Plasters to Stick. Another interesting move by the BBC in the War on Gilliganism. It's exactly the kind of costly draconian measure I'd expect from an organisation that is more interested in self-preservation than reform. Update.Stephen Pollard tidies up a couple of stories for us.
Read more...Fact and Fiction. A gulf of epic proportions emerges between these two pieces by Fox and the BBC on Iran's nuclear programme and the controversy surrounding it. No doubt Greg Dyke would take that as a sign of success, but after reading them I know which I find more convincing, and I know which gives me words from the horse's mouth as opposed to a luke-warm second-hand mush of pandering UN-speak where the voice of the journalist and the politician are indistinguishable. Thanks to Dan in the comments below for pointing this out.
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"We get from time to time people saying you're biased in favour of the Labour Party. Every time I ask people - show me a case of that bias, explain to me where we got it wrong and why what we said was so unfair - they seem to be unable to do so",
Andrew Marr May 11th, 2001.
"The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias",
Andrew Marr
the Daily Mail, Oct 21st, 2006.
"It's not a conspiracy. It's visceral. They think they are on the middle ground",
Jeff Randall former BBC Business Editor,
in The Observer, Jan 15th, 2006.
"The idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s. Why not tax people for owning a washing machine to fund the manufacture of Persil?",
James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, Aug 24th, 2007.
"People who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that [global warming] is the consequence of our own behaviour. I assume that this is why the BBC's coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago",
Media Guardian, Jan 31st, 2007.
"I do remember... the corridors of Broadcasting House were strewn with empty champagne bottles. I'll always remember that"
Jane Garvey
BBC Five Live, May 10th, 2007, recalling May 2nd, 1997.
'We need to foster peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking.'-BBC drama commissioning controller, Ben Stephenson in the Guardian, July 16 2009
