Moseying

Lord Hall, Lord Patten and James Purnell wouldn't have been surprised at any time by a Times leader calling for a smaller BBC. Should they have been more surprised by a leader flowing from an essay by Roger Mosey, who, until September this year, was the BBC's first (and only ?) Editorial Director ?

There are some dangerous equations implied in the Mosey thesis. Broadly he says BBC News and BBC Radio has too much of the market; its output is too homogeneous/lefty; and top-slicing the licence fee is no bad thing. And you can see where he'd like the money to go. "[Channel 4's] prospectus for the speech-based Channel 4 Radio [shelved in October 2008] still reads as an exciting challenger to Radio 4 if it could have avoided the leftist tinge of their television service. If that couldn’t work as a commercial enterprise, might it enrich the nation if similar bids were open to funding by the licence fee?".  Mmm. Two state-funded national news and speech radio services ? How very European (which I suspect is not Roger's real intention..)

Mosey has previous on the politics of the BBC. In 2007, he expressed "some sympathies with what Janet Daley says generally about a liberal/pinko agenda". More, no doubt, later.