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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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He was long an authoritative voice on the BBC, a respected journalist responsible for imparting momentous news to the nation. But now Michael Buerk has turned on the Corporation that employed him for more than four decades, blasting its Diamond Jubilee coverage as ‘cringingly inept’.
 
And he reserves his strongest criticism for the presenters on the day – who included Strictly Come Dancing co-host Tess Daly – decrying them as ‘airheads’ who failed to convey the majesty of the occasion.
 

Tess Daly with that other bird brain

 
In his article Buerk argues that the spectacle and significance of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, which should have been an event to unite the nation in pride, was ‘betrayed’ by the vacuous BBC coverage. “The one enduring British institution [the Monarchy] was mocked by another that had shamefully lost its way. On the screen, a succession of Daytime airheads preened themselves, or gossiped with even more vacuous D-list “celebrities”. With barely an exception, they were cringingly inept.”
 
“Nobody knew anything, nobody cared. The main presenter couldn’t even work out what to call the Queen. The Dunkirk Little Ships, the most evocative reminders of this country’s bravest hour, were ignored so that a pneumatic bird-brain from Strictly Come Dancing could talk to transvestites in Battersea Park.
 
“I was so ashamed of the BBC I would have wept if I hadn’t been so angry. The worst thing was that it was deliberate – planned that way to be “light” and “inclusive”.”
 
Buerk reserves particular spite for George Entwistle, the BBC executive responsible for the Jubilee coverage who was subsequently promoted to director-general. But he was forced to resign after just 54 days in the job following the Jimmy Savile and Lord McAlpine Newsnight fiascos, pocketing an estimated £400,000 pay-off. Buerk says: “The BBC actually congratulated itself, and the executive ultimately responsible was promptly promoted to become the most disastrous director-general in the Corporation’s history.”
 
The BBC attracted 2,425 complaints over its coverage of the Thames flotilla in June, with viewers complaining of the trivial nature of the broadcast and elementary mistakes such as referring to the Queen as ‘HRH’ instead of ‘Her Majesty’.
 
This is not the first time Mr Buerk has turned his fire on the BBC and its employees. He once said of his fellow newsreaders “You get a great deal of money, you have very little work to do and you don’t need a brain. There are some real lame-brains doing it. It is the only job that actually requires no talent at all. If you can read out loud, you can do it.”
 
His opinion of the BBC is famously low. He says “The BBC is a private school old boys’ and girls’ association ... now, while most of us are being squeezed, senior executive pay soars and, even at the top of public service organisations like the BBC, fortunes are flung at failures.”
 
He accuses BBC staff of making the Guardian newspaper their “bible” and political correctness "their creed”. Writing in the political magazine Standpoint, he said “What the BBC regards as normal and abnormal, what is moderate or extreme, where the centre of gravity of an issue lies, are conditioned by the common set of assumptions held by the people who work for it. It’s all very well-meaning, and painstakingly even-handed, but often notably adrift of the overriding national sentiment.”
 
Accustomed to speaking his mind, Buerk once annoyed the Welsh (always a satisfying thing to do, The GOS finds) by writing “Wales is not another country; it’s England with an accent and a good singing voice. But it is being pulled along by Scotland in devolution’s slipstream, whether it likes it or – more probably – not”.
 
He also caused controversy in 2005 when he claimed life was now lived “according to women’s rules” and men were reduced to little more than “sperm donors”.
 

 
The GOS says: Well, good. It needs saying.
 
Not that Buerk himself is completely immune from the malaise that affects the BBC and most other media at the moment. Their problem – and ours, therefore – is that no matter what events unfold in the world, the media always think it's about them. That we might be interested in the subject matter and not in their own tawdry little lives and opinions just never enters their heads.
 
Bastards.

 

 
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