Jeremy Paxman is (as the Brits candidly call them) a news presenter on the BBC. Over the last weeks the network has been mired in controversy that is more like dirt about its truthfulness, fairness, balance, and all of the other virtues which it has smugly claimed for itself for decades. Paxman surely was engaging in hyperbole when he said that working at the BBC was like working in Stalin's Russia. But it is a mark of the disarray in official England's smug voice to the world that such hyperbole is now routine. Would that there were such candor about the unjustified self-satisfaction of public television and public broadcasting in the U.S. As in Britain, PBS veils the realities of what happens behind the scenes that produces the ideological monotone of high-minded programming, like that of Bill Moyers, formerly LBJ's top assistant, now once again a sanctimonious preacher. In Britain actually, the matter of BBC's coverage has gone to the courts. There was so much criticism of BBC reportage about Israel and the Palestinians that the network in 2003 and 2004 commissioned a more-or-less internal study of the facts, conducted by Malcolm Balen. When the report was turned in in 2006, the BBC admitted that Balen had found that the network had much coverage biased against Israel. But its board refused to release it to the public. Imagine a public broadcasting system, paid for entirely with public funds, sequestering such a report. PS: Apropos PBS' latest (and pathetic) efforts at honesty, read Philip Jenkins' posting yesterday on "PBS and Historical Objectivity" in Open University.