The BBC at war

One of the things that I found time enough to read over the past couple of weeks was Josh Chafetz’s excellent article in the Weekly Standard describing “the BBC's institutional meltdown”.

Reading Calpundit’s take on it I realise I probably come across like one of those “hawkish bloggers” who believe that “the BBC is irretrievably anti-American, anti-war, and resolutely unfair and unbalanced”.

Well, I don’t know about “irretrievably” but I do get to see a lot of the BBC’s output (unlike Calpundit who says he doesn’t watch it) and its news reporting and current affairs programming is often characterised by an aggressively critical attitude towards all things American.

This stance came to seem increasingly absurd during the war in Iraq. It quickly became clear that the BBC was not going to adopt a similarly tough-minded approach to Iraqi government information or indeed to any other source of dissent against American involvement in the region.

But it’s not just the anti-American bias at the BBC that concerns me; it’s the decline in journalistic standards (of which the Gilligan fiasco is but one example) and the increasingly bizarre spectacle of a public broadcasting company that seems to be at war with its own government.