Gordon Berlusconi

This is encouraging.

Seems like Gordon's really making his play. Not only does he want us to think of him as British so that we forget how his majority will be sustained by Scottish MPs when the House votes on English matters, but apparently he's been learning a thing or two about telescreens and Freizeitgestaltung, because what this country really needs right now is yet another organ peddling government orthodoxy. I know the BBC has its own orthodoxy, and that's tiresome enough (in this article, for instance, they draw a beautiful distinction between the two sides of the debate by carefully referring to people they like as campaigners - tireless, committed, ordinary people forced into activism - and those they don't like as lobbyists - shady professionals in the pay of big business hatching plots to subvert our freedom - just so that we're quite clear who the good guys are, despite mounting evidence of the thoroughgoing failure of any and all handgun legislation), but at least at the moment it's free to change its mind should it ever choose to employ people capable of critically rationalist thought. It is not the BBC's task to "sustain citizenship and civil society" any more than it's government's task to report the news. No doubt Brown's envious of the influence exerted over their countries' media by such beacons of transparency as Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi (both owners, if you please, of national media organs), but this narrowing of the gap between state and media is ominous in the extreme.