At an internal BBC meeting held on 19 June 1984, Peter Woon, the editor of BBC News, said there was "a general feeling in the newsroom" that the previous day's coverage of Orgreave had displayed "a marginal imbalance", while Alan Protheroe, the assistant director general of the BBC, admitted that "the BBC's early evening coverage of Orgreave might not have been wholly impartial". In 2009, Nicholas Jones, a former BBC journalist, said: "I got ensnared by the seeming inevitability of the Thatcherite storyline that the mineworkers had to be defeated in order to smash trade union militancy." Jones said that the media may have been guilty of "a collective failure of judgment", and if its "near-unanimous narrative had not been so hostile to the NUM and had done more to challenge government then Thatcher may have been forced to reach a negotiated settlement during the initial phase of the dispute". Geoffrey Goodman, a former industrial editor for the "Daily Mirror", said that "the dominant media account" had been "hostile" to the strikers, "with much of the UK's mainstream media willingly 'marshalled by Downing Street to provide the propaganda that helped defeat the miners.