Alice in wonderland, or in my case Habb.

[habbiner]

I read the Daily Mail. In todays editorial it stands shoulder to shoulder with the BBC to protect its independance, saving it from politically controlled watchdogs, OFCOM to be exact.

Apparently putting editorial and financial regulation into the hands of politically controlled watchdogs is an assault on freedom of expression, and should horrify all lovers of liberty. OFCOM are lefties apparently.

Do i have to state the obvious? The BBC have no independance, and is controlled by loony lefties, or communists. OFCOM is run by blairites, apparently, which is better than old style commy anarchists, such are entrenched at the BBC.

The Mail has had an IQ shortout. Here we have the Mail defending the status quo at the BBC. As for defending free speech and independance, then i accuse the Mail of PSYCHOSIS.

The BBC is not free or independant. It is run by anarchists with a political agenda hell bent on destroying British society.

Another disturbing fact. According to Mr Hitchens, the conservative pre 1960s society is fast being replaced by the liberal socialist post 1960s generation. This is probably true.

God help us all.

[Teddy Bear]

First I'll post the actual article that you're referring to Hab.

DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Why the Mail stands shoulder to shoulder with the BBC...

By Daily Mail Comment

As regular readers will be aware, this paper has never been slow to criticise the BBC over its monstrous bureaucracy, its unthinking profligacy with licence fees, its manifold editorial misjudgments or its all-pervading soft-Left bias.

So there may be many who thought they would never read these words: the Mail stands shoulder to shoulder with the Corporation in its battle to protect BBC independence from the most insidious threat it has faced in peacetime.

True, our national broadcaster and its supine Trust have brought most of their latest troubles on their own heads, from the shameless waste of £100million on a useless computer system to the grotesque mishandling of the Savile and McAlpine affairs and now the appalling scandal of sweetheart payoffs to senior staff.

But the remedy being widely canvassed at Westminster – putting editorial and financial regulation into the hands of politically controlled watchdogs – is an assault on freedom of expression that should horrify all lovers of liberty.

For make no mistake, if politicians are given influence over the BBC’s output – as they would be, under this plan to transfer the Trust’s functions to Ofcom and the National Audit Office – this will fundamentally undermine the Corporation’s independence and, with it, the public’s right to know.

Indeed, any scrutiny of Ofcom – that nest of politically-correct Blairites – should demonstrate how unsafe it would be to entrust it with rulings on what the BBC may and may not broadcast.

Four years ago, David Cameron declared that under the Conservatives ‘Ofcom as we know it will cease to exist’.

Yet it still spends £117million a year, under a £381,000-a-year chief executive, Ed Richards, who was a policy adviser to Tony Blair, helped to write Labour’s manifesto and is surrounded by a cabal of like-minded Left-wingers.

How can such a body be expected to uphold the BBC’s duty of impartiality?
As for handing financial oversight to the NAO, which is accountable to politicians on the Public Accounts Committee, yes, the Corporation has been spectacularly wasteful of licence-fee payers’ money.

But whoever controls the cash inevitably has a huge influence over any media organisation’s output, determining which journalists can be hired and which stories can be covered in depth.

It is simply not safe to entrust such power to a quango answerable to MPs, with their vanity, partisan agendas and propensity to bear grudges.

Let us be clear. The Mail stands by every word of its criticism of the BBC.

With its 8,000 journalists – vastly more than the rest of Fleet Street put together – it is much too big, exercising an influence that is all the more unhealthy for being monotonously one-sided.

(Zealously pro-EU, the Corporation has all but admitted that it censored early debate on mass immigration.)

Indeed, the very size and power of the BBC, which crushes competition from commercial rivals and so undermines the plurality of opinion in the British media, makes it all the more dangerous to put its regulation into the hands of quangos.

It is also patently obvious that the Trust – under its smugly blasé, pink-tinged and utterly useless Tory chairman, Lord Patten – is not up to its job of representing licence-fee payers’ interests.

But surely it cannot be beyond the wit of man to devise a genuinely independent regulator, with the authority to ensure value for money and true impartiality.

Yes, this paper has many differences with the Corporation. But where the freedom of the media and the public’s right to know are at stake, political control can never be the answer. We value the independence of the BBC as highly as our own.

I agree it's absurd for the Mail to be taking this stance. In any case, it's my understanding that the output of the Mail, like every other private media company, is already overseen by Ofcom. Unlike the BBC which has the autonomy and power to monitor its own output, and the licence fee payer has to pay up or face prison if they don't give it this power.

So instead of the BBC dictating what politicians should or shouldn't do, as it stands at the moment, the Mail thinks it will be worse of it was the other way round. Frankly I can't see any difference so long as the dynamics that already exist within our society continue to reign.

I would like to see an exterior control of BBC output that is comprised of a genuine BALANCE of views, who constantly review BBC's output. This is only provided the BBC is maintained by the licence fee payer. I would like it more if the BBC was privatised - then they can do what they like.

Given the present managerial 'talent', I don't think they would last very long.