God Save The BBC

Antony Jay writes with a former insider's prospective at Times Online about how, after increasing public scrutiny, the BBC has discovered its leftward leaning tendencies. These four sentences deftly summarize my thoughts about liberals in this country as well:

"We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual elite, full of ideas about how the country should be run. Being naive in the way institutions actually work, we were convinced that Britain’s problems were the result of the stupidity of the people in charge of the country.

This ignorance of the realities of government and management enabled us to occupy the moral high ground. We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world."

Apparently, it is a global hallucination.

Please take the time to read the entire article. It offers observations from the inside of this particular institution and provides a historical perspective about how the BBC evolved to its current state.

If the British are re-evaluating the role of the BBC, hopefully we will see other bastions of media liberalism coming under increasing scrutiny as well.