Looks like the Brits are talking about dismantling the BBC:
Britain’s government is considering a plan to break up the BBC and remove its independent status in the wake of a bitter row with the state-funded broadcaster over the Iraq war, a report said.
Government papers detailing possible changes to the BBC’s structure proposed breaking it into separate regional entities for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, The Sunday Times said.
The 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.
Personally, I think it is a shame that the Hutton Inquiry was reported as a triumph for the government. This quote captures how I read the story when it came out:
When you say “Gilligan’s story was essentially true” you could point out that evidence to the Hutton Inquiry proved the UK Government’s dossier of September 2002 was indeed ‘sexed-up’, with a swarm of ‘mays’ and ‘mights’ transformed into ‘wills’ and ‘dos’ at the behest of Downing ST spin doctors; plenty of intelligence personnel were indeed unhappy about it as Gilligan rightly reported. The infamous 45 minute claim referred only to battlefield weapons, not missiles — as the authors of the document knew full well, but did not spell out. The intelligence warning that attacking Saddam Hussein could trigger the use of whatever weapons he did have, was suppressed, as was a finding by the top-ranking Joint Intelligence Committee, in Whitehall, that war on Iraq would worsen the threat from al Qaeda.
So, thanks to Gilligan, we know more about the misinformation and misrepresentations used to sell the case for war than we did at this stage of any previous, comparable story.
(via Cursor)
