TWENTY WORDS: Reader Franco Aleman emails:

The NYT is starting to see the light; the piece is a good one. But what I found astonishing is the first paragraph, coming from the same ranks that made such a big fuss over the 16 words by Bush on his SOTU address…

Yes. Here are the opening paragraphs:

The BBC, the world’s largest and best known public service broadcaster, sends out millions of words daily, but its long-nurtured reputation for accuracy, fairness and objectivity is being challenged for just 20 of them.

On May 29, the defense correspondent of its morning radio news show, Andrew Gilligan, said that the government had inserted into its dossier of intelligence on Iraqi arms the claim that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons that were deployable within 45 minutes.

Mr. Gilligan went on to say that “actually the government probably knew that that 45-minute figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in.” The phrase took only seconds to utter, at 6:07 a.m., but the effect has been long lasting.

And it’s not over:

While most attention has been focused on the decline in public trust of Mr. Blair’s government, the BBC’s ratings have slid as its practices and internal judgments have been exposed. In a poll in The Daily Telegraph late last week, 47 percent of those questioned said their opinion of Mr. Blair had gone down since the inquiry began, and 36 percent said their opinion of the BBC had also fallen.

Rightly so.

UPDATE: John Keegan observes:

It does seem extraordinary, whatever value we give to the issues of freedom of speech and independence of the media, that a body founded by royal charter and supported by what is effectively a tax on subscribers should treat with the government as if it were a sovereign body.

The rights and immunities conferred on the BBC at the outset of its existence were clearly both desirable and justifiable, if it were not to become an agency of government news management.

The enlargement of those rights engineered by the BBC, particularly in recent years, suggests that both its employees and trustees now conceive themselves to be outside and even above democratic and constitutional processes. . . .

The issues raised by the BBC’s conception of itself as a sovereign power are too large to be dealt with by Lord Hutton. They are crucial, nevertheless, in the context of the inquiry, because they have worked to direct its focus away from the purpose for which it was called into being.

Accountable to neither the voters nor the marketplace! That’s the ultimate New Class dream, of course, and explains in part why the BBC has such iconic status to the New Class, worldwide.

UPDATE: Biased BBC has more on this, of course.