BBC Director-General Mark Thompson has written

an article defending the BBC in today’s Guardian.

A commentator in the Guardian’s comments section sums it up well:

Partnership… standards… interaction… percentages… engage… conversation… culture… value… colleagues…

Now, back to the studio.

Most of the comments, from Guardian readers remember, have been hostile. For example:

What a load of guff. It’s not your stupid phone-ins and naff prizes which are the problem – it’s your political bias and the increasing vacuousness of your news coverage. It offends me, and I’m a bloody liberal! No wonder the Tories and assorted “nationalists” are apoplectic.

And PLEASE put a kindly bolt in the head of that awful NEWS 24. “All the same news all the effin’ time”.

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I deeply resent being forced to pay the licence fee for a luxury item that I do not need and would not currently choose to have. I don’t watch BBC news or documentaries anymore because the news is simplistic, sensationalistic and condescending and the documentaries are ‘docudramas’. I don’t much care about the quiz line rip-offs – I always assumed they were rip-offs anyway – but the issue of selective editing is far more dangerous. You create the view you want to and everyone is taken in by something, no matter how smart we think we are. I do realise that neutrality is virtually impossible to achieve but you might take a stab at it occasionally. Meanwhile, the licence fee has to go. I want to have a television, primarily to watch dvds on, but occasionally to watch television programmes too. I am quite happy to not receive BBC. I’d like to be given that choice.

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I’m fed up paying the BBC license tax I rarely watch it. I don’t watch SKY either but then I don’t pay for it, I believe only 25% of the public watch it. If I watch TV on the PC do I have to pay the license???

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As someone that leans towards soft centre-left liberalism (i.e. a Guardian reader) I find the BBC news reasonably balanced and have little to complain about.

Erm..hang on a sec though, that’s the problem here isn’t it?

I doubt I’d agree with bigjake on many things but the treatment of Redwood by bbc editors was truly appalling, it played right into the hands of everyone that accuses the beeb of bias.

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Impoverished local theatres with a budget of tuppence ha’penny a year put on fantastic new and revived stuff week in, week out. But the Beeb, with its corridors awash with OUR MONEY, gives us Casualty and, if we’re children, DR BLEEDIN WHO.

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The political coverage is so soft on Labour as to be a joke. Remember Little Ant and Dec interviewing Blair?

Brown refused to go on Question Time. John Humphrys says there’s no point having him on the Today programme because he just reads from a script irrespective of the question.

He is almost NEVER interviewed full stop. The BBC needs to get mediaeval on his ass for being so undemocratic.

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Well you could start by realising the report on the BBC’s coverage of the Lebanon war instead of hiding behind data protection act in the courts , that may help. Or even get your middle east reports to actual read Hamas charter before they report on it, they are there to report the events for the wider world in balanced way not to be ‘friends of the Palestinians’.

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Thank you to Biased BBC reader Ayayay for the link.