Conscientious

There's an important contribution today to the debate on better ways of controlling and protecting the BBC in future, from the current Director of the BBC Trust, Alex Towers, wise beyond his years.  All worth a read, but here's my best bit, in which he challenges the view that the 180 Great Portland St Mob act as a BBC "cheerleader". ...

"In practice I think the Trust has tried to act more as the conscience of the organisation. That works well enough for a lot of the Trust’s day-to-day work and many of its current functions. But it works less well in any sort of crisis situation, when responsibilities need to be clear and decisions need to be taken quickly. In those situations, it can be a real problem that the Charter tangles up some of the functions of running the BBC with those of regulating it, and requires the Trust to try its hand at both simultaneously. 

"To be clear – I don’t blame the system itself for any of the specific things that have gone wrong. But by the time something has gone wrong, it’s not always been clear who should be stepping in to sort it out. And if that hasn’t been clear inside the BBC, the sense of confusion has been amplified when those outside have tried to evaluate, after the fact, where the mistakes were made and who should be held accountable."