I love the BBC

'Innuendo and exaggeration'. That's what News International accused the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of last week. The quote was in reaction to a report, also released last week, in which the Committee was rather critical of News International (the main UK subsidiary of the ridiculously huge News Corp) and one of its papers called News of the World. That's right. The people who own News of the World, Fox News and The Sun are accusing a bunch of people whose idea of a snappy title is 'Press standards, privacy and libel' of innuendo and exaggeration. Laugh? I nearly punched a hole through a little statue of Rupert Murdoch.

The Baptist Times [in which this column first appeared in early March]  is a small paper and I am in no way a rich man, so I will not risk being sued by saying everything I truly feel about the Murdoch-owned media behemoth currently intent on ruining journalism (and the world). I will just say look at the front page of News of the World the next time you're at a news stand. Read the words put into the mouths of the pretties on page three of The Sun. Enjoy the measured, subtle, grown-up style and balanced, intellectual content of their coverage of the latest celebrity sex scandal. If you're interested in what their brothers and sisters on US TV are like, watch Fox News presenters and pundits suggest that vaguely socialised healthcare is all about the government killing the elderly, and then maybe you'll get an idea of what I think. I couldn't possibly comment, obviously.

In related news last week we heard that the BBC is tabling plans to lay off large numbers of its workforce and to close many of its operations. Much of this comes in the wake of the Tories promising that they will cut back on spending on the BBC, which in turn comes after Rupert Murdoch's son, James, called the expansion of the Beeb 'chilling' and 'a threat to independent journalism.' His campaign to get the BBC cut down to a smaller, more manageable size has some supporters in Labour, not just the Tories, and some commentators last week saw the proposed cuts across the BBC as a kind of 'pre-emptive strike', defensive pruning in the hope that bigger cuts will then not be justifiable. So while we should all join campaigns to save the variously beloved bits of Aunty Beeb we want to see survive, let's not blame the BBC brass themselves. Let's blame a handful of private-enterprise media moguls who want to see the BBC destroyed. Why? Because it is competition. Brilliant, wonderful competition that does not need to pander to the lowest common denominator to get funding from myopic advertisers.

That is not to say that the BBC does not pander to idiots. Just think of Chris Moyles on Radio1 or such gems as 'Snog, Marry, Avoid?' and 'Hotter Than My Daughter' on BBC TV. But what it does is attempt to provide as broad a range of programming as possible. Radio4 does not need to dumb down, make prank calls or focus on Paris Hilton's sex life, because its function and funding are not at the mercy of the profit motive. And the country is better for it. Niche music and even Pop are served by Radio 1 without being completely dominated by the American artists big record companies already push, and the country's music industry is better for it. Inasmuch as our news-gathering community is held up to better standards than those of fast-food sound-bite tabloidism, it is because the BBC is there, with no political agenda and no need to keep advertisers happy, and the country, if not the world, is better for it.

The BBC is one of a handful of things that make Britain truly great. And when phone-hacking, right-wing, mammon-worshipping, journalism-destroyers try to kill or even wound it, every person of good conscience should fight them, every step of the way.

Jonathan Langley is a columnist for the Baptist Times, writing on current affairs from a Christian leftist perspective.

This column first appeared in The Baptist Times on 5 March.