Samizdata

Nick Cohen laments the ‘the sinister treatment of dissent at the BBC‘, as if the state owned tax funded media operation had ever been some haven of even handed rectitude and objectivity.

What a fool I was. Since then, BBC managers have shifted Tom Giles, the editor of Panorama, out of news. Peter Horrocks, an executive who insisted throughout the scandal that the BBC must behave ethically, announced last September that he was resigning to “find new challenges”. Clive Edwards, who as commissioning editor for current affairs oversaw the Panorama documentary, was demoted. The television trade press reported recently that his future is “not yet clear” (which doesn’t sound as if he has much of a future at all).

Why would the top people at the BBC be all that different to any other part of the British state? When being a state body means you cannot go bust as long as there are taxpayers to be farmed, the people suckling from the public teat serve up such wonders as the police and social services did in Rotherham, or the NHS in Staffordshire Hospital. Had the Staffs scandal happened privately, I are quite certain there would be howls in the Guardian for all private hospitals to be nationalised and new ones made illegal, yet I am told the NHS is still the ‘envy of the world‘.

It takes a double shot of navy proof state issued rum to not expect the worst from any aspect of the tax funded Leviathan. And the BBC is a tax funded arm of the state.