BBC wounds that won't heal

Abstract

The BBC’s training programme for staff after the 2007 revelations about faked winners of phone-ins and competitions was something of a fake itself, argues one of the men tasked with running the course, Keith Somerville. Now a journalism lecturer at Brunel University he was a BBC journalist for 28 years, latterly at the corporation’s College of Journalism. He contends that though the programme, Safeguarding Trust, was well constructed it was watered down and failed to question ruling editorial cultures. Now, with journalists required to be multi-media reporters, there is concern about a further decline in standards.