Harry’s Place has a great article called “Time to save the BBC”.

A couple of choice quotes:

The BBC is necessary because, unlike all other media outlets, it is accountable to us, the viewing public, rather than billionaire owners or corporate advertisers.

and

Look at some of the appalling acts committed by malign news owners in the past decade. Rupert Murdoch has censored even his most respectable news outlet – The Times – from reporting Chinese human rights abuses, because it was inconvenient to his plan to extend his interests into the heart of the Chinese Empire. Or look at the late, unlamented Conrad Black, who promoted a fierce right-wing agenda amenable to the uber-rich when he owned The Daily Telegraph. As one of his former editors, Max Hastings, put it, Black is “seldom unconscious of his responsibilities as a member of the rich man’s trade union”. Do we want the editors of our news accountable to them, or to licence payers?

The comments are worth a read too!

Painted the woodwork today in Jon’s new room. Hopefully this is the last stage and we can get him moved in soon! We also went to town today and bought Jon some new shoes. He’s now size 7E and has a new pair of shoes witha picture of a dinosaur on them :) We also got him a new pair of Tigger Wellington boots which look really cute!

As this week comes to an end, I notice that I’ve been really busy at work again. I’m pretty happy with how this week has gone too as we’ve got lots done.

Mad musing of me has a good comment on what might happen to the BBC as a result of this. I agree that it would be really really bad if BBC News became as bad as Sky News. Even worse will be if the new Director General and Chairman of the Board of Governers are “yes-men” to the Government.

Further thought (and commentary reading) about the report itself does make me add my voice to the wonderment about how the Government came out of this so “clean”… Hmm… Have to think a bit more about this, but reading about Lord Hutton does show that they chose their Law Lord carefully!

I like the phrase “Teflon Tony” too! Describes Bush’s puppy very well at the moment…

Last thought: One other thing, you can’t say that the BBC don’t report about themselves. They certainly are going into detail in their reporting of this issue…

Some random thoughts:

If the Government is not-guilty of changing the intelligence and the intelligence was quite clearly wrong. It’s about time someone took responsibility and was fired (or resigned!) That someone is probably the head of our intelligence services.

The BBC really needs to fix it’s complaints system. In my view, the making of the mistake is not the issue. The issue is that the Government’s complaint was handled so badly. It was right and proper that Gavin Davis resigned. Others should too.

Does anyone else worry that the top of our Government (10 Downing St) doesn’t minute their meetings? Clearly Lord Hutton took the narrowest view of his brief that he could otherwise there would have been some comment on this. I was actually amazed that the Government didn’t come in for one bit of criticism for the shambles that releasing Dr Kelly’s name became. From what I can tell, it only didn’t because Lord Hutton only looked at if the release was duplicitous (it wasn’t) and not whether it was incompetent…

On the whole, I think that the criticism of the BBC was generally fair, but that the Government got off lightly because of the narrow brief.

It’s been snowing !

It’s been a really busy week so far. Yesterday, we spent the evening watching the BBC’s adaptation of Pride and Predudice with Colin Firth. Whilst I’m not really into these sorts of dramas, I did think it was very well done and that the show was stolen by Mr Bennett!

Thinking about Pride, I see that our Tony has got his new tax on the middle classes through (aka as the topup fees for Universities, thing!) 5 votes. Not very impressive with a majority of 160ish is it? Whilst I acknowledge that we have to pay for universities somehow, I think that ?15,000 is remarkably low point for paying it back. Look for the ?3000 per year rising very quickly in the near future too…

Also, the justification was that University graduates earn more money than those who didn’t go to University. It’s also true that people with A-levels earn more money than those who have’t got them. Thus, I can’t see what’s to stop them charging “top ups” for A-Level courses soon too – the precedent has been set.

Georgina’s a bit better this afternoon which is good. Such a shame that she’s missed the entire weekend though :(

Gill came round this afternoon which was great as I was running out of ideas on how to entertain Jon :)

Saturday was a quiet day. Georgina isn’t feeling very well – stomach bug maybe? As a result she slept nearly all day and so I looked after Jon. We spent most of the day playing, except for a couple of trips to Homebase to pick up painting supplies. I think we have all that’s needed to do the woodwork in Jon’s new room now.

In the evening we watched Magnum Force – one of the Dirty Harry films starring Clint Eastwood. There’s something about the way that a 70s film is directed that just shouts “70s” isn’t there? I’m not sure what it is, but there can’t be many films from that decade that have aged well. One of the obvious differences between a 70s film and a modern one is night scenes – they are very dark, whereas nowadays a night scene is quite light. It’s much easier to watch a scene when you can see what’s going on!

It’s been a busy week this week and I didn’t make the deadline, but got close enough! Absolutely knackered for some reason too and that demotivates me to write much.

I have been listening to the Today program all week though and find it much more interesting with a dynamic opposition that is actually pointing out the Government’s stupidity. It’s quite refreshing really.