Another Insider's View of the BBC

Yet another Dissident writing in the Telegraph :

I work for the BBC. There - I've said it. In spite of everything I have written in the past and am about to write now, you should know that a proportion of my income comes from the very news and current affairs operation that is taking a deserved hammering in the print media.

Along with a few other newspaper journalists, I cross the line regularly to act as a pundit for the comment and analysis programmes that constitute the BBC's outer fringe of broadcast opinion and argument.

I am a token Right-of-centre political voice, permitted to express my views provided that I am cancelled out by an acceptably Left-of-centre one (or two) and carefully framed by health warnings about my notorious political sympathies. I am often metaphorically backlit like something out of Leni Riefenstahl .
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Anyone who wonders why the world view of the BBC seems so alarmingly homogeneous, unself-critical and smug - whether on tax-and-spend economics (good) or US foreign policy (bad) - should spend a few hours on the phone with BBC researchers. The most startling difference between them and their newspaper counterparts is that they have, almost invariably, never worked anywhere but the BBC.
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Staff are recruited sometimes straight from university into the hermetically sealed environment of a corporation that is so huge and powerful that when you are inside it, you cannot see the edges.

What strikes you most about the BBC scene is what a closed world it is. Walk into a BBC newsroom and you will hear more talk about the BBC itself than about the outside world: more office and corporate politics than real politics. (The atmosphere always reminds me of a university: all bitchy, cliquey, internal gossip and personal rivalries on which the wider world scarcely impinges.)
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BBC staff often say proudly that it is their responsibility to oppose whatever government is in power. Well, actually, it isn't. To question the Government with critical rigour, to be sceptical about its claims - yes. To oppose systematically everything that it does - no. Examination and analysis are the business of tax-funded journalism. Opposition is the business of mandated politicians. And there is a difference between scepticism (the Government may be wrong) and cynicism (all governments are always wrong).