Marina Hyde

I agree and we can't argue that there has been effectively editorial interference.

Because the mere settling of that suit in order to get... We can't argue there hasn't.

Yeah, there has been.

And, but I do also think that attempting to have a correction from that era where, I mean, I sort of hate calling it Pete Woke, but you know what, for want of a better phrase, where lots of liberal newsrooms had, in fact, these incredible blow ups about tiny, tiny things and

Real enormous cancellations of staff members and things like that over really actually relatively minor infringements of some perceived liberal code.

And I do think that there has needed to be some kind of correction if you wish to try and keep things mainstream.

And, you know, I've talked about it before and talked about it a bit when I did appear before the select committee, that in the UK we have this extraordinary thing that America does not have.

We have the BBC sitting right at the centre of our sort of mainstream.

And I realise that people have got all sorts of different problems with the BBC, but like 60% of people check it frequently.

In America, you've got a situation where nothing gets more than 20% of anybody.

And the polarisation is overwhelming.

almost off the charts like if you like Fox News then you absolutely hate New York Times and vice versa and they are everybody is sort of flung out to the outer reaches of these graphs and they don't have anything sitting in the middle and the attempt to and I do think that when

a shared mainstream disappears, and we see this all over the world, you get these big, big cultural problems.

And the lack of a shared mainstream in America, and the perception that some things are for some people and some things are for other people, and it's very, very siloed like that, is not great for social cohesion at all.

And you can see the effects of it.

So

I think the sort of aim of it, whether or not you think they're doing it right and whether or not you think that actually is their aim or it's kind of a covert thing for interference, I think the aim of it is good to try and create something that more than 20% of people ever are going to think is trustworthy.

And it doesn't sort of matter if you have got bigger ratings than you had before because other things have fallen away.

You're still, as you say, the ice cube is not a terrible analogy.

Yeah.