Jean Seaton

Jean Seaton (born 6 March 1947) is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster and the Official Historian of the BBC. She is the Director of the Orwell Prize and on the editorial board of Political Quarterly. She is the widow of Ben Pimlott, the British historian.

Her volume of the official history of the BBC, Pinkoes and Traitors: the BBC and the Nation 1970-1987, was published by Profile Books in February 2015. Bonnie Greer, writing in The Independent found Seaton’s book to be a "densely argued and magisterial account", adding: "Seaton, who is the director of the Orwell Prize, writes in prose which would have impressed Orwell himself. Unsentimental, robust, devoid of jargon and clear as a bell". In The Guardian, Seumas Milne – son of former BBC director general Alasdair Milne, whose ousting in 1987 is a key moment in Seaton’s book – praised the author’s "evocative detail" but criticised the book for its take on his father, finding that "in her enthusiasm to show that the collision of the 1980s was as much the fault of BBC obduracy and incompetence as government ideology and menace, she tips over into rewriting history. There is a no man’s land between journalism, subject to libel law and instant challenge, and established history – and it’s in that land of factual licence that Pinkoes and Traitors sits". He added: "The book is littered with inaccuracies and demonstrable distortions: from names and dates to the self-serving spin of those who have survived to tell the tale". David Elstein has also found numerous errors in the text. The anonymous reviewer in Private Eye concurred with Milne and Elstein about the errors, saying: "According to this, the sixth volume of the official history of the BBC, Blue Peter celebrated its 15th anniversary in 1979 (it was the 21st anniversary), the IRA hunger strikes took place in 1982 (1981) […] while the controversial 1980 documentary Death of a Princess is called a “Channel 4 programme” (it was ITV – Channel 4 did not exist until 1982)." The magazine’s reviewer noted: "It would be bad enough if a serious factual error on practically every page was Seaton’s only offence, but that’s not all. In the acknowledgements, she says 'It was a challenge to attempt to meet the BBC’s standards of hard impartiality'. It seems to have been so challenging she gave up trying, and started editorialising like mad." The review concluded: "The book is littered with egregious howlers that wouldn’t last half an hour on Wikipedia. That this is the official history of a major institution written by a supposedly respected academic simply won’t do. She thanks the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for funding her research. They should all ask for a refund."

Selected works

• ed. The Media in British Politics (Avebury, 1987)

• Politics and the Media in Britain: Harlots and Prerogatives at the Turn of the Millennium (Wiley, 1998)

• ed. The Media of Conflict: War Reporting and Representations of Ethnic Violence (Zed Books, 1999)

• Carnage and the Media: the Making and Breaking of News about Violence (Allen Lane, 2005)

• (with John Lloyd) What Can Be Done? Making the Media and Politics Better (Wiley, 2006)

• (with James Curran) Power Without Responsibility: the Press and Broadcasting in Britain (Routledge, 7th edition 2009)

External links

• University of Westminster faculty biography
• Guardian contributor profile page
• Seaton's articles on the OpenDemocracy website
• Prospect magazine contributions