CURRENT AFFAIRS

Getting Out Alive: News, Sport and Politics at the BBC Roger Mosey; This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC Charlotte Higgins; A Place of Refuge: An Experiment in Communal Living — The Story of Windsor Hill Wood Tobias Jones; Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? Mick Hume; So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed Jon Ronson; Zero Zero Zero Robert Saviano; Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic Sam Quinones; The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria Samar Yazbek; Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution Mona Eltahawy

News, Sport and Politics at the BBC

Roger Mosey (Biteback, 336pp, £20, Oldie price £16)

This New Noise The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC

Charlotte Higgins (Guardian/ Faber, 288pp, £12.99, Oldie price £11.69)

THE BBC is yet again under attack, this time from a newly elected Conservative government determined to reduce the scope of its operations and its ‘imperialist ambitions’. According to Peter Oborne in the Independent, Chancellor George Osborne and his neoliberal backers have launched a concerted attack on Britain’s democratic public culture; they want to destroy our public space, and put it to commercial use.

For Oborne, Roger Mosey embodies the most attractive qualities of the modern BBC: its decency, classlessness and an earnest but muddled determination (often thwarted) to get things right. As a former editor of the Today programme and head of both news and sport, Mosey believes that most people in the BBC are fair-minded and that journalists have a professionalism that means they steer well clear of party political bias. But there can be a default to ‘groupthink’ — a set of assumptions that seem reasonable to everyone they know, which embraces the EU and immigration.

But Mosey also disagreed with the corporation’s reflexive defenders who resist any changes on principle: if it does not adapt and slim down from its current level of 18,000 staff, it is fatally vulnerable, said Stephen Robinson in the

Sunday Times. For Roger Lewis in the Daily Mail, the BBC comedy W1A was tantamount to being a fly-on-the-wall documentary.

Oborne admired Charlotte Higgins’s ‘beautifully written’ history of the BBC since its formation to today’s collapse of institutional self-confidence. He gave his final words to Higgins: ‘The BBC is one of a tiny number of institutions that holds us together as a nation. For all its faults it is one of the jewels of our common national life. It is time for British citizens to take sides, come out and fight for the BBC, and if necessary to man the barricades.’