BBC, BNP or Bank of Scotland - what's worse?

For £14.3m we could employ 677 nurses, 695 teachers or 596 coppers.. but we get 50 money-grabbing BBC fat cats

The News of the World World Exclusive about the BBC.


When the BBC loses the licence fee, and everything is Sky Two, remember: we let this happen.


When Marina Hyde gets it, it must be important.

How are you enjoying the BBC witch trials, in which the Daily Mail has so brilliantly inhabited the Joseph McCarthy role? Naturally, were it all to stop now, the paper could take a curtain call, and bouquets, and offers of guest spots at the Salem Temperance Festival. Yet one can't help feeling the past week is just the start of a play in three acts, which begins with something genuinely nasty happening in the woods, but quickly subsumes all manner of innocents. Oh, for an Ed Murrow to lay bare the hypocrisies, contradictions and self-interest that lie beneath the witchfinder general's demented pursuit.

Mail on Sunday: angry.


And World's Greatest Newspaper is class semi-conscious.


Here's the great Charles Moore:

In the course of their on-air conversation, the pair joke that, near their telephones, most grandparents have photographs of their grandchildren sitting on a swing, so they decide, laughing hysterically, to point out to Mr Sachs that Brand "enjoyed" his granddaughter on a swing. They say many, many other targeted, horrible things.

In short, they think through all the permutations of mental pain that can be inflicted, and inflict them.

When the Abu Ghraib atrocities against Iraqi prisoners filled our media, people rightly noted that the torment consisted not in physical pain, but in humiliation.

The humiliation was increased by photographing the acts. The torturers thought that what they did was funny. They were arrested, dismissed from the US armed services and imprisoned.

Jonathan Ross was doing essentially the same thing. He thought it was funny to use his power to torment someone mentally, and to let other people witness the torment. His punishment so far is to earn £4.6 million this year from the BBC, instead of £6 million.

I think Bruce Parry should be made to go and live in Kensington Square: I'd give him a day.


Some more Charles Moore because we need a laugh:

At a time when taxes are rising, it would be a political winner for a party to promise the abolition of the licence fee, but of course this won't happen. Conservatives and Labour alike are terrified of the way the BBC would trash them if they did.

So it falls to us, the public. We do not have the power to stop Ross and Co by switching off. Time, then, to revolt.

My own modest contribution will be as follows. If Ross is still in post when my television licence next comes up for renewal, I shall keep my television, but refuse to pay the fee.

Instead, I shall hand over the £139.50 to Help the Aged, and wait for Mark Thompson's detector van to come to my door.

Charles Moore is 52 years old. Is that old enough for him to write the cheque to himself?