Since this opinion piece will struggle to maintain even a hint of objectivity or detachment, let me confess immediately: I loathe the BBC. One of my great joys as an expatriate Briton is the absence of this media institution from my daily life.

The distance of half the globe now insulates me from its patronizing, distorted, reactionary "news" broadcasts, its disgraceful TV tax, its tedious bourgeois entertainment programming, its insufferable self-righteousness and its arrogant public announcements. Everything rotten about the UK and its smug, pampered, blithely ignorant and dishonest "chattering classes" is distilled in the BBC. When the BBC howls in pain, I exult.

Let there be no doubt about it, right now the BBC is howling in pain. In the wake of the independent Hutton inquiry, which lambasted it unambiguously for its appalling journalistic standards, institutional corruption and ideological bigotry, its two top leaders have been forced to resign, its already dismal reputation has plummeted to new lows, and the enlightened few who aim to privatize this sick public corporation when its charter comes up for renewal in 2006 are sharpening their butchering knives. Even in deeply conservative Britain, those hoping for a modern, open, responsive, honest and truly progressive media culture now see a glimmer of hope ahead.

From its inception the BBC has been an organization quite explicitly dedicated to promoting the tastes, opinions and interests of the British anti-market elite: the privately educated, well-connected and well-accented classes who assumed control of the country's post WWII command economy. In the battle pitting enterprise and opportunity against established privilege the BBC has never wavered in its support for the latter. Its tone is consistently condescending - even sneering - as comes naturally to the complacent beneficiaries of unearned power, untested by commercial reality and deeply resentful of the possibility that ordinary consumers might use the market place to allocate influence and rewards in society.

When Margaret Thatcher - Britain's Deng Xiaoping - fought to overturn decades of economic stagnation, anti-market dogma and fossilized class privilege in the UK during the 1980s, the BBC launched an unremitting propaganda effort against the reforms. In the late 1990s, as it became clear Tony Blair was determined to defend certain aspects of the Thatcher legacy - in particular the introduction of opportunity and competition into Britain's bastions of elite power - he too entered the BBC's cross-hairs.

Because the BBC aligned itself so completely with the self-serving power of closed elites, Tony Blair's US-style theme of meritocratic social mobility - however half-hearted it remained - was an intolerable provocation. Driven apoplectic by the Bush-Blair relationship, the BBC cast aside even the veneer of journalistic neutrality, lining up behind the crude smear-campaign of their correspondent Andrew Gilligan. Gilligan's wild accusations of government "lies" have now been judged to be recklessly irresponsible lies themselves, leading via the suicide of a government scientist and the ensuing Hutton inquiry to the organization's present encounter with nemesis.

Wholesale privatization of the corporation would now be the fitting solution. It will take a Rupert Murdoch to clean out these Augean stables. I hope they get one soon.

starcomment@yahoo.com