"unpopular as this may be, if ever a person was 'mediated' then that person was Walter Pardon, whatever his status as a 'source singer'."

Popularity has nothing to do with it - the above is effectively meaningless in the present discussion. It's already been asserted by those who believe 'mediation' to be a useful concept that it applies to every singer who ever opened his or her mouth in company, never mind singing into a recording device. Can you expand your point by explaining to what degree Walter P was 'mediated' compared with, say, Anna Brown, Mary MacQueen, Sam Fone, Louis Hooper, Marina Russell, Phil Tanner, Sam Larner, Jeannie Robertson or Will Noble? Or, come to that, Dillard Chandler, Texas Gladden, Iron Head Baker or Robert Johnson?

"It is absolutely right to look back at collectors from the past with a critical eye, including Alan Lomax. Not least if you are researching the history of a particular song. When Brian researches the 'history' of songs he must come up against questions such as the reliability and possible mediation and bias of the sources of information he finds."

There's nothing wrong with casting a critical eye - I've had plenty to say on this forum in the past about the provenance of songs that came to us via Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl. But what I'm talking about here is not legitimate and evidence-based criticism, it's biased and inaccurate attempts at demolition. Did you take the trouble to follow the Lomax thread? In what was by present Mudcat standards a very enlightening and good-mannered discussion, people coming from different places and with different views - some critical of Lomax - formed a consensus that a particular radio programme was a travesty of the truth. That kind of thing is not a necessary 'challenge to authority', it's just destructive. By the way, I research the history of songs, not the 'history'.