I read that the BBC is to film a historical documentary likely to rob England of King Arthur, one of the nation's most treasured legends.
Film-makers are due to arrive in Croatia next month (july) to begin filming the programme with British historian John Matthews, who believes Arthur was really Roman general Lucius Artorius Castus
Did you catch Mark Easton's glowing report on Portugal's policy of not prosecuting anyone caught in possession of hard drugs? Here is the content of it. What struck me was the subtle but all too evident admiration Easton exhibits for a government that has given up on the war on illegal narcotics. As Easton concludes.....
Some question aspects of the system but what Portugal's controversial experiment has demonstrated is that, if you take the crime out of drug use, the sky doesn't fall in.
Listening to this BBC Today segment concerning the positon of Trident, I was reminded how much the BBC wallow in debates among their ideological confreres (they are enjoying it while they still can). In this segment, the BBC presented the views of George Robertson and various leftist thinkers (the presenter calls it a "phenomenal list"), Robert Peston (the left-oriented BBC commentator), and the Labour Government minister Bill Rammell. Rammell defends the Gvt's position in persisting with Trident by saying that Britain is at the forefront of nuclear disarmament- pointing to cutbacks in the arsenal. He does this because his critics are coming from the CND legacy left. The BBC offers no counterbalancing voice, and indeed the presenter barbs caustically "can we afford it?"- something I don't recall hearing concerning any other item of public expenditure ever from the BBC. Biased.
"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.
(courtesy of Jonathan Boyd Hunt)
"We need to foster peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking."
Ben Stephenson
BBC Drama Commissioning Controller
Guardian, July 16th 2009
