The Media Show - 19/08/2009

Media Studies courses have once again had a bad press recently, with the Conservatives advocating that schools should score fewer points in league tables for passes in 'soft' A Level subjects like this. Is it really a soft option and what do people in the business actually make of it? The BBC has received 200 complaints after George Alagiah was told to step down as patron of the Fairtrade Foundation charity. Most of these are keen to see him reinstated. In the week that the first of his programmes on the Future of Food was aired, we ask if the BBC was right to ask George Alagiah to relinquish his patronage over their concerns about impartiality? What do the public pleas to reinstate him tell us about how the viewers see the BBC's duty to be impartial? And where does the notion of journalistic professionalism start and end? To coincide with the start of a new series of The X Factor, Oxo is launching a new advertising campaign, asking the public to make their own 'Oxo family' advert. The programme asks whether user-generated content is the future of advertising. How successful will Oxo be in getting members of the public to make their own ads? And what happens when advertisers hand over creative control to 'the great unwashed'?