This is from the Financial Times:

The BBC is losing the public service plot
by Philip Stephens
Published: June 20 2006 03:00

Some time soon the government will announce the BBC's new licence fee settlement. The funding increase will not be as extravagant as the corporation would like but probably not quite as miserly as the Treasury would prefer. This will be the last such deal. The present model of public service broadcasting is destined to struggle against the rising tide of digital technology. The BBC's failing journalism may well set the seal on its demise.

A poll tax levied on ownership of a television set is already beginning to seem eccentric. Who needs a box in the corner of the sitting room when they can get news on their mobile phone and watch their own on-demand television channels on a multimedia flat screen?

The BBC's response is to reinvent itself. Mark Thompson, the director-general, recently set out the vision. It gushes technology. The BBC, he declared, is to become a global media player, competing in every market and every technology. Forget Reith, think Google and AOL.

It is hard to draw the connection between this global power play and a levy on every British household. The more the BBC resembles Google, the weaker is its claim to a unique role as Britain's public service broadcaster. For licence fee payers, if not for the new and growing BBC audiences around the world, big looks like bad.

There are still plenty of reasons to back a strong public broadcaster. The market will not pay for brilliant drama, powerful documentary and imaginative comedy. In an age of diversity, the BBC can promote social and cultural coherence. When it tries hard, its television and radio output is as good as it gets.

Above all these remits, though, stands the BBC's role as a champion of democracy - its duty to provide impartial, high-quality journalism. Take away the responsibility to educate and inform and to provide an impartial channel between politicians and people and all the rest crumbles.

Yet it is precisely here, in its core journalism, that the BBC is failing. Mr Thompson recently devoted a speech to the subject. It was unremittingly defensive. The thrust was that any negative comment about the BBC's journalism was rooted in the personal prejudices or ideological inclinations of the critics. The holy grail of objectivity, it seems, is the sole property of the BBC.

I recently served as a member of an independent panel established by the BBC's governors to review its coverage of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It was a fascinating exercise. As illuminating was the reaction of BBC management.

Apart from the occasional lapse by one or two individual journalists, the panel did not detect the bias or partiality often alleged by the two sides in the conflict. It highlighted some first-class journalism. Italso found serious shortcomings.

These included a failure consistently to maintain editorial standards, lack of depth and analysis and the substitution of reactive journalism for an effort to tell a complicated story. In parenthesis, the panel pointed out that if an individual who blows up a bus in London is described as a terrorist, the same should apply to someone who does likewise in Tel Aviv. The central conclusion, though, was that BBC coverage did not constitute a full and fair account of the conflict. The picture I tookaway from the exercise was of an editorial machine sacrificing quality to quantity and one in which everyone and no one claims to be in charge.

Mr Thompson's response was to misrepresent the panel's conclusions. The report called for a guiding editorial hand to ensure accuracy and quality over myriad outlets. Mr Thompson quite wrongly represented this as an attempt to prevent editors and reporters presenting the facts and making their own judgments. On the basis of their official response to the panel's report, the BBC governors are loath to challenge the director-general.

How the BBC reports the Middle East, of course, will scarcely decide its future. But the failures identified by the panel - the absence of editorial planning, grip and oversight to accompany the headlong expansion of the BBC's news outlets - speak to what has gone wrong elsewhere.

The BBC's coverage of domestic political affairs - the very core of the public broadcasting remit - is a case in point. I do not believe there is deliberate political bias, even if some well-known BBC figures will never forgive the prime minister for the Hutton report on Iraq. Rather, quality, depth and judgment are sacrificed to showbiz trivia and hyperbole. Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are equal victims of this shallowness.

Partly it is a question of lazy journalism. It is much easier to retail Westminster gossip than to seek to report complex policy debates, or to shout at politicians rather than subject them to forensically robust cross-examination. Healthy scepticism has given way to easy cynicism. My sense is that BBC news reporting has also lost a once iron-clad commitment to objectivity and a necessary respect for the democratic process. If I am right, the BBC, too, is lost

This appeared in the letters page of the FT:

Impartial, accurate BBC must make it harder for a Fox
From Mr Ian Martin

Sir, I am writing to say how much I enjoyed, and agreed with, Philip Stephens' article, "The BBC is losing the public service plot" (June 20).

As an expat living in the US, the BBC's website is one of my main links to the UK. It's my home page: I read it daily. Increasingly, though, I find myself fuming at spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and teeth-grindingly poor writing.

I am not totally convinced that, as you say, the "market will not pay for brilliant drama, powerful documentary and imaginative comedy". (Here in the US, HBO provides all three.) But I absolutely agree with your comments on the importance of the BBC's core journalistic role.

I speak as someone who believes that the BBC has a role even, or perhaps especially, in a competitive media marketplace, as a constraining and disciplining influence on the excesses of private media companies who may be tempted to bias their coverage to attract "customers". The presence of a trusted and impartial - and accurate - media player must surely make it harder for a Fox News equivalent to be a success in the UK.

Ian Martin,
Cambridge, MA 02138, US