Additional Information   Politics of the media: can the BBC's
Mark Thompson survive?  Director general Mark Thompson is the
man inflicting the death by a thousand cuts on the BBC. So he's
not the most popular man at Television Centre.  Share this
article  But he isn't very popular anywhere else either,
certainly not with the government, which turned down his finance
submission and now finds itself accused by even the right-wing
papers of destroying the Beeb.  And, of course, the thought of a
reduced Beeb makes everyone think.  We may have a pretty vibrant
market in the UK in terms of new media options, but they're all
chasing a more or less finite pool of advertising so they're
hardly likely to spend buckets on "important" programmes.  ITV
has lost its monopoly so we won't be seeing a new 'World at War'
from them any time soon.  Not that the BBC is making these shows
either. Now that Simon Schama's big series on the history of
Britain has run out, digital channel BBC History is reduced to
running re-runs of '