Trust in the BBC is at an all-time low, because of recent scandals - rigged results to phone-in votes, and misrepresentation of an incident involving the monarch in which she was shown in a bad light.

It's about time the public woke up to the Establishment propaganda machine. Pity that it had to be because the Head of State fell victim to it's manipulation of events. That time it was for effect, usually it's to more sinister ends. Reversal of a filmed sequence to distort the facts is nothing new to the BBC, though it's usual milieu is the news rather than entertainment programmes. The miners had a taste of it more than once during their great struggle to save their industry. Simon Pirani, editor of the NUM newspaper during the big strike, gives an example -

"... no apology or correction was offered when BBC news reversed the order of events at Orgreave in 1984, screening shots of miners throwing stones at police before showing mounted officers charging the miners. In 1991, though, in response to a complaint by Charles Alverson of Cambridge, Martin Hart, on behalf of the then BBC director general, acknowledged that the film had been reversed. Hart claimed: "It was a mistake made in the haste of putting the news together ... an editor inadvertently reversed the occurrence of the actions of the police and of the pickets." No inquiry. No measures to ensure it doesn't happen again. No public admission. "http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2134594,00.html

Others have furnished further examples -http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2136625,00.html

As for the rigged ballots. It's well known that the runaway winner of the vote for BBC sports personality of the year in 1991 was Bob Nudd, world champion angler. But the BBC opted to give the award to the athlete Liz McColgan. The BBC didn't do angling, you see, so there was no percentage in promoting the sport.

Personally I lost confidence in the BBC in the early seventies, when the BBC news reporter for the Middle East was a right-wing American Zionist called Michael Elkins. This gent was allowed to broadcast Zionist propaganda as news on the BBC. At the same time the BBC's news from Northern Ireland was being spun by an Orangeman named Waldo Maguire, who ensured that all reports from his fiefdom showed the "Loyalists" in a good light, and ascribed all violence to the Papists.

I didn't know enough history to lose confidence earlier. It was much later that I learned of the BBC's role in the General Strike of 1926, broadcasting falsehoods to undermine the morale of the striking workers, and break their solidarity.

The history of the BBC is a history of lies, disinformation, and class war partisanship. If Murdoch ever succeeds in his ambition to take it over it might not be too much of a culture shock. It will just be a case of breaking out its true colours and nailing them to the mast.