. Greg Dyke has spelled it out in fascinatingly bullish fashion in an email to anxious staff ahead of the Hutton report: ‘ “What is important once Hutton is published is that if the BBC is criticised we learn from whatever is written – assuming of course that we agree with what is said,” Mr Dyke told staff.’ Note- not ‘If we are criticised we must learn from our mistakes’, … Continue reading →

Another “Yer Wot?” moment, this time brought to us in one of those ‘From our own correspondent’ semi-personal pieces by Bridget Kendall. This is the bit that had me Yer Wotting: The French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, another formidable orator, took the floor. His speech was equally ardent, arguing that the world did not necessarily have to follow America’s lead. Then something extraordinary happened. As he finished there was … Continue reading →

Norman Geras writes: …Marr presented Blair as now going for the humanitarian dimension of the Iraq intervention because of how things had turned out with WMD and as though he had just discovered it. This is becoming one of the major components in the anti-war party’s current mythology. But that’s what it is: mythology. Blair stated the humanitarian argument plain as day, albeit as subsidiary. Incidentally, there is no such … Continue reading →

I got this one from the comments to the post below. Many, including me, were surprised to note that the audience of Radio 4’s tranzi flagship Today apparently contains a goodly proportion of believers in the right to armed home defence. Laban Tall writes about the way the BBC dealt with this distasteful result. Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

with some of your emails in the next few days. Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

, visiting family and letting my poor nerves recover from the stress of Beeb-watching. But I did scribble this one down specially for B-BBC. On 31st Dec, the Ceefax news index on page 102 said “122- Israeli troops shoot protestors.” Sounds bad, said I, thinking about the deaths or injuries implied by the word “shoot”, and grimly set the remote to page 122. It turned out that the only things … Continue reading →

Denis Boyles does a best /worst of the year list. The Beeb makes the cut in both! The BBC is the worst in this best of all possible media planets. The Beeb’s grotesque old-Labour bias and blatant anti-Americanism continues apace, despite the mismanagement of the Corporation by Greg Dyke and his sidekicks, all of whom rested the credibility of the BBC on the quality of Andrew Gilligan’s slipshod reporting, captured … Continue reading →

This just in: Caroline Thomson, the BBC’s director of policy and legal affairs, said the Today programme report that led to Lord Hutton’s judicial investigation fell short of the “truth and accuracy” that are the “gold standard of the BBC”. She said the concessions made by the BBC during the inquiry had been “spectacular”… Ms Thomson conceded that the BBC’s regulatory structure, in which the organisation’s editorial impartiality is upheld … Continue reading →

. Christmas is a busy time for personal life and a quiet time for news, or rather, news bias. What’s the point in the BBC launching an offensive against their bettes noire or an extensive cover-up of ‘bad news’ when the punters are flat out with surfeit of this or that mind altering substance (even if it’s just the old post-prandial-orgy-chasm their minds have fallen into)? There’ll probably be another … Continue reading →

‘Tony Hall, the U.S. ambassador to the food program… asked one of Mugabe’s top aides: “Why do I get the impression that I have to beg you to feed your people?” ‘ -Michael Grunwald, Washington Post Staff writer, Jan 03 Funny how in this article about famine in Zimbabwe, a certain man’s name is missing. On top of that, they’ve chosen just about the most tendentious ‘fact’ possible with which … Continue reading →