, it is safest to have your say as a comment. Writing to me is always a gamble: will I lose your email, misattribute it or merely ignore it? Here, belatedly, are some that slipped through: From Stan Brin: I am an American journalist specializing in media criticism. Two questions: 1. Does anyone in Britain know how horrid the nightly North American BBC television broadcast is? Pure propaganda, paid for … Continue reading →

“Does the BBC really need six million more enemies at this time, six million more people who think BBC self-regulation has failed, and the licence fee is no longer justifiable?” asks the author of this surprising Thought for Today. They seem to think they do. They seem really quite proud of Popetown. Just in case anyone misses the point: I support freedom of speech for the vilest messages, for stuff … Continue reading →

There has been an unexpected applicant for an important position at the BBC. Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

. An absolute must-read as Gerard Baker of the Financial Times, writing in the Weekly Standard, surveys the state of the BBC: ‘The sheer scale of the BBC means that “the truth as seen by the BBC” is what gets believed. Aunty is simply too big and too powerful for the modern media era. The BBC is, in fact, a curious vestige of pre-Margaret Thatcher Britain: a massive public monopoly, … Continue reading →

Now I am going to put it to good, if belated use: a few days ago Dave Holroyd wrote: BBC America’s 6.00 PM EST (their only evening news report) news coverage of Gavyn Davies resignation was a peach! First selections from Hutton’s summary (3 minutes), then Campbell’s press conference (2 minutes), then the resignation speech (4 minutes) and finally a six minute segment about international reaction to the Hutton reports … Continue reading →

, but the little caption in a grey box on the main BBC news page linking to this story used to say something like “American troops in Iraq: giving out sweets by day, kicking in doors by night.” I’m not complaining about the story itself, but that caption somewhat gave the impression that the door-kicking was mere vandalism that the soldiers indulged in under cover of darkness. Actually the story … Continue reading →

This is somewhat off our usual beat, and I am the last person to come to for for an opinion on computer stuff – but here’s an email I received, which I shall reproduce for reader interest. Hi. I’d like to draw your attention to a remarkably ill-conceived article on the current “MyDoom” virus at this link. Almost every paragraph contains either errors or gross distortions of fact, and the … Continue reading →

. True, everybody’s done it in this case, so what the heck, but you might have thought the BBC would have had enough of misreporting sources. Nicholas Vance has an excellent account of how the BBC has managed to distil the the interviews given by Dr Kelly,… sorry, Dr Kay, into a pithy little sound-byte, ‘it turns out we were all wrong’. True, the ‘sound-byte’ itself as an irritating noun … Continue reading →

When I noticed what Eamonn pointed out in the comments- that the BBC website was giving extraordinary prominence to two short protests against the Hutton Report before and during its debate in Parliament- I zipped along the wires to see for myself. I couldn’t find it until I realised they’d put it on the World Edition page- where there were two stories about the protests (the second story is totally … Continue reading →

– the storm has passed and they’re not kicking up another one just at the moment. Meanwhile, pundits are stock-taking, generally with a sense that somehow journalism has been the loser. Few have come out and praised Lord Hutton, and even if they have they’ve said at least something about his ‘unworldliness’, or being a bit Northern Irish for the subtleties of London affairs, or ‘hackings’ to that effect. Rounding … Continue reading →