I don't know who coined the phrase 'ignorance is bliss' - but I'd like to think it wasn't a journalist. Ignorance can be very damaging indeed.

Take the national media coverage of the BBC's move to MediaCity. To read some of the more lurid headlines, you'd think half of the corporation's staff lived in gated communities in Mayfair, having never ventured outside London and were terrified of life beyond the M25.

You'd think the walls of MediaCity were made of freshly-minted £5 notes. And you'd think Salford was a bit like inner-city Baltimore - only with fewer shops.

Then there was Jeremy Clarkson. The Top Gear presenter branded Salford 'a small suburb' and said he would rather quit than move north. Making his show from the city would, he said, involve employing local people - 'a genuine handicap' - and filming Christmas specials from the 'Dog and Duck'.

Never mind that Top Gear is filmed in the Surrey village of Cranleigh, 60-odd miles from the heart of London. Never mind that Clarkson lives in the Cotswolds. And never mind that no one had actually asked him to move to Salford. No, he still saw fit to dismiss the entire MediaCity project as 'a box that has been ticked'.

Doubtless, he expected outrage. What he got was a bemused shrug. It was hard not to agree with John Merry, the leader of Salford council, who described Clarkson as 'a slightly more sophisticated Alf Garnett'.

The fact is, people in Greater Manchester don't care about such barbs because they are, by and large, so patently untrue.

Anyone who has walked round the MediaCity site, or Salford Quays in general - the Lowry centre with its A-list productions, the iconic Imperial War Museum North, the plush canal-side apartments - could hardly fail to be impressed.

Salford Quays are indivisibly part of Salford, which is indivisibly part of the Manchester conurbation - the thriving engine of the northern economy.

To attack it as some sort of backwater is as ludicrous as attacking Berlin, Brussels or Milan.

No, the move to MediaCity isn't just a 'box ticking' exercise - welcome though it is that the corporation has recognised that England doesn't mean London.

The long-term economic argument is sound, and Greater Manchester is currently enjoying a renaissance in the creative and media industries. Manchester - known as Britain's 'second Fleet Street' in the heyday of national newspapers - has reinvented itself for a new age.

The Sharp Project, on Oldham Road, is providing space for a range of digital and production companies and is already making national waves. Manchester's Vision + Media film office - an agency set up using EU funds - has attracted a string of Hollywood blockbusters to carry out their filming in the city's trendy Northern Quarter.

And at MediaCity, ITV Granada is moving the production of Coronation Street, The Jeremy Kyle Show and other popular programmes from their historic Quay Street studios to their new base opposite the BBC building.

For let's not forget - MediaCity isn't just about the BBC.

Salford University has opened a new digital learning base on the site, to nurture the journalists, producers and media executives of the future. Some 1,500 students at the university's respected media school will be able to work with leading professionals and state-of-the-art equipment.

And MediaCity enjoys some of the fastest broadband speeds in the UK.

We are proud of such progress - but in truth it's a pattern that has defined Greater Manchester since the industrial revolution. The city-region has always been at the cutting edge of innovation and change.

In politics, we are synonymous with Chartism and the suffragettes; in science, the world's first computer and the splitting of the atom. The phrase 'Madchester' virtually defined the British music scene for much of the 1980s and 1990s.

Economically, and socially, Greater Manchester continues to reinvent itself. The heart of the city of Manchester is unrecognisable since it was destroyed by an IRA bomb in 1997.

The new gleaming glass buildings are home to designer shops and offices filled with staff of blue-chip companies from around the globe. In the decade that followed the bomb, economic growth outstripped even London on a per-capita basis.

The arrival of the BBC, therefore, is certainly not seen in these parts as some kind of hand-out or political gesture. We know how much talent there is in our region; we know what we can give the BBC, as well as what the BBC can give to us.

And the benefits of the move speak for themselves. Britain, among similar nations, is uniquely skewed towards its capital.

There is no doubt that London is a great city - one of the greatest in the world. But then it isn't the only great city in Britain, and it is surely right that public assets are distributed in a way that encourages a more balanced national economy.

In the case of the BBC - which in its journalistic capacity exists to find and report stories of public importance - there is an ethical dimension to the argument, too. Not all news happens in London - and something isn't more important just because it happens where the great and good happen to reside.

Of course, it isn't the Manchester Evening News' role to uncritically celebrate the arrival of the BBC in MediaCity.

We have run - and will continue to run - stories about discontent from some of the staff asked to move north. We will continue to scrutinise spending of taxpayers' money by the BBC. That is our role.

But we will do it in a way that is fair, and balanced, and reflects all sides of the argument. And we absolutely won't short-change or talk down Salford or Greater Manchester in general.

Our readers would not thank us for being an uncritical cheerleader for MediaCity. But then MediaCity doesn't need an uncritical cheerleader - it just needs people to give it a fair crack of the whip.

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This article was published in the BBC magazine Ariel

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