Everybody is always complaining about the BBC. They can, because it belongs to us. They ought to because it always needs to be better.

The BBC has never faced larger or better resourced competitors nor more aggressive opponents on both the left and the right, and especially commercially motivated lobby groups. Yet in a period of ‘fake’ news, when politics is more angry and divisive than ever before, when both domestically and internationally the UK is anxious and uncertain, and when social media produce silos – when people only talk to others they agree with (and behave intimidatingly to those they do not agree with) the BBC may be more relevant than ever: how can it help to make us listen to each other and how can its obligation to represent us all to ourselves and each other be developed?

A report of the meeting by Clive Barrett is available to download.

Speaker biography

Dr Sian Nicholas is Reader in Modern British History at Aberystwyth University. She studied History at the University of Cambridge and Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, before completing her DPhil thesis (on the BBC’s role on the home front during the Second World War) at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Lord (Asa) Briggs, and has taught at Aberystwyth since 1992, specialising in modern British history (in particular the British home fronts in the two world wars) and the history of the mass media. Her research interests include the social role of broadcasting, the British media at war, and the institutional, personal and creative links between different mass media in the first half of the twentieth century. Her publications include The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC 1939-45 (1996) and Reconstructing the Past: History in the Mass Media 1890-2005 (ed. with Tom O’Malley and Kevin Williams, 2008). She is currently writing a history of the British press in the Second World War (with Tom O’Malley), and is project lead on the Heritage Lottery Fund-sponsored community history project “Aberystwyth at War 1914-1919: Experience, Impact, Legacy”.

Note: This lecture was originally to have been presented by Professor Jean Seaton, and we are very grateful for Dr Nicholas for stepping in at short notice

Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History, Director of a unique Foreign Office Programme – that brings together Indian and Pakistani journalists – and Director of The Orwell Foundation. This uses the work of George Orwell to give a voice to the less powerful and confront uncomfortable truths, and which runs the most prestigious prizes for political writing and journalism. She has written widely on the role of the media in conflicts, politics and a wide range of social and political history. She has been involved in policy making and discussion and is on the boards of Full Fact (the UK’s premier fact checker) and the Reuteur’s Institute. Her volume of the official History of the BBC ‘Pinkoes and Traitors: the BBC and the Nation 1974 -1987’ was published in an updated and expanded paperback in 2016. She broadcasts regularly.

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