Love your enemy – everyone can change: The Beeb

The enemy, this time, is the Beeb. Known worldwide for its fairness, its accuracy, its high standards of journalism; known at home for its current willingness to follow the government's lead on any significant story, its post-Hutton flaccidity, and for its paternalistic tone of voice.

Its intellectual conservatism can be ascribed to its status as one of Britain's leading institutions, after the city banks and the FCO. To a large extent it is staffed by people who will never see any flaws in the BBC brand, who joined in order to have one of those good careers that other people, mere mortals, envy, and who never have any intention of rocking the boat, no matter how bad things get.

Subservience and flattery

Good journalism is crippled by a lust for access to the very people whom the journalists should be investigating. Of course access is necessary, but not when, as now, it is characterised by subservience and flattery.

Impartiality is its watchword - and that is both meaningless and patronising. No thinking person who takes even a moderate interest in world affairs would conclude that the BBC's coverage is impartial. From the moment they put their bids in to the White House or the Knesset, their much avowed impartiality is doomed.

What they call news is most of the time a cocktail of diplomatic or parliamentary tittle-tattle, followed by the weather. They have learnt there is a world beyond Whitehall. They have yet to learn there is a world beyond the White House. Ordinary folk get a look in rarely, usually only when their mangled corpses, rotting in mass graves, are tastefully edited for the pre-watershed viewer. It's a shame.

Pulling faces

At least they're fond of recycling. Sadly it is usually programme ideas they choose to recycle. Then they “cherry-pick” ideas from other networks, that are already bad, and make them rather worse.

It's a shame they waste their resources on news when it's so often apparent that the correspondents diligently picking their way through the rubble or the floods have little real knowledge of where they are or why. Shouldn't blame them. It's in the studio where things get bad, as women in ridiculous makeup, or men in bright ties and bad suits, make their sad or happy faces to guide the viewer through the minefield of world events.

Time to tune out

So what's there to love? Possibly nothing, other than potential. And that's not such a bad thing. Imagine what even a little bit of creative chaos would do? Imagine what would happen if journalists insisted on telling their stories, whatever the lobby groups say, whatever the government line is.

Now its main function is chaining people to their sofas so they can be told what to think and how to feel by “People Who Know” - but that can change. How do we show this petulant paternalistic love of ours how we feel? We switch off. Tough love, you might say, but it's the only way. Then, eventually, they'll realise that their audience has better things to do with their time, like living life, and acting in the world to make things better, rather than sitting around waiting for “The Truth” to be revealed ... just before the sports results and weather.