Speeches by Hinds.

“This question is for both of you. Do you agree that it is people who would like to see the demise of the BBC who are the ones—”

“I do not mean a literal blind spot, in that they did not spot the splice—I do not think anybody did—but rather that, its having been brought to people’s attention, a lot of people apparently overlooked it until, as Dr Shah says, having had 500 complaints after your memo, there has been a period of reflection.”

“That was in time for the January meeting. An awful lot of time has passed between January and November, so there were still a lot of people who had a blind spot. So after this thing had been identified—”

“It was a very good splice job—that is why.”

“It was not just a management blind spot; lots of people must have had a blind spot, starting with the person who did it, then whoever was editing it, a producer—presumably somebody straight away. Obviously, it did not get the most massive audience, because people in general did not spot it, but many people must have se…”

“Do you think the corporation has what you might call a “bigger truth” problem—that there is a bigger truth that the vast majority of BBC output is good, and therefore it is less important when something is misleading? Or that, on this specific episode of “Panorama”, there was a bigger truth the programme was trying to …”

“To go back to the splicing, in his “sacred job” memo to us, Dr Shah mentions that since your memo, Mr Prescott, the corporation has had 500 complaints, which has prompted “further reflection.” As a result of that further reflection, the BBC now accepts that the splice gave the impression of “a direct call for violent a…”

“No, I did not. It was an extremely good splice job where you could not see the seam. That is the point.”

“I totally agree with that, and as I say, I am not arguing against push placement, but there is another way of looking at it. You can say, “We need to be wherever the kids are”—it is a ubiquity strategy—but you could also say, “Actually, no. Some of our content is going to exclusively available on our owned channels. If…”

“They are totally empowered to do it, aren’t they? It takes money—I grant you that.”

“What has it done it with?”

“On prominence, there are two different ways that you can find things: you can either have them shown to you or you can go looking for them. We have talked about prominence so far today in terms of being shown stuff. It occurs to me that when we were kids, on telly it was the case that BBC One and Two and ITV were prefe…”

“Do we know numbers on whole-family viewing?”

“I’m worrying unnecessarily, Chair.”

“Do you think so?”

“Does Saturday night family entertainment exist and work in the same way that it used to?”

“My last question will be on bonding. Although we are here to talk about children’s television, I want to talk about general family television. You spoke about the importance of doing things together, and we also touched earlier on the growing trend over a number of years for children to have their own device to watch t…”

“It is very difficult to establish a direct line of causality—as it always is with these things—but do you feel that there is some connection between the consumption of this kind of media and some of those issues?”

“It will be interesting to hear what both of you hear from your interactions with people in the world of education and so on. Anecdotally, people talk about there now being issues with spans of attention for children—presenting in year R—and with being able to sit still. There are also more children presenting with spec…”

“Frank, can I ask you about your Sheffield speech—particularly what you were saying about early years development and the exposure of very young children to flashing imagery and very fast-moving content? Do you think there should be guidance from the health service or the Department for Education that says, “Do not expo…”