More on the BBC:

The ranks of the stricken were not confined to the emoting British elite, at least if the BBC is to be believed. Its New York correspondent reported that he was overwhelmed at the outpouring of sympathy he had found on the streets of Manhattan.

"'Good luck,' said a colleague from a friendly U.S. network, squeezing my arm with a look of pity and concern in her eyes." This lonely but brave reporter went on to add, with the pure objectivity and balance for which the BBC is so renowned: "Arch skeptics here see it as just another victory for the ideology that drives the war on terror." He presumably meant to insert a hyphen before the word "skeptics," though the omission perhaps gave the statement its truer meaning.

The Hutton Report was, to read the British media, the Night of the Long Knives, the bonfire of the vanities, and the Cultural Revolution all rolled into one hideous assault on cherished press liberty.

If you live in the fantasy world of self-adulation and preening pomposity of high-powered liberal journalists, I suppose the aftermath of the Hutton Report might seem like that. But for those who have to toil in the less sensational world of reality, the unassuming 72-year-old peer may just have done the world one of the greatest services in the history of journalism and public broadcasting.

The average American couldn't care any less about the BBC, Gilligan, any other partisan hack at the Beeb. Hell, most Americans would have a hard time putting a name to Dick Cheney's picture. The Brit media beleives that the world is behind them, sorry chaps, the world doesn't give a damn.

...THE KELLY STORY was not an isolated incident. It was merely the most infamous example of a left-liberal bias that refracts all news coverage through the prism of the BBC's own distinctive worldview.

The BBC's coverage of the Iraq war itself marked a new low point in the history of the self-loathing British prestige-media's capacity to side with the nation's enemies.

Its Middle East coverage is notoriously one-sided. Its pro-Palestinian bias is so marked that recently the London bureau chief of the Jerusalem Post refused to take part in any more BBC news programs because he believed the corporation was actually fomenting anti-Semitism. If anti-Americanism is on the rise in the world, the BBC can take a fair share of the credit; much of its U.S. coverage depicts a cartoonish image of a nation of obese, Bible-wielding halfwits, blissfully dedicated to shooting or suing each other.

Its suppositions are recognizable as those of self-appointed liberal elites everywhere: American power is bad; European multilateralism is good; organized religion is a weird vestige of unenlightened barbarism; atheism is rational man's highest intellectual achievement; Israel (especially Ariel Sharon) is evil; Palestinians (especially Yasser Arafat) are innocent victims; business is essentially corrupt, or at best simply boring; poverty is the result of government failure; economic success is the product of exploitation or crookedness. And so on.

A great summary of the events that led us to where we are now. The Brits who own TV's are required, by law, to pay $200 per year to support the BBC. They will be prosecuted if they don't fork over the required pounds.