Small world

Cardiff University

Here's something you might not have known - and I certainly didn't until a few days back - but a former regular on Radio 4's The Moral Maze is now the chairman of the BBC's Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board, the board responsible for developing and ensuring compliance with the BBC’s editorial guidelines. 

No, it's not David Starkey or Roger Scruton and still less Melanie Phillips. It's Prof. Ian Hargreaves, one of the programme's old left-leaning regulars. 

Now, of course, him being an "old left-leaning regular" on The Moral Maze doesn't necessarily mean that he's going to be biased in his BBC role. To believe that would be to fall for the ad hominem fallacy. So we could just leave it there...

...however, as I was reading his Wikipedia entry to make sure it really was the same Ian Hargreaves I spotted another name - that of Justin Lewis. 

I thought, "No, it can't be that Justin Lewis, surely?". But it was, and it is. 

Justin Lewis, regulars may recall, is the head of the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, which the BBC relies on for the data for its major impartiality reports. 

Past Cardiff studies have helpfully 'proved' the BBC to be basically impartial but not entirely free from pro-Right, pro-EU bias.

Prof. Lewis himself participates in these surveys, including (most recently) that fatally flawed attempt to re-'prove' that the BBC has a bit of a right-wing bias problem by assessing the corporation's coverage of think tanks that missed (probably forgot) one the UK's main (left-leaning) think tanks! 

And what, pray, is Justin Lewis's connection to Ian Hargreaves? Well, besides both of them being Cardiff University professors, Wikpedia says of Prof. Hargreaves: 

So the man whose media department produces the main impartiality findings for the BBC is the co-founder of Creative Cardiff with the current chairman of the BBC's Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board - the man who presumably receives and reviews such findings for the BBC.

And they both still work together at Cardiff University and Creative Cardiff. 

It's a small world, isn't it (for some)?