From WMDs and the Hutton Report back through the first Iraq war, the Falklands, the Cold War, Suez, WW2, all the way to Lord Reith's affinity for the British Empire, the BBC has always operated, as John Birt admitted, 'under the shadow of the state and the other main repositories of power'.
The first report from a scintillating ourBeeb discussion with Claire Enders, Britain's leading media analyst, finds the BBC at a digital crossroads, but holding up remarkably well.
The Daily Mail's loathing of the BBC has this week given the world a 'scoop' which has turned out to be utter nonsense; yet with a tiny, buried apology, the damage is done.
Is Radio 4 the voice of the establishment? An ourBeeb survey into the class backgrounds of the station's presenters and guests discovers a significant bias towards a privately-educated Oxbridge elite.
Programmes like Mock the Week are a great platform for stand-up comedians, and yet fewer than one in ten of the guests are female. Why do the likes of Caitlin Moran and Grace Dent feel compelled to turn down BBC panel shows?
A look into the complex array of issues involved in reporting science stories in the news, from one of the researchers on last year's BBC Trust-commissioned Science Review. What counts as an 'expert', and how many of them do you need for your show? And why isn't it good enough to say "scientists h
Despite the sale of televised England home-matches from the BBC to commercial broadcasting, cricket remains central to collective imaginings of 'Englishness'. Recent attempts to situate the sport within the history of empire reveal much about the BBC's continuing ties to the ideology of state-led
Private industry is extremely well represented among the Beeb's trustees and directors, from bankers to energy and security firm executives. How does this square with the BBC's public service remit?
Why does the BBC insists upon giving climate change 'believers' an equal platform to deniers, in the name of balance - especially when last year's BBC Science Review cautioned specifically against this folly?
The BBC World Service has lost resources and its much loved home in Bush House; by 2014 it will have lost a quarter of its staff and its traditional source of funding. What hope is there for the institution Kofi Annan called "Britain's greatest gift to the world in the twentieth century"?
The latest Ofcom report on media plurality has made some progress in establishing an appropriate scope, limits and metric for measuring media consumption in the UK. Most significant is their flagging up the dominance of the BBC regarding news programming, a fact made worrying by the institution’s
