Edinburgh Peace and Justice Centre

When the editor-in-chief and Director General of the BBC goes to Downing Street and is apparently caught in flagrante with the government of the day, how can, and how does, the BBC report on the story. Mark Thompson, the DG, was photographed coming out of Downing Street with scribbles on his note-paper describing how the corporation was going to be covering the government's program of cuts.

Today, the flagship morning radio news program was instructive. First, John Humphreys made a pretty good impression of the naughty schoolboy owning up to letting off the stink-bomb in chapel. Second, he passed the story straight on to the BBC's media correspondent. There was a telling, jovial, handover: Humphreys, noting that their editor-in-chief had come out of Downing Street holding his note-pad the wrong way around (i.e. the visible way around – note the implication that transparency is wrong); the media correspondent has the same jovial tone picking up the story with the words: "people will eventually learn [to properly hide]".

The joke is about how not to get caught. If I were the headmaster, I would now double their punishment: they don't even understand what they have done wrong.

And just to be quite clear, this is what they have done wrong: one of the most powerful justifications for the existence of a very large, very broad BBC is that widespread popular support built through commercial-style programming gives the BBC the political independence that allows it to pursue the truth in the face of political pressure. (See David Elstein's brilliant take-down of the editor-in-chief's McTaggart lecture). But here we have the truth of that relationship: not content to use its power through popular support, the BBC also goes and cosies up to its ultimate paymaster, the Cabinet.

Any business man will tell you that when you are re-negotiating the contract that your business depends on, you get all over the client, at every level. The "client", in the Thompson view of things, is Britain. Getting all over us means giving special deals to the executives at the top (soft treatment on the cuts) as well as handing out so-called freebies – popular programming – to everyone else. That is how you build feel-good and run a sales campaign.

And as every business man knows, the thing most stretched in a sales campaign is the truth.

Country: 

England

City: 

London