Setting the agenda

The normally high-minded Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom lets slip a uncomradely journalist-to-journalist tone in its evidence to the BBC Trust on Putting Quality First. In its section on journalism, it offers these thoughts..

"..... for an organisation with such large journalistic resources, the BBC is far too heavily dependent on the news agenda set by the partisan press – this is particularly true of the Today programme, and particularly when it is presented by John Humphrys"

The Campaign is equally waspish about the quality debate.

"...one suspects that ‘quality’ is being defined here, albeit implicitly, as the opposite of ‘popular’ and hence as a way of restricting the BBC’s output to a specific type of content not supported by the market. This impression was reinforced recently by remarks made by Caroline Thomson at a Westminster Forum on Public Service Content. We would argue that quality should be maintained across all areas of a thoroughly diverse output, including popular and minority interest programmes alike. We would also stress that diversity is just as important as, and certainly more satisfactorily definable than, quality."