"Just f***ing start talking”, shouted the legendary ITN studio director Diana Edwards-Jones into the earpiece of a reticent reporter at a constituency count more than 40 years ago as she commanded general election night coverage with great panache.
The recently departed Head of Sky News was in combative mode as he outlined three recommendations to improve British broadcast journalism.
First, John Ryley said: “Broadcasters should start reporting on the Royal Family with the same rigour as they treat every [other] story on the news agenda.… They are too supine, too incurious, too compliant.
The subject of regulation was highlighted in the second session on impartiality, which heard from the executives Angelos Frangopoulos (GB News), Deborah Turness (BBC News) and Jonathan Levy (Sky News).
When he sat down in Cambridge for a discussion about the vexed question of impartiality in television news presenters, Piers Morgan was clearly still licking his wounds from his abrupt departure in 2021 from ITV’s Good Morning Britain. He was quick off the mark, offering a “hypothetical” scenario:
Talk TV and GB News are offering a shaken-up version of traditional news media – for some representing an exciting new wave of audience-focused, edgier broadcasting, with others wondering where the so-called ‘Americanisation’ of broadcasting will lead us. Join a panel of decision makers as they ask whether impartiality rules are still fit for purpose, and if the idea of due impartiality is still as important to audiences as it used to be.
