Am enjoying the BBC being on the back foot and apologetic as a result of stories by Iain and the chaps at the Biased BBC blog being picked up by the Dead Tree Press.

The fact is that the BBC worldview is a cultural suppressant. We all learn from the BBC that America is bad, Israel is very bad, businessman are bad, all problems can be solved by throwing more money at them, but we are all going to die from global warming anyway. They are the BBC, that is what they do.

Worse still the BBC is an innovations black hole. It sucks young talent into a slow monolithic bureaucracy, we don’t have a Silicon Valley culture of innovation because our best and brightest go work for a not-for-profit para-statal broadcaster which crowds out private sector start-ups. The iPlayer? Re-hashed Microsoft crap which is not even open source, despite the BBC being a “public service”. How many enterprises never get off the ground because the BBC is in the market sector and for-profit enterprises can’t compete and make a profit? With the lack of a for-profit mentality comes a depressing culture.

Come the party conference season the hangar-sized media centres will be filled with journalists, approximately half of whom will be from the BBC. Yet Sky News, with a fraction of the resources, will match their output story wise. Last year at the Tory party conference Guido watched various BBC camera teams film the media pack that was surrounding Boris. They all had their own presenters reporting duplicate stories for different BBC outlets. A complete waste of money that would not happen if the BBC could not coerce billions from the public.

UPDATE : Bloggers are even correcting NASA climate change data – it now turns out that 1934 not 1998 was the hottest year in the US since records began.