The Staggers: BBC

Another day, another Nazi jibe -- this time from Alex Salmond, who has described a senior BBC official as a "political Gauleiter", the name given to Nazi regional leaders.

The Scottish First Minister had been due to appear as a rugby pundit on a TV show ahead of the Calcutta Cup match at Murrayfield between England and Scotland. Salmond would have appeared alongside former international rugby ... read more

In a ruling on 31 January, the BBC Trust defended its decision to censor the word "Palestine" from a freestyle by rapper Mic Righteous on 1xtra in February last year. In the performance (above), he rapped:

I still have the same beliefs

I can scream Free Palestine,

Die for my pride still pray for peace,

Still burn a fed for the brutality

They spread over the world.

BBC production staff covered ... read more

An episode of David Attenborough's Frozen Planet series that looks at climate change will not be aired in the US, where many are sceptical about global warming.

Seven episodes of the multi-million-pound nature documentary series will be aired in Britain. However, the series has been sold to 30 world TV networks as a package of only six episodes. These networks then have the option of buying the seventh "companion" episode -- ... read more

It is axiomatic in military circles, and down the British Legion Club, that there can only be one winner in a war and this week that prize goes to Sky News.

Anyone watching events unfold in Tripoli over the past few days knows that the Osterley upstart has led the way both in style and substance. The BBC rightly makes the point that it must be the people on the ground ... read more

In an exclusive interview with Joan Bakewell in the New Statesman this week, director-general of the BBC Mark Thompson issues a strong warning about the potential power of Rupert Murdoch if Jeremy Hunt allows the News Corp takeover of BSkyB:

Because of commercial decisions taken ten or 20 years ago, BSkyB is in an utterly commanding position and will have far more money than the BBC or any other media player ... read more

The government has decided to give BBC World Service an extra £2.2m to shore up the Beeb's Arabic service, in light of the recent ructions in the Middle East. This is a "massive U-turn" from previous government policy, which last year shunted the costs of the World Service from the Foreign Office onto the BBC - a de facto cut. "Massive U-turn" is not my phrase, however; it was - ... read more

David Cameron may have once described cuts to the BBC as "delicious" but he's less enthusiastic when said cuts affect his constituency. The PM has intervened to persuade the Beeb not to axe its local news service in Oxford, which includes his constituency of Witney.

Cameron expressed his displeasure at the cuts in a letter to BBC director general Mark Thompson, who also lives in ... read more

Even Roy Greenslade, in a rather sour Guardian piece, grudgingly conceded that Hugh Grant's hilarious entrapment of the former News of the World executive Paul McMullan was a decent story, at the same time offering the startling observation that online was now more influential than print (Roy, surely not!).

Grant's report for our issue of 11 April has become a  read more

"If you appear on the box, people think you know what you are talking about, and it's patently not so," says David Attenborough, in an interview published in this week's New Statesman. He is being typically modest – as Richard Dawkins puts it, Attenborough is probably the most respected person in Britain. His body of work has shaped the way we see the natural world, and contributed significantly to scientific ... read more

In an interview with today's Observer, the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, accuses the BBC of having a left-wing bias. "I think," he says, "if you were to discover how people vote at the BBC there are probably more who vote Labour or Liberal Democrat than vote for the Conservatives."

I don't presume to know how BBC staff vote. However, if a majority of them did vote ... read more

David Cameron may insist that he does not "relish" the spending cuts but, in the case of the BBC, he's just allowed the mask to slip. Speaking at a Brussels press conference, the PM began his salvo with a dig at the Beeb for sending too many journalists to cover major events.

He said: "Good to see that costs are being controlled everywhere – let's take the third question from the ... read more

For a few weeks now the BBC has been test-driving a "prototype" approach to explaining historical events that it hopes might soon inform its History and News programming. The website, BBC Dimensions <http://howbigreally.com/> , is a Google Earth-based system which aims, so they say, "to bring home the human scale of events and places in history".

And bring things home it quite literally does. Simply tap in your postcode and famous ... read more