Michael Richard Jackson (born 11 February 1958) is a British television producer and executive. He was one of only three people to have been Controller of both BBC1 and BBC2, the main television channels of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and for being the first media studies graduate to reach a senior level in the British media. He was also the Chief Executive of British television station, Channel 4, between 1997 and 2001. In 2018, he co-founded Two Cities TV, with Wall to Wall Media founder and ex-CEO Alex Graham

Born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, Jackson was the son of Ernest Jackson, a baker, and his wife Margaret. He was educated at The King's School, at the time a direct-grant grammar school, and now an independent school in Macclesfield, Cheshire and his sister, Hilary, later claimed in a newspaper feature that he was already focused on a media career by the age of twelve. Following school, Jackson studied at the Polytechnic of Central London (renamed the University of Westminster in 1992), from which he graduated with a First Class Honours BA in Media Studies in 1979. The media studies degree at the Polytechnic of Central London had been launched by David Cardiff in 1969, when the institution was still known by its former title of Regent Street Polytechnic, and was the first such degree course ever to have been established in the United Kingdom.

Immediately after graduating, Jackson became the organiser of "The Channel Four Group", having written his final year dissertation at college on the prospect of a fourth national television channel in Britain. The Channel Four Group was a collective of television producers lobbying the British Government to establish a new independent television channel outside of the BBC / ITV duopoly, to act as a "publisher" of programmes produced by independent production companies rather than using the almost exclusively in-house production methods the existing channels then employed. This channel, named Channel 4, was eventually launched in 1982, and Jackson was the producer of one of its first major documentary series, The Sixties, screened that year.

The following year he joined the staff of the independent production company Beat Productions Ltd, where he continued to make programmes for Channel 4. Two of the programmes he worked on for the channel during the 1980s were Open the Box, which looked at the way television programmes were both produced and viewed and the attitudes held towards them, and The Media Show, of which he was founding editor when it launched in 1987. The Media Show was described by Waldemar Januszczak in The Guardian newspaper in 1997 as "one of the defining television programmes of the 1980s... In Michael Jackson, its first producer, it gave us a media-genius."

Despite his success in the independent sector however, in 1988 Jackson was persuaded by Alan Yentob, the then Controller of BBC Two, to join the staff of the BBC. Jackson came to be seen as something of a protégé of Yentob's during his time at the corporation, both coming from a background in arts and media programming, and Yentob immediately installed Jackson as the founding editor of the new late-night BBC 2 arts magazine series The Late Show.

Prior to the launch of The Late Show in January 1989, there was some scepticism as to whether or not the programme, running four nights per week on BBC 2 in a late night slot after Newsnight, would be a success. In a feature for The Times newspaper on television arts coverage, published two months prior to the show's launch, Bryan Appleyard wrote that: "the real tension is building up around The Late Show and its young creator, Michael Jackson." Appleyard pointed out that: "the investment financial, intellectual and egotistical in the programme is enormous... Yentob is determined to put his own cultural stamp on BBC2 and Jackson has everything to prove." However, the programme went on to be a success, running for six years. Looking back at The Late Show and other television arts programming in a feature for The Guardian in 2003, David Herman felt that the programme represented the last great era of television arts coverage. "The Late Show cast its net wider in terms of formats... What drove it was the enthusiasm and passions of its presenters, producers and editors, and this built a certain eclecticism and unashamed highbrowness into its agenda... It could be argued that the real high point of intellectual life on British television was not the 1960s or the 1970s, but the decade between the beginning of Channel 4 and the end of The Late Show in 1995."

Jackson remained as editor of The Late Show for the next two years, until in 1991 he was promoted to become BBC television's Head of Music and Arts. At the age of thirty-three, he was the youngest Head of Department in the history of the BBC.

In 1993, at the age of thirty-five, he became the second youngest Channel Controller in the BBC's history when he was promoted to succeed Yentob, who had been promoted to Controller of BBC 1, as Controller of BBC 2. Jackson's time at BBC 2 was generally seen as a great success — he was described by The Guardian in 1996 as "one of the best controllers BBC2 has ever had." During his time in charge of the channel it increased its average audience share from 10% to 11%, and was the only channel during that period to increase its audience share in households which had cable or satellite television.