Readers who woke to Radio 4’s Today programme at around 6:30 a.m. can be forgiven for leaping out of bed in alarm. ‘There has been a coup at the BBC!’ cried presenter Nick Robinson, or words to that effect. Clearly, as we lay snoozing, a hostile takeover of our state broadcaster was underway. ‘These are not,’ Robinson informed us, ‘normal times’. Indeed, they are not.

His monologue began:

The boss of the organisation which remains, despite all the rows about bias, the most trusted news organisation in the country – perhaps also across the globe – has quit, along with the head of news, after a row in which the President of the United States denounced what he called ‘doctoring’ of what he had said in a speech featured on a BBC Panorama programme.

Remove the caveats, and this is a b

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