Ed Henning

Increasingly, changes that significantly affect the quality of our lives are driven or affected by developments in technologies. For this and other reasons I have often argued for a much better educated and more fully informed society.

How can we collectively make the right decisions - assuming we are still allowed to do this - if we do not properly understand the issues involved?

The recent controversy regarding the future of the BBC has concerned me greatly in this respect. I think the recent Elstein report identified the problem correctly; that the BBC has been dumbed down to a shadow of its former self, but the proposed solutions are completely wrong.

Whether the BBC is broken up, the licence fee scrapped or whatever, the proposals seem to all entail accepting this downgraded version, rather than forcing a return to the old values and standards.

My main concern here is with news and related programmes; the idea that the BBC should dumb down to the level of other media or TV channels is crazy.

For the BBC to concern itself with ratings compared to the other commercial channels is rather like the Financial Times worrying that it is outsold massively by the The Sun.

It should be the other way around. The commercial channels should have to worry that high-quality broadcasting might eat into their ratings, thereby providing pressure against the trend towards ever more rubbish.

So what if fewer people watched the BBC? It would have a positive influence on all other media in this country, providing as it once did a yardstick against which others are judged. That would be true value for money from the licence fee.

Newsnight seems to be the only decent news programme left, and even this does not handle technology issues properly. The appalling quality of the other BBC news programmes must have the Newsnight team feeling like they are clinging to the top of the mast of a rapidly sinking ship.

Are they next for what must be the highly embarrassing training courses on which other BBC news presenters are taught those bizarre hand gestures we see? Who are the simpletons who dream up this stuff? Send them to work on Channel 5.

The earliest example I can remember of poor BBC treatment of a technology issue was a few years ago when Jeremy Paxman interviewed somebody senior from Microsoft about the Department of Justice case.

Paxman, so good when dealing with political issues, was totally out of his depth. He clearly did not understand the issues and didn't ask the right questions.

Somebody else should have conducted the interview. Most of our general media seem to handle technology issues in just this way, and there are plenty of examples.

There was a recent report about some Windows source code appearing on the internet and how this was such a risk to security. Nobody seemed to make the obvious point that an operating system said by many to be much more secure than Windows - Linux - only survives by having its source code permanently on the internet.

Far more important technology issues are dealt with equally badly. The debate about GM foods is one example. We have recently been told that there is no 'scientific case' for not planting these crops.

This is simply a lie that goes unchallenged in the media. Remember Thalidomide? There was no proof that it was dangerous before it was released to the UK public, no 'scientific case'.

In the US they took the right approach; as there was no proof that it was safe, it was not released. Proof of safety and lack of proof of danger are not the same thing.

When scientists and politicians lie and deceive like this so much of the time, you have to assume they have something major to hide, and we therefore need a challenging media to confront them.

How about the possible dangers of mobile phone use? Or the related issue of living near electricity pylons? The absurd accepted position that human activity is causing global warming - which is also happening on Mars. Guessing the common factor there is not too difficult, is it?

There are also countless issues regarding the health of the foodstuffs sold in the west. Incidentally, I am writing this column in Nepal, and so many conversations here among westerners include comments about how good the food tastes compared to Europe. I am referring to the raw product, such as bananas or tomatoes.

One friend here recently told me how the eggs remind her of her childhood; how eggs used to taste in England many years ago.

Regarding all these and many other technology-related issues, the suspicion has to exist that scientists and politicians do not tell us the whole truth and often lie. We cannot trust the general media to understand the issues sufficiently well to challenge these lies and extract the truth.

We need a media that is well informed and challenging, and reinvigorating the BBC would be a perfect place to start.

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