.

The idea of bringing in a tech boss to run the BBC is almost certain to raise eyebrows. But what’s the biggest challenge facing the BBC at the moment? It is clearly navigating the end of linear broadcasting and creating a media organisation that can thrive digitally while delivering on its historic mission to inform, educate and entertain.

It makes a lot of sense to bring in someone who understands the digital landscape, has led innovative digital organisations, and has the network of contacts to support a major change to the BBC’s platforms and modes of delivery.

And while Brittin may lack experience in public service broadcasting, his background as a non-executive director of The Guardian suggests he is engaged with the media and its strategic woes.

But here’s the thing. It is always News that does for DGs.

You have to go back to John Birt to find one who was not either forced from office or finished his tenure under a cloud because of a crisis in the News division.

It was frequently suggested that Davie’s weakness was that he wasn’t a journalist and thus did not have acute enough antennae when bad news began to break, but he did at least have a solid background at the BBC.

It may be feasible to have a Deputy Director General with a solid news background who can absorb the incoming flak, allowing the DG to rise above the fray and focus on strategy. Indeed, the incoming interim DG, Rhodri Talfan Davies, might be just such a person.

But doesn’t it sound like the board couldn’t find the right person to do it all?

Scoops aside, I think this saga still has a way to run.

In this quiet period between Christmas and the New Year, a journal has published my final article of the year - an examination of 10 years' worth of guests on Question Time.

If you can’t access academic journals, this article from The Conversation was a work in progress that examined nine years’ worth of guests.

The findings are similar:

1. While the Conservatives and Labour Party were broadly equally represented, there were big differences between the other parties. The way the producers filled the third political seat tended to benefit the SNP and penalise the Greens and the Farage-led parties.

2. Claims that Nigel Farage is on all the time are not borne out in the sample period 2014-2024. In fact, in this period, he was a less frequent guest than the former Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas.

3. The producers aim to feature a range of voices from British civil society, including academics, sportspeople, and people working in the creative industries. But the largest single group are business leaders, which far outweighs, for example, trade union leaders.

4. It is not easy to appear on Question Time, and some of the best performers are opinionated journalists. The most frequently appearing guests over the course of the decade were journalists, many of them on the right, and writers for the political magazine The Spectator.

As I argue in the article, there is a tension between the public service remit of the BBC’s journalism and the need to produce an entertaining programme for the mass-market channel, BBC1. There is sometimes too much heat and too little light. But some of the best performers on the programme are journalists who are unafraid to express controversial opinions and argue their corner. It’s the reason why people such as Isabel Oakeshott and Julia Hartley Brewer are so often booked. But the table demonstrating the frequency of some appearances should raise questions about whether the BBC is relying on too small a group of pundits:

Lots more data in the article itself - plenty to dig into.

December is traditionally the month of media predictions for the next 12 months. Who will be defenestrated from political life? What will people be wearing on the beach next summer? And in my field, how will news change next year? Every year, the Nieman lab publishes its predictions, and while some of them are sharp, they usually contain more questionable claims, like this is the year that local news succeeds, that the battle over journalism’s ethics and practices is finally won, and that we are all finally converted to vertical video.

The trouble for sages who predict seismic change in just a few weeks or months is that everyone can check whether they were right. And change is often a process that takes longer than early adopters tend to think. So, inspired by a CJR article looking at the same idea, I thought I’d give myself a long enough lead time to avoid being proved quickly wrong and to see the tectonic plates move.

As all good sci-fi writers know, to write about the future, you need to start by looking at the past. To imagine how the news of 2050 might look, let’s consider the news of the year 2000 and how it compares with today.

Back in the year 2000, broadcasting and newspapers were still the main ways in which people got their news. The main bulletins on the public service broadcasters, BBC, ITV, Channels 4 and 5, had been joined by rolling news with the emergence of satellite, cable and digital television – Sky News in 1989, BBC News 24 in 1997, and the ITN News Channel in 2000. Radio too had increased its news coverage with BBC 5 Live relaunching as a news and sport station in 1994. Newspapers still luxuriated in sales running into millions – The Sun selling more than 3.5 million copies a day, even the broadsheet Daily Telegraph could shift more than a million copies per edition – today it barely sells 150,000 a day.

And yet from the perspective of 2025, one can already see that they were already in long-term decline. Audiences and circulations were tumbling; digital editions had been launched that would move centre stage in the following decades. The long-term decline in audience trust and willingness to pay for news was already underway.

There’s a perceptive quote – usually attributed to Neuromancer author, William Gibson, “The future is already here - it’s just unevenly distributed”. In late 2000, I joined the newly launched ITN News Channel as a producer. It was late to the market as a 24-hour news channel and only lasted until 2005 before the plug was pulled. But forward-thinking ITN executives had already spotted the possibility of delivering news headlines to internet-connected phones. In theory, the channel could even be streamed to a WAP-enabled phone. Whether anyone actually did this in practice is another matter – but the idea of delivering news to a digitally connected phone was, as we now know, the future of news. It had already arrived, even if not evenly distributed.

So, what does the state of the media in 2000 tell us about what we might see in 2050?

In 2000, news to phones was an extraordinary technology that did not quite work, today it’s the way in which most of us discover news, in 2050 it will be the past. My suspicion is that wearable digital devices point to the future. While the current crop of AR-enabled glasses is pretty clunky, 25 years of refinement and the incorporation of increasingly sophisticated AI may leave us with wearable devices that will be able to deliver personalised news and information on command. It may not be quite the dream of Captain Picard’s badge communicator, but it may not be far removed from it.

Artificial intelligence is the latest trend to explode across the media. This one is set to stay the course, just as websites did in 2000, and by 2050, its use in the production and delivery of media will be everywhere. The ethical concerns that have slowed its uptake in news won’t have completely disappeared, but the guardrails that will be established in the next few years will mean AI video won’t be used deceptively, but it will be used to explain stories in a stylised manner – like this Netflix explainer. AI won’t be doing on-the-ground newsgathering. But its use in OSINT, parsing public data, and creating personalised stories will be routine.

Of course, comparing today to 25 years ago also reminds us how slowly some things change too. The BBC is still here; most of the national newspapers are still here; we still go to the cinema, the football, the theatre, and the opera. Media formats can be much stickier than people imagine. When I was working for The Times in 2008, News International established a new £350m printing facility in Broxbourne to be paid for over 25 years. Those of us working on the website were incredulous that Rupert Murdoch was throwing away his money, given that newspapers were certain to be obsolete within a couple of years. 17 years later, the presses are still rolling, even if printing fewer daily copies.

By 2050, I think we can be certain that newspapers will finally be digital-only. But the main national brands, The Times, The Telegraph, and The Mail, will continue. They might be shadows of their former selves – after all, they already are – but they will still be a source of news for many readers. The BBC too will still be with us. 25 years from now, its charter will have been renewed twice more after a deal is completed next year. I do think the Licence Fee will have gone by then, but probably only just. It will definitely remain in 2027; it may well continue after 2037, although I think some of the arguments about universal access will become more difficult to make at this point. By 2047, the BBC will deliver some form of personalised public service media direct to consumers as the old linear channel, BBC1, is finally phased out. Radio too will continue. 25 years is far too soon to see the end of BBC Radio 3 or 4. I suspect people will still be starting the day with the Today programme at the end of century.

So, some predictions for how news might change and how it might remain similar by mid-century. Please do check back in 25 years to see whether I was anywhere close to being right.

Since the emergence of Twitter as a forum for discussion of UK politics back before the 2010 General Election, barely a day seems to have passed without someone moaning about the BBC’s political editor. Nick Robinson was lambasted as a Tory. Laura Kuenssberg was lambasted as a Tory, and there was a deeply unpleasant undertone of misogyny in much of the criticism of her reporting. And now Chris Mason is being lambasted as… well, a Tory sometimes, but also a bit lightweight, a bit cartoonish, somehow not serious enough for the job.

There’s often a tendency among those complaining about the BBC’s reporting to look back at John Cole’s time as the BBC’s Political Editor. From 1981 to 1992, Cole was a regular on-screen offering analysis of the latest political developments. The critics remember him for his trusted, impartial reporting. But Cole essentially pioneered the role of the modern political editor. His strong work ethic meant he appeared first thing in the morning on Radio 4’s Today and still worked into the late evening on the TV news bulletins, providing analysis based on a deep understanding of Westminster and political affairs. His earlier career in newspapers meant he had a broad professional hinterland, but his BBC reporting focused on the details of political life, power, and who held it — just as TV political editors do today. Some of those recalling Cole as a magisterial and rigidly impartial figure seem to have forgotten his catchphrase and the title of his memoirs, “As it seemed to me…” The analysis of political success and failure was a core part of his journalism.

Much of the criticism of the BBC’s political editors seems to me to conflate two issues. The first is something that I have a great deal of sympathy with: that political news is too often viewed through the prism of the Westminster Village.

The accusation is that once a political correspondent is assigned a story, its construction will always prioritise the Westminster gossip’s view of the issues, rather than foregrounding the policy considerations and their impact on voters. I think this is a solid criticism of political broadcast news, and it can be traced directly back to John Birt’s critique of the “bias against understanding”. Indeed, it is one of the reasons behind the proliferation of specialist editors – to try and drive a deeper understanding of policy and its impacts. But it is still too easy for producers to feel that a political story needs a political correspondent talking about politics and personality, not policy and its trade-offs.

The other criticism is that the BBC’s political editors don’t provide enough depth of analysis, are too lightweight in their presentation, and their comments amount to mere editorialising. I have less time for this – I believe it fundamentally misunderstands the role of a broadcast news political editor.

The BBC’s political editors reach a mass audience of millions, most of whom have little time or interest in the detail of political stories. It is the role of the political editor to offer context and analysis, to highlight what is most important for viewers in a minute or perhaps 90 seconds of broadcasting. That it is not sufficiently detailed for those obsessed with political news or rigorous enough for academics is a feature, not a bug. When Chris Mason speaks to around three million viewers on the Six O’Clock News, he must make it impartial, engaging, rigorous, interesting, original, and understandable to people with very different backgrounds and interests, while never underestimating their intelligence or overestimating their knowledge. It’s a difficult balance to maintain, and he is well paid to do so.

Of course, mistakes will happen. The pressures of always-on broadcasting, social media and writing stories for wildly different audiences mean that problems will emerge. The punch that never happened, for example, or a piece on the tone of an event that veers too far towards sketch than analysis. Maintaining standards of accuracy, impartiality, and fairness is important. And as I have written before, I think the BBC can do more to differentiate its digital content. But to dismiss the work of the political editors out of hand is to underestimate the challenge that broadcasting about political news presents, and the consistent quality of the work they produce.

Chief among them is the ITV News contract to supply national and international news to the biggest of the three commercial PSBs, as well as the local ITV News London service. ITN in total turned over a little more than £150m last year, the bulk of it coming from news production for ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5. News production was worth about £113m in total, which equates, very roughly, to an ITV news contract worth around £50-£55m, Channel 4 £30-35m and Channel 5 £10-12m a year, with specials and additional projects, such as election coverage, making up the rest.

Last year, the company made less than £800,000 in profit, partly because it continues to service an extremely expensive legacy pension scheme that has been £100m underwater for a couple of decades.

You can see why any change to the ITV News contract could be fatal to the company; it would put a third of its total income at risk. So, with news that Comcast is interested in buying ITN’s owner, ITV’s broadcast business, there’s not unreasonable disquiet in the company – as reported in this week’s Private Eye.

Industry observers have noted that should Comcast – the current owner of Sky – buy ITV, it would be spending somewhere north of £200m on news across the two businesses. As well as the contract with ITN, ITV spends £70-80m on regional news and its current affairs programmes. Sky News’s budget is about £120m a year – losses are reported to be circa £70-80m. But I would suggest that it is Sky, not ITN, that finds itself in the riskiest position.

When Comcast bought Sky in 2018, it promised to continue investing in Sky News for 10 years. The end date for that commitment is coming up fast, and Sky News’s boss, David Rhodes, has been plotting a future in which the channel starts generating income through subscriptions and premium online products. Insiders also anticipate future cost-cutting beyond the Comcast pledge to bring the overall budget more in line with ITN’s costs.

But all that would be off the table if Comcast’s bid for ITV were successful, and there’s no doubt that the company would be looking for savings in news if Sky and ITV came under single ownership. It is not unreasonable to think that the government would extract guarantees around ITV’s PSB future and news provision as part of a sale, and Comcast would want the privileges that being a PSB grants ITV through prominence, crown jewel sports rights and so on.

All this could mean real difficulties for Sky News. Its future strategy and budget would be under real pressure. What would the incentive be for Comcast to continue funding it if it could point to spending on news through ITV? All points for the government to consider before regulatory approval could be agreed.

Prescott had no idea how his memo came to be leaked after he merely passed along internal BBC review findings to all the BBC board members, along with Ofcom and the DCMS. How could this veteran political communications expert and former political editor of a national newspaper possibly have predicted that it might find its way to a newspaper hack?

The veteran PR advisor also huffed and puffed about never using the phrase institutional bias, something that The Telegraph and other publishers have spent the last two weeks discussing. Perhaps he might have used his media contacts to put them right?

Samir Shah was clear, however, that he had the unanimous backing of the BBC board, merely one working day after a member of that board had quit, citing issues with governance at the top of the organisation. Clearly, unanimity has only recently been established.

And Sir Robbie Gibb could not believe that anyone could believe that he, a life-long Conservative and former Director of Downing Street Communications for a Tory Prime Minister, might have a particular view of the world. Why, impartiality ran through him like a stick of rock.

Observers, not least those sitting on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, may not have been convinced by all this. But in the end, it is always a crisis in News that does for a BBC Director General. You have to go back to John Birt to find one who was not either forced from office or finished his tenure under a cloud because of a crisis in the News division.

And part of the reason that the job is nigh-on-impossible is that whenever there is a crisis, the BBC’s competitors in the news industry holler loudly about it, and MPs who have been the subjects of its stories take the opportunity to stick the knife in. Even joined this time by the litigious President Trump.

Even if you accept that there were editorial and management failures at the BBC, the prolonged existential crisis it is suffering is out of all proportion to the offences it committed.

The only way to bring all of this to an end is to make the BBC truly independent of government, ensure its charter and funding have longevity, and stop Ministers and MPs from demanding heads every time there is a crisis in the corporation. I’ve written before that I think the British Broadcasting Challenge have done good work on this – hopefully their thinking will inform the upcoming charter renewal, and put an end to hearings like this one.

If reports emerging this morning are true that the board blocked the BBC executive from apologising for the edited Trump speech in an episode of Panorama, it seems to me to be as clear an example of political interference in the running of the BBC as any since the forced resignation of Alasdair Milne.

The Labour government should take the opportunity presented by Charter renewal to end the current combined BBC board, which seems to have failed completely in this episode. It neither defended nor apologised for the BBC, and it appears to have actively interfered in the running of the corporation during a crucial period.

The British Broadcasting Challenge has already done some good work considering what a future structure might look like. It’s time now for DCMS to move forward on changes that will strengthen the BBC and its governance for the long term.

This morning, Radio 4 was at it again. In the bulletin at eight o’clock, the newsreader called Mamdani a radical left. I mentioned it on Blue Sky, and another journalist responded that Emma Barnett had also referred to him as a “radical leftwing Democrat” in her introduction to an interview at 8:20.

I haven’t conducted an exhaustive search, but it appears to me that only BBC Radio 4 is using the term. The website and last night’s Ten O’Clock News on BBC1 were much more measured.

What’s going on here? Is that an accurate reflection of Mamdani’s political stance? Or does it merely imitate Donald Trump’s language? He has called Mamdani a communist, which he clearly isn’t, but Trump has long expressed his desire to destroy the radical left.

According to Collins, the dictionary definition of radical left in American politics is a faction representing extreme left-wing views, often Marxist or Maoist in ideology. That clearly is not the part of the political spectrum Mamdani occupies; he describes himself as a democratic socialist – and many of his political positions would not look out of place in a European democratic socialist manifesto, including rent controls, cheaper childcare, and higher taxes to fund them. That certainly puts him on the left of the Democrats, but it’s hardly Marxist or Maoist.

And even if ‘radical left’ were a clear description of his policy agenda, using that term would still echo Trump’s language, which has been weaponised against the Democrats. On its own, it should raise questions about impartiality. It feels like a descriptor that is already coded as anti-Mamdani before many people in the UK have had a chance to understand and consider who he is and what his election represents.

The BBC should retire it, and aim for less loaded language. Leftwing and leftwinger are more than adequate shorthand descriptions for New York’s new mayor.

After a mass-casualty event, there is always an enormous appetite for information about the attack, the suspect or suspects, and their motivations. It is natural to want to know whether it is a one-off or if it is an example of those rare events where multiple attackers are intent on causing carnage.

But why does disclosing the suspect’s skin colour help inform and reassure the public? And why, during recent high-profile incidents, have the police been so quick to reveal it?

The answer lies in the febrile atmosphere of summer 2024, when some social media users whipped up public anger over the murders of three young girls at a dance class in Stockport. False rumours spread that the killer was an immigrant and that he was Muslim, prompting an attack on a mosque and widespread unrest and riots.

In the disordered information ecosystem we now live in, anonymous accounts on X.com are financially incentivised to spread rumours and lies, and political demagogues garner support by nodding towards some voters’ worst instincts about immigration and race. Former professor of politics at the University of Kent, turned GB News pundit and pollster, Matthew Goodwin, was quick to blame immigration as the news broke.

Indeed, it is possible to consider that some social media platforms are now engineered to promote political radicalisation along these lines. Look at Elon Musk’s comments about hobbits and rapists – what skin colour do you imagine the hobbits have in Elon’s fevered imagination? What colour are the rapists?

To try to quell this online disinformation, police forces have been quick to release details about the skin colour and background of suspects in high-profile cases. For example, in May, Merseyside Police was quick to say that the suspect arrested for driving a car into a crowd of celebrating Liverpool fans was a middle-aged white man.

In August, the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council issued interim advice to consider disclosing the ethnicity and nationality of suspects when they are charged in high-profile or sensitive cases. The decision by British Transport Police to release information about those arrested on Saturday in line with this advice.

All of this leaves me in a dilemma. I believe that the public has a right to as much information as possible about events of this kind. I worry about recent court rulings, such as the Bloomberg Supreme Court case, which limit the public’s right to know about arrested individuals. And while racists on social media seek influence, fame, and fortune by lying about events in the public eye, I think it is right to try to prevent speculation that could cause real-world harm to people from ethnic minority communities.

And yet, there are also harms to other communities from releasing this information. There was no operational reason to do so in this case; the police made it clear from early on that this was not a terrorist attack. Does this stop online speculation about race and religion as motivating factors in violence, or does it just further fuel it?

I am not going to pretend I know the answer to this. I fear it is complicated. However, I believe we need to be honest about why such information is being released by the police in high-profile cases, and consider what that means for our political discourse. And while there is so much heated debate about the motivations of the attacker, the one person we should be thinking about is the rail worker in a critical condition in hospital after heroically trying to protect passengers. As someone who commutes daily by train, I’d rather hear a lot more about them than anyone else.

My colleagues, Stephen Cushion, Max Modell and Keighley Perkinds and I conducted one of the most comprehensive surveys to date of people’s attitudes towards broadcast impartiality in the UK. This included examining people’s news consumption habits, how well they think broadcasters scrutinise each of the main political parties, and their knowledge about one of the most high-profile policy debates over recent months - levels of net migration into the UK - particularly whether they think it has increased or decreased.

Shockingly, almost two-thirds of people—63%—wrongly thought net migration to the UK had increased compared to the previous year, according to the latest figures. Just 8% correctly identified that net migration had decreased. The highest proportion of people who thought net migration had increased are frequent consumers of GB News (84%), as opposed to frequent consumers of BBC (62%), ITV (71%), Channel 4 (51%), Channel 5 (69%), or Sky News (68%).

A narrow majority also opposed Ofcom’s current rules, which allow serving politicians to present current affairs programmes on TV and radio. Unsurprisingly, people who would vote for Reform UK if an election were held tomorrow were the only group of political voters who thought politicians should present programming (44%) more than those who did not (39%).

Ofcom have been consulting on the issue, and Nandy has become increasingly interested in its results. Our research seems to contradict previous Ofcom findings that there is little public opposition to politicians presenting current affairs programming.

You can read more about our findings here

The first is in The Conversation and examines complaints, including the Bob Vylan case at Glastonbury.

The second is a more detailed analysis of the dataset on the project’s blog.

The key point is this: the public cares deeply about impartiality, especially in regard to the BBC. Perceptions of unfairness or the BBC backing a particular position can lead to thousands of complaints. But very few of those complaints are actually upheld. As the project progresses, we’ll be seeking to understand in greater detail why audience concerns rarely lead to upheld breaches.

And that’s just the news division.

It was not my intention to write easy, knocking copy about the Beeb for social media kudos, and yet, here we are again.

After one of my recent Substacks was published, I noticed some comments in the replies that can be summarised as, “The BBC is rubbish, what does it do for the Licence Fee? It should be abolished.”

This is fundamentally wrong-headed. The BBC remains a force for good in the UK. The money spent on the public broadcaster provides enormous benefits, and I worry that if the changes I foresee in news come about, its role will become more important during the next decade, not less.

We all know that media consumption is atomising – that we can seek news and entertainment from a host of different providers, some professional, some hobbyist, some activist, some high-minded, some populist, and so on. However, the BBC remains a near-universal service, the leading UK media brand that 84% of adults use each week and 94% each month.

Even among 16-24 year olds, it’s the only traditional media brand in the list of the top ten most used news providers.

The BBC still produces programmes that can unite the nation, from Strictly to Rebus, live sport and music, to high-end documentaries. Even today, its programmes can provide watercooler moments. Sixteen million people watched Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, and more than nineteen million viewed Gavin & Stacey: The Finale last Christmas – those are phenomenal audiences by any measure.

BBC One remains the most used news service in the UK. Despite the growth of on-demand services, around four million people sit down to watch the Six O’clock News every day. And while there are many complaints about BBC News, it remains one of the few news providers that aspires to public accountability by making detailed editorial guidelines and a rigorous complaints system publicly available.

Globally, the BBC remains the world’s most trusted international news provider, garnering a weekly audience of 453 million people. It is a soft power champion.

And that’s before you get onto regional and local news on TV, radio and digital, the domestic and international language services, BBC Parliament, BBC Education – including Bitesize – and the relationship with the Open University, and the financial impact on the creative economy of its spending.

Back in the 80s, the BBC made a promo with John Cleese based on a scene from The Life of Brian where he complains, “What has the BBC ever done for us?” Of course, the answer is a huge amount, and that’s still true today.

The reason this is important is that, globally, media freedom is in decline, as the World Press Freedom Index demonstrates. Journalism is either entirely or partially blocked in more than three-quarters of the world. For more than half the global population, press freedom is totally absent.

Disinformation and misinformation are thriving. Whether supported by state actors or opportunists seeking a quick financial return, they pose a threat to our security, health, and national cohesion.

I’ve written before about the epistemic crisis that we are currently experiencing – where even basic facts become contested, let alone opinions and projections.

As more and more news providers either fail financially or move behind paywalls to secure more reliable revenue from readers, without the free-at-the-point-of-delivery BBC, we risk losing open access to vital news and information, which is essential for maintaining an informed citizenry capable of making rational democratic decisions.

The BBC’s role in providing impartial, factual information has never been more essential. It will likely grow more important as other media outlets falter or cater to a smaller but wealthier, closed audience.

Yes, the BBC can do better, and sometimes it must do better. The critics are not always wrong. The BBC must live up to its promise of providing a universal, inclusive, impartial service, not just pay lip service to it. But we who use it, value it, and pay for it, have a duty to ensure that it has a sustainable and independent future for generations to come.

And everybody’s a critic. No one’s satisfied, and no one’s happy. It’s a thankless task, and to any current or former BBC News executives reading this, you have my sympathy.

Every week, there are repeated complaints about the BBC’s digital content. They’re wide-ranging and varied in nature. But two that come up a lot can be broadly categorised as “Why did they publish this?” and “Why is it written like that?”

Here, I think the BBC could make some structural changes that would help. The BBC News website is a brilliant and comprehensive digest of the news of the day. But it’s written to be read by everyone. News stories are submitted by news teams based in regions and nations, the network news service, and the world service. But they’re served to the reader as a single product – BBC News.

That does not make a lot of sense to audiences. Hardly a day goes by without someone on social media being sarcastic about a local news story that might be an entirely sensible piece of public service journalism for its intended audience, but looks parochial to someone in another part of the country. Just as a listener to BBC Radio Cornwall is unlikely to gain much value from a news bulletin broadcast by BBC Radio Leeds.

The BBC has long tailored and targeted its broadcasts for specific audiences, whether through geography, with local radio and regional television. Or by age, with services like Newsbeat and Newsround. Or interests like Newsnight, which caters to those more interested in depth of reporting and analysis. The BBC needs to find a way to tailor its digital news output in a similar fashion.

No commercial operator would attempt to launch a news service that encompassed both mid-market and broadsheet news, as well as local, national, and international news, and serve it in exactly the same manner to its readers. It would develop different products based on its users’ interests and preferences.

This would also address some of the complaints about the way stories are written. In the UK, 7.1 million adults read at, or below, the level of an average 9-year-old; that is a significant audience that the BBC has a duty to cater for. At the same time, around one-third of the adult population holds a degree. The same BBC products have to cater for those too. Getting the pitch right – clear, accessible information written in a simple but unpatronising fashion – is tough. And it’s tediously common on social media to see complaints from people who are experts in a field arguing that a piece written for the general public, who may be encountering a subject for the first time, doesn’t have sufficient depth or nuance.

There would be second-order effects, too. Publishers and academics are increasingly concerned about news avoidance. But I would argue that the phenomenon of news avoidance is, at its heart, a product problem. If you only serve boiled potatoes to your customers, don’t be surprised that they all disappear off to the social media sweetshop for something tasty to snack on.

And a BBC that published BBC local news for local people, BBC impartial mid-market, BBC detailed policy analysis, and BBC verify the facts and objective truth, and many more, with clear branding and positioning would give audiences a clearer sense of what they should expect.

Now there are reasons why the BBC doesn’t tend to segment its digital news for different audiences. Some of it is about cost – and the BBC has faced an unprecedented squeeze on its resources since 2010 – but there is also an argument that it risks undercutting the principle of universalism. That all audiences get something from the BBC. It would be wrong to dismiss either of these out of hand, but as the BBC goes into what is likely to be an extremely difficult charter renewal, the corporation needs to renew its sense of mission – and that means providing digital news that users value just as much as they have traditionally valued the broadcast products.

I won't spend much time on the piece. It’s a campaigning article, and anything that ends, “what a tale, what a teller. Cry God for Harry, England, and Lucy Connolly”, should be given no more respect than it deserves. Connolly has repeatedly been found by the courts to lack credibility and demonstrate a lack of reflection or insight into her actions.

What I think is more troubling is the BBC’s overnight online write-up of the story. Headlined “Lucy Connolly says she was political prisoner over Southport post”, the BBC’s story gave a relatively uncritical rendering of her interview with The Telegraph.

While the headline was later updated to “Woman jailed for race hate post says she was political prisoner”, the original has continued to circulate on social media.

The story was flawed in a number of ways:

· There wasn’t sufficient scepticism in the headline or the piece regarding her claims, giving the impression that the BBC accepted their validity.

· There was no attempt to balance out her extraordinary claims, either through providing another voice to challenge them or acknowledging that the courts had already dismissed some of her claims during her appeal.

· It included a quote in the opening paragraph saying Connolly was “Sir Keir Starmer’s political prisoner”, which she didn’t actually say. She did agree enthusiastically to this proposition when it was put to her by Pearson, and that’s fine for a line in The Telegraph story, but this misled BBC readers by implying those were her actual words.

It is standard practice for newsrooms to rewrite stories from other publications for their own audiences, and the BBC frequently does so with newspaper splashes. A recent finding by the press regulator IPSO highlights the dangers. It found against the Daily Mail after it rewrote a Telegraph splash claiming that one in twelve Londoners is an illegal immigrant. IPSO rightly rejected the Mail’s defence that it had copied the stat in good faith, as it expected The Telegraph to have checked it was true (it hadn’t).

Media reform campaigners have long argued that the BBC’s tendency to follow up newspaper stories – intermedia agenda-setting in academic parlance - is a threat to its impartiality. A comprehensive study conducted during the 2015 General Election by some of my colleagues at Cardiff University found that, while there was no deliberate political bias among broadcasters, the tendency to rely on stories from a predominantly right-wing press risked compromising broadcast journalists’ ability to make impartial judgements about news selection.

I tend to agree with my colleagues on this and find some of the social media criticism of the BBC’s news values a bit overheated. However, I believe this is an instance where the criticism is justified. There was no need to publish this article hastily. Waiting until it could be better contextualised and Connolly’s claims properly analysed would have been wiser. This is especially true given the ongoing protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, and when even normally sensible press outlets like The Times are publishing stories that seem to fuel the flames of anger.

I also think the BBC needs to do far more to make clear where post-publication updates have been made to a story. Most digital publishers will include a note of an update to a story or headline; at the very least, the BBC should do the same.

This is yet another example of how blurred the boundaries of journalism have become in the digital age, highlighting the urgent need to restore trust, transparency, and accountability in news. These are precisely the issues I am examining with my JOMEC colleagues, Stephen Cushion, Keighley Perkins, and Maxwell Modell, as part of the 'Enhancing the Impartiality of Political News' project – more updates on this soon.

For example, back at the end of July, the paper published a front-page splash claiming one-in-eight prisoners is foreign, confusing foreign-born citizens with foreigners and eliding small boat asylum seekers with wider immigration.

The confusion over 'foreigner' and 'foreign-born' might seem technical, but as Oxford professor Ben Ansell pointed out, there are plenty of people born outside the UK who are British, not least himself and the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Accuracy is vital in good journalism, and so is scepticism about sources’ predictions.

The Times has written repeatedly, warning about the disaster that could result from placing VAT on private school fees. It warned of school closures and a state system creaking under the strain of an exodus of private students. We now know what happened last year, as education policy expert Sam Freedman writes: private school pupil numbers decreased by 1.85% from approximately 593,000 to 582,000. They also fell in the state sector by 0.7% due to lower birth rates. The difference between the two – a 1.15% drop – is smaller than that experienced by the private sector during the pandemic. The number of private schools actually increased from 2,421 to 2,456.

And today, The Financial Times reports that HMRC data shows that an oft-warned-of exodus of millionaires and non-doms has also turned out to be nonsense.

And it’s not just news reporting, but also the paper’s editorials, that seem off-kilter. The paper recently published a leader suggesting that X.com’s decision to restrict access to a parliamentary speech by Katie Lam was evidence of the government restricting freedom of speech, rather than reflecting Elon Musk’s social network’s inability to moderate content accurately and effectively. The following week, Danny Finkelstein published a more measured column that appeared to walk back the previous position.

The paper is publishing stories that oppose the Labour government, without sufficient focus on accuracy or scepticism regarding the vested interests of sources. These stories do not hold the government accountable for its flaws but seem to credulously campaign against its existence. Partly, I suspect this is because there are few reporters with reliable sources inside the Labour government who can accurately convey what the government is thinking and doing. With notable exceptions such as Patrick Maguire, there is little quality writing about Labour in office.

Now, more cynical readers may be thinking, “Duh, The Times is a right-wing newspaper! What do you expect?” And I get it – I understand that a paper should have a range of voices. I can even take the odd (in all senses) Lionel Shriver column in a mix that contains voices such as Finkelstein, Hugo Rifkind and Caitlin Moran. And the paper continues to publish interesting and well-considered pieces, such as this one by Fraser Nelson attacking the populist doom-mongering of social media.

However, there's an undeniable sense of a finger on the scales. Tony Gallagher is a first-rate editor who has previously edited both The Sun and The Telegraph, as well as holding a senior position at The Mail. Some of this might relate to an editor’s personal interests and biases, but the backbench should have spotted some of the accuracy errors.

Ultimately, the point is this: I subscribe to The Times. I pay good money to read the paper, and part of the deal is that I expect it to be accurate, truthful, and trustworthy. I am worried that we are approaching a similar epistemic crisis as the US, where media, social media, and even official statistics have become unreliable. If accuracy and insight are sacrificed to please particular politicians and their supporters, then I will stop subscribing. And I am sure I won’t be the only one.