The Beeb's new home...

...Lights out at the BBC

We were wrong when we thought we would kill off the newspapers. They adapted to meet our threat. If they could not beat us on speed of news delivery they could – and did – slaughter us on the features pages and in the opinion columns. They chose a battleground on which the state broadcaster, shackled by guidelines that demanded impartiality and balance over polemic and opinion, could not compete. I remember when we decided to include the equivalent of a leader column in the Nine O’Clock News. It lasted, I think, a month.