Mary Goldring

Mary Goldring OBE is a British business journalist and broadcaster.

An economist who graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, Goldring turned to journalism in the late 1940s and became a member of staff at The Economist, where for a long time she was its Business Editor, rising to the rank of Deputy Editor alongside Norman McRae. She left the paper suddenly in Spring 1974 following a dispute over its Editorship in the wake of the surprise departure of Alastair Burnet, who went briefly to become editor of the Daily Express.

Goldring then moved to the BBC, where she established a new current affairs programme for Radio 4 which became Analysis, see below, and meantime also wrote a weekly column for the Investors Chronicle edited by Andreas Whittam Smith. In the 1970s and 1980s as one of the main regular presenters of BBC Radio 4's Analysis series of analytical authored current-affairs documentaries, she developed it into a flagship programme. She also made five series of television documentaries, the Goldring Audit, for Channel 4 screened from 1993 to 1998.

Mary Goldring became particularly noted in the late 1960s as the Economist's aviation correspondent, for her sustained and trenchant critique of the development programme for the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic aircraft, on the basis of noise, pollution and above all what she predicted would be disastrous commercial economics. An almost solitary voice of dissent at the time, her views turned out to be sadly well-founded.