Mark Thompson: ‘A second Brexit referendum risks seeming like a stab in the back by the elite’

Last year the New York Times CEO and ex-BBC boss published a book lamenting the decline in political discourse. With the advent of Brexit and Trump, he’s had to write a new chapter…Mark Thompson is the chief executive officer of the New York Times. He is also the former director general of the BBC and, before that, the chief executive of Channel 4. Last year he published Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong With the Language of Politics, a condemnation of current political discourse that was described by this newspaper’s Andrew Rawnsley as “elegantly argued… in cool, nuanced and forensic prose” but also a “blistering flame-thrower about the consequences of the digital revolution”. For the paperback edition, Thompson has added a postscript that deals specifically with the fallout from Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US.What made you want to write this book?Mark Damazer [former controller of Radio 4, now master of St Peter’s College, Oxford], a friend from the BBC, asked me if I wanted to give a series of lectures on public languages, on rhetoric. And I said no, I don’t know anything about it and I’m not interested in it. This was back in 2012. And then I spent about a week turning it over, and by the end of the week I figured out that actually I did have something to say, and that something had gone wrong in the relationship between politicians and the media and the public.If the economics turn dark and people feel they’re making big sacrifices for... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2017-09-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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