Media Brief

Post categories: mediabrief

Torin Douglas|10:36 UK time, Tuesday, 16 March 2010

I'm the BBC's media correspondent and this is my summary of what's going on.

Gillian Reynolds in the Telegraph accuses the BBC of "taking the axe" to the radio drama department "which nourished Stoppard, Pinter, Gielgud and Dench".

The Independent asks if David Beckham will now become a TV pundit for the World Cup, after his Achilles heel injury, and if so will it be for ITV or the BBC?

The Guardian reports that Sheila Hancock accuses theatre critics and actors of being "snooty" about musicals. She's one of the judges in the new BBC Andrew Lloyd Webber show, searching for a Dorothy for The Wizard of Oz.

David Cameron's ITV interview attracted only 1.7m viewers, far fewer than Gordon Brown's ITV interview with Piers Morgan (though that one inherited a large audience from Dancing On Ice) reports the Times.

But the Daily Mail says the pre-show publicity about "SamCam" has boosted the Conservatives' polls showing.

Should a levy on Google and BskyB be used to help fill the gap in funding for rigorous journalism? A Carnegie Trust inquiry into the future of "civil society" thinks so reports the Press Gazette.

The row in the music industry over the proposals in the Digital Economy Bill to curb illegal downloading was investigated by Radio 1's Jo Whiley for Panorama.

And the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones' asks in his blog where the Dot.com millionaires are now, ten years after the peak of the dotcom bubble?

The BBC newspaper review covers analysis that the European Commission's warning that Britain is not doing enough to cut its deficit.

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