Peter Horrocks quits the World Service with a pitch. “Let’s make the BBC’s international news utterly distinctive: different from what newspapers and other broadcast competitors in the UK are doing, which is largely seeing the world through UK eyes,” he tells the Indy. “The BBC can give people an understanding of how the world sees the world.”
So over to Ofcom, where our very British regulator – exalting “due impartiality, in particular when reporting on matters of major political controversy” – is hauling Russia Today over the coals, threatening sanctions, because of its Ukraine reporting.
But where’s understanding of the Putin view, beamed across Russia to Russians, if we deem it too partial to bother the scorers here? Why let a global assortment of news channels on air, then seek to homogenise them? You may think the RT coverage deeply flawed. I do. But I want to see Ukraine through Russian, as well as through UK, eyes.
■ Remember the piece in this column two weeks ago – the one headed “In the digital age, Fleet Street’s new mantra is better together”? Then pause as the Newspaper Society and Newspaper Publishers’ Association, ancestral representatives of regional and national papers respectively, merge to form the News Media Association (with the digital twist that name implies). Unity, unity … nothing but unity! Who knows, this week the Daily Mail may even say something kind about the Guardian …?
