Here’s my take – though I should say that ‘jag’ has been on the money with every post:

Every communicator is a ‘mediator’. Every teacher, journalist, TV presenter, orchestral musician or historian. As a blanket term it’s so non-specific as to be of limited use, so generally it’s reserved for cases such as a go-between in a dispute, while teachers are still called teachers, and so forth. Harker proposed a new definition of the word. The relatively anodyne formulation in his introduction has been posted twice already but, as two posters pointed out immediately, the coy phrase ‘might have been’ doesn’t begin describe what is to follow, and the devil is in the detail of the usage.

Of Scott, Fakesong reports that he “collated, 'patched up', 'made up' “ material, as well as cutting and expurgating verses. In doing this, we are told, Scott “did not deign to notice [workers’ culture], let alone allow its songs and music to appear unmediated.”

Regarding George Gardiner’s collection we read: “This self-censored material, collected according to Sharp's methods, then altered musically for commercial publication after a further filtering and privileging of modal tunes,.represented the highly-mediated product of the dominant cultural values...”

In both of these examples it’s clear that the ‘mediation’ being described is wholesale editing, and that it is being carried out according to a cultural agenda. That’s a long way from the usual sense of ‘mediation’. Although there is an occasional concession to the idea that not all ‘mediators’ were as bad as one another (“In the work of Ritson, too, we see the beginnings of a genuinely scholarly approach to mediation”), the general sense of the word is pejorative. Both Sharp’s and Baring-Gould’s ‘mediations’ are described as ‘doctoring’ with all the implications of falsification and deception that the word implies. And since the entire thrust of the book is the appropriation and misrepresentation of ‘workers’ culture’ by the bourgeoisie, it’s clear that ‘mediation’ in the Harker sense is a Bad Thing.

The word has thus acquired so much baggage that to bring it into any current discussion in our field is to risk ambiguity and controversy. This isn’t helped by the fact that, where Harker felt justified in lumping together Percy, Scott, Child, Sharp and Williams (whose methods and aims were very different), we now find the net spreading further, so that even a modern and meticulous collector like Mike Yates, or a singer who writes a memoir, such as Bob Copper, can find themselves described by a term that might be entirely innocuous on the one hand, or offensively derogatory on the other. The new usage was one of the Big Ideas in Fakesong, but it's now time to move on.