The Controller of the BBC News channel is in a politically sensitive position, constantly accused of bias. After Guido reported that the BBC buys the Guardian more than any other paper yesterday evening, a clearly exasperated Kevin Bakhurst piped up:

@GuidoFawkes Keep going-someone may bite on the (non)story at some point. Try Times/Telegraph/Sun/Mail nos vs Guardian/Mirror/Indy 🙂

— Kevin Bakhurst (@kevinbakhurst) August 14, 2012

At the time Guido thought that was a risky thing for the head of news at the BBC to be saying:

@kevinbakhurst Sun actually. The days when the BBC got to define what is news are long gone mate.

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) August 14, 2012

Bakhurst seemed to have forgotten that the days of Big Media’s gatekeepers deciding what is news and what is not news, are long gone. We decide tomorrow’s news…

And so it turned out, as the “Guardian of Beeb“ story not only made the Sun but was also the subject of blogs by Dan Hannan at the Telegraph and Roy Greenslade over at the Guardian themselves. Greenslade asked “Why is that so surprising?” It wasn’t to Guido.

Greenslade was on the money when he wrote

“There are so many similarities between the BBC and the Guardian aside from assumptions about politics. Both organisations are free of commercial ownership, with the corporation funded by licence and the paper owned by a trust.”

Which isn’t an unbridled good. It imbues both with an anti-profit ethos bordering on anti-business as well as anti-capitalist.  The shared mindset of the two organisations is most clearly visible in their coverage of America and Israel. The Republican party is extremist because they don’t subscribe to left-wing nostrums and Israel is the primary cause of trouble in the Middle-East. These are axiomatic truths for the Guardian-BBC axis of “progressiveness”…