Corridor of Madness

Dismantling the BBC?

'The [government] documents, which the newspaper said had been drawn up by "senior civil servants", also suggested that the job of ensuring the BBC's impartiality could be taken away from the corporation's board of governors.

[...]

The dispute came after a BBC radio report alleged in May last year that Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites)'s government deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction in a pre-war dossier.'

How very interesting. So since the government is not happy with some reporting about the government, the government wants to take over "the job of insuring the BBC's impartiality".
Sounds like government censorship to me.

Will the British people stand for this one? Will anyone be able to do anything about it? It remains to be seen. In the meanwhile, I look forward to the debate extending to US news sources. After all, the BBC is a worldwide, mainstream force among news media, maybe the only one that the big conglomerates here at home really have to reckon with. The Beeb is invaluable for Americans, in that it imports points of view from abroad that are rarely widely available here.
And it's publicly funded and independently run, another thing that's quite rare in the US.

No wonder the anchors over at FOX think this of the BBC.

Why isn't Mr InstaPundit commenting on this? I understand that griping about the comment that a reporter at NASCAR made - about Bush's war record - may seem like a matter of larger American concern.
However, whether or not the BBC is allowed to continue broadcasting uncensored should concern us, too.

But then, maybe Glenn Reynolds agrees with the FOX guy above. You can never tell, with these techno-libertarians.

(Thanks to Mortimer at Media Underground for the link to the BBC story)

UPDATE: Not too long after I posted the above, Reynolds caught up with the story. Here, FYI, is his actual opinion on the issue.

Great. Guess I must be psychic.