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Robustly independent journalism is needed to hold African governments to account. This was the blunt message of leading African media figures addressing a conference to mark the 25th anniversary of the Reuters Foundation Fellowship Programme at Oxford University.  

“Could do a lot better”! That was the main message to emerge from the deliberations of more than 1,000 Ministers and senior representatives of developed and developing countries and civil society organizations at the High Level Forum in Accra at the beginning of September.  

David Levy proposed in an 18th August article in the Media Guardian that the UK debate over the future of Public Service Broadcasting should learn from French experience about how to maximise the return on the licence fee. When France merged licence fee collection with local taxes major cost savings were achieved. If similar savings could be achieved in the UK it could provide a new source of funding for additional PSB provision, without any impact either on the nature of the licence fee or on current BBC funding levels.
Read the article here  

Britishness has emerged as a key political issue of the moment but there has been little focused debate on the role of the broadcast media and the press in promoting a sense of national identity - if they do and indeed if they should. 

The Price of Plurality: Choice, diversity and Broadcasting Institutions in the Digital Age was jointly edited by David Levy and Tim Gardam for publication by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in May. 

The Commission pour la Nouvelle Télévision Publique has reported in June on the future of the French public service broadcaster, France Télévision, on which David Levy has been sitting as the sole foreign commission member www.matelepublique.fr