IN THEIR OWN WORDS

The BBC. Condemned out of its own mouths.

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"Journalists and media organisations [are] waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people."

-- BBC Middle East correspondent Fayad Abu Shamala at a Hamas rally

"When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry."

-- BBC Middle East correspondent Barbara Plett commenting on Yasser Arafat's death. Fortunately an internal whitewash cleared her of any 'bias'.

"If you persist in making these allegations [of bias], I will treat it as harassement [sic]. If you attempt to contact me again this bureau will pass you [sic] emails on to the police."

-- Illiterate BBC Middle East correspondent Orla Guerin in an email to one of her many critics

"I'm in the center of Baghdad ... and I don't see anything ... But then the Americans have a history of making these premature announcements."

-- Disgraced ex-BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan during Iraq War

"America is often portrayed as an ignorant, unsophisticated sort of place, full of bible bashers and ruled to a dangerous extent by trashy television, superstition and religious bigotry, a place lacking in respect for evidence based knowledge. I know that is how it is portrayed because I have done my bit to paint that picture."

-- BBC's Washington correspondent Justin(itforthemoney) Webb, proving his mouth is of sufficient capacity to facilitate the emplacement of both feet

"We get from time to time people saying you're biased in favour of the Labour Party. Every time I ask people - show me a case of that bias, explain to me where we got it wrong and why what we said was so unfair - they seem to be unable to do so."

- Andrew 'Guardian' Marr, demonstrating a 100% disengagement with the real world

"We must ensure that we don't become Americanised."

- Greg Dyke, then-BBC Director General. Presumably the Sahara Desert must similarly strive not to become flooded?

"(The BBC is) "basking in a Jacuzzi of spare public cash."

- Mark Thompson when he ran competing broadcaster Channel Four. Upon becoming Director General of the BBC, Thompson ordered four reviews of the bloated organization's activities and finances, thousands of redundancies, and massive pay rises for top managers like himself.

"I was gobsmacked to hear, in a set of headlines today, that the coalition was suffering 'significant casualties.' This is simply not true. Nor is it true to say - as the same intro stated - that coalition forces are fighting 'guerrillas.' It may be guerrilla warfare, but they are not guerrillas…."

"Who dreamed up the line that the coalition are achieving 'small victories at a very high price?' The truth is exactly the opposite. The gains are huge and costs still relatively low. This is real warfare, however one-sided, and losses are to be expected."

- Paul Adams, BBC defence correspondent for the Iraq War, in an internal memo the BBC denied existed - until it appeared in a national newspaper!

"There are many reasons why the BBC should be allowed to survive. Far from extending knowledge, or increasing literacy, the Age of Information has merely enshrined the notion that people should watch what they want, and not what anyone else considers to be good for them. Judged by such standards, the low-level aggressions perpetrated by journalists cannot really be called cynical. The BBC is a last bastion of intelligent speech and therefore of mass intelligence. It is even more important now than it was during the propaganda wars of the last century - because it is one of the few reliable maps of consciousness still available to us."

- BBC documentarian Nicholas Fraser, saying in far too many words that journalists should be allowed to lie to us 'for our own good'.

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