Here is the BBC Radio 4's "The World This Weekend" from last Sunday.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01cj83k/The_World_This_Weekend_26_02_2012/
For those who don't know, it's BBC Radio's flagship current affairs programme, broadcast on Sunday lunchtime. It consists of a five minute news bulletin, followed by 25 minutes of discussion, interviews and analysis.
The second item on the news was that an ex-head of the National Health Service (appointed by the previous government), Nigel Crisp, "has told this programme" that the government's NHS reforms are a mess that will set the service back (etc, etc). And, sure enough, he said those things (amidst quite a lot that was considerably more emollient) in a segment after the news. His ex-boss, Labour's John Hutton, was also a part of the discussion and the tenor of his remarks was actually quite supportive of the coalition government's stance. I'd regard that as slightly more newsworthy: ex-Labour minister agrees with the Tories. Which seems to suggest that the BBC is more interested in highlighting anti-government views than pro-government views.
But that is incidental to my main point: short of John Humphrys running amok with a pump-action shotgun, what happens inside a BBC studio is not the news. On any proposition, it must be trivially easy to get somebody who used to be important to vent on the radio, for or against. There is an ex-senior civil servant who disagrees with a government policy. Big deal. If doctors plan to strike because of the reforms, that is news. If some clause of the government's bill gets voted down in parliament, that is news. Something has happened in the outside world, and it affects the public at large.
Of course, none of this would bother me if I weren't forced to pay for the BBC's inflated sense of importance and its tendentious news presentation.
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