![]() We all pay for it, therefore all of us have a right to hear our views represented. The licence fee is a huge privilege, offering predictable income that other broadcasters or media organisations would die for but it comes with the solemn obligation to be “impartial” across all output. And BBC impartiality matters in a unique sense because, if we have a TV set, we are obliged, on pain of being fined or even imprisoned, to pay the annual BBC licence fee, currently £159. The Corporation claims that over 90 per cent of us use at least one BBC service every week and I believe that because the BBC offers highly professional content across all the main platforms – TV, radio, the internet, podcasts. Why does this matter? With respect to GB News, TalkTV and others, they are midgets compared to the BBC. The difference between us is that he appears to want a debate about GB News and TalkTV, whereas I want one about the broadcasting elephant-in-the-room. It might suit Mr Robinson’s purpose to portray me as against a debate. In fact, I have spent 25 years, when I was at the BBC and since I left it, agitating for exactly that – a proper public debate about impartiality. He said I had accused him of being “deluded” for wanting a debate on Ofcom’s rules on impartiality – which could hardly be further from the truth. Mr Robinson took exception and wrote a letter to this newspaper in which he seemed to misrepresent what I had written. I responded to Mr Robinson’s interview in a comment piece for the Telegraph in which I said that he was “deluded” if he thought the country needs a debate about GB News and TalkTV: much more important, I maintained, was to have a debate about the BBC’s “impartiality” in which I do not believe. He called for a public debate on Ofcom’s understanding of impartiality. He suggested that Ofcom, the media regulator, had surreptitiously changed the rules on impartiality so that outfits like TalkTV and GB News can broadcast stuff that Mr Robinson had always understood was forbidden. To recap: earlier this month, Mr Robinson gave an interview to the trade paper Press Gazette in which he implied that Britain was in danger of losing something precious: to wit “news we can trust”. Interviewers like Mr Robinson frequently deplore this slippery tactic, so it is no credit to him when he stoops to the same thing. You all know the tactic – faced with an awkward question, they choose to answer another one so that the interview becomes a pointless and frustrating exercise in shadow-boxing. I’ll say this for Nick Robinson: he’s clearly picked up some tips from the politicians he regularly grills on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
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