NEWSNIGHT POLICY EDITOR LEWIS GOODALL ‘SHOULD RESIGN’: An article on Guido Fawkes (20/8) called on Lewis Goodall, the BBC2 Newsnight policy editor, to resign over an article he had written for the New Statesman magazine which, it was claimed, ‘spectacularly’ breached editorial impartiality guidelines on three grounds in that it expressed strong views,. Advocated against a single policy and exhorted a change in policy. The article said that these points were:
- A claim that ’a government led by technocrats had nearly destroyed a generation of social mobility’ – which, it was claimed, was ‘a strong and controversial view’
- An attack for ‘political and moral’ reasons on the government’s use of algorithms to predict exam results
- The assertion that the exams crisis ‘demonstrates the weakness of this form of technocracy’ and was driven by Dominic Cummings.
The article also noted that the whole thrust of the article advocated a change in government policy. It noted that the BBC press office had said that a post-Hutton ban on journalists writing about political controversies had been rescinded, and had defended the article as being a piece of ‘journalistic analysis that holds to account the handling of examinations by all the political parties that govern the UK’.
JAN LEEMING: ‘I WON’T RENEW MY TV LICENCE’: Eleanor Sharples (Daily Mail 21/8) reported that former BBC newsreader Jan Leeming – who presented bulletins in the 1970s and 1980s – had said that she would not be renewing her television licence after the current one expired because the corporation now presented only a handful programmes she would want to watch.