Important speech tonight by Roger Mosey, the BBC's head of television news. Mosey makes a number of very interesting points. The vast expansion of choice through the explosion of TV channels has not expanded our society's horizons -- it has shrunk them into a tawdry and sordid theatre of humiliation, cruelty, degradation and trivia.

Samples of this dross: 'It was ITV1 and ITV2 which broadcast a show a year or so back called "Wudja? Cudja?" paying cash rewards for behaviour which was either unpleasant or anti-social. A man was paid £1000 to be stripped to his underwear and tied to a lamp-post before being pelted with fruit. Then worms were tipped over him. In another segment, a host who achieved nerve-tingling levels of awfulness ran round a market town trying to persuade shoppers to show her their bare bottoms...I quote from the Channel 4 website: Three mad mates from the Welsh valleys and one warped Londoner, all united by a total disregard for their own personal safety and a burning desire to destroy the boundaries of taste and decency. Not only will you see the team embarking upon foolhardy ventures such as rolling in stinging nettles, playing naked paintball, lying on beds of drawing pins, drinking their own urine, challenging professional wrestlers and downing four litres of water only to deny themselves lavatory relief - but, rather worryingly, you'll also be taken inside their deranged heads. And if you've ever wondered why someone thinks it's a good idea to nail their genitals to a piece of wood, Dirty Sanchez will reveal all!'

Naturally, these remarks have already produced sneers from the Beeb's competitors that it is returning to 'paternalism'. But so it should. The whole point of the BBC, and of public service broadcasting, is that it has a mission to educate and elevate as well as to entertain. And that is something the Beeb has departed from in recent years, both in its relatively dumbed-down programming -- because what Mosey does not acknowledge is the extent to which the BBC too has been dragged down this path -- and in the corruption of its journalistic standards of objectivity.

With the Hutton report looming in front of him, Mosey tackles this issue too. Refreshingly, he states the following: 'The bottom line is this. It is a legitimate aspiration of the BBC to make Britain a better place. But it cannot do this by reflecting through its journalism or factual programming a world which liberals or anyone else wishes would exist: rather, it has to be clear-sighted about the truth and about reality. News is not a function of social engineering'.

Absolutely. And he acepts the risk of following a 'consensus' view. But then, like every other BBC executive I have ever talked to about this, he refuses to accept what is patently the case -- that most BBC journalism views the world's events through a left-wing prism, a view of the world which is anti-America, anti-Israel, pro-Europe, anti-Tory and pro-social libertinism.

He then says something which illustrates perfectly how he is trapped between his desire to uphold journalistic objectivity and the fact that he too has swallowed the same assumptions:

'And so today we have to be fair and impartial about President George W Bush, despite his unpopularity in this country and in most of the world. The Neoconservative agenda may be right, it may be wrong: I honestly have no conclusions. But I stand by what I said in The Independent: the editorial assumption cannot be that President Bush is automatically wrong in everything he does'.

Absolutely, Roger --except what's all this about Bush's 'neo-conservative' agenda? That is code for 'the Jews now run US foreign policy for the benefit of Israel'. Bush's agenda is not 'neo-con'. It was forged out of the realisation that gripped old-style conservatives along with a load of others that geopolitical realpolitik as we knew it was incinerated in the ashes of the World Trade Centre. The assumption that the neo-cons now call the shots is the very kind of lazy, prejudiced, consensus journalism that Mosey so rightly criticises.

On the basis of Mosey's speech, it seems the BBC is now giving serious attention at long last to the perception of its institutional bias -- but it still has a hell of a way to go before it reasserts the proper standards of public service broadcasting.