Outrage! There ought to be some, though the fact that I have only heard about the BBC's rent-a-heckler scheme to barrack Howard, as far as the MSM is concerned, from the Telegraph and a little snippet on Sky suggests that it will slip smoothly down the well-worn memory sinkholes out there. (This first link is to BiasedBBC's snippet-summary.)

However, I have to say that I agree with David Vance that 'The BBC is a menace to democracy in this country and that is one more reason why it should be privatised.'

This follows from my agreement with the Rottweiller Puppy that 'The fact of it is that when you're actually bringing in demonstrators and filming them while they disrupt a political rally, you've stepped across the wire, so to speak, between filming the news and actually manufacturing it. This isn't documentary-making, it's political activism.'

One could add to that nascent chorus USSNeverdock's conclusion: 'What a pathetic, biased and bumbling organization the BBC has become.'

My own view (to add that) is that this incident is not surprising. Observing the Beeb's tendancy to highlight every utterance of Howard on the subject of immigration it's clear they feel he is one step away from warranting 'Griffining'. They've been itching to have a go at Howard for weeks, and in the spirit of over-zealous theologians if there isn't a heckler for Howard then it's time to go and invent some.

An interesting insight into the media world we live in is available if we contrast the BBC's unheralded manufacturing of stories (which, as we know from Gilligan and other incidents is something of a Jayson Blair-like habit on a grand institutionalised scale) with the reaction to a very simple Channel Five documentary gleaned merely from dropping in on life in average British Comprehensive schools. Laban Tall has that story.

A couple of things are confirmed a little for me by this story. One is that British schools are about as bad as your worst intuition might have told you. Another is that Channel Five is a place where interesting outcast programme-makers can find some of the interest they deserve.

Lifting my gaze for a moment from the squalidness of what can be called the detritus
of cool Britannia, I note that some big events are taking place around the world. This post from the diplomats at the New Sisyphus blog, and this from Mark Steyn, are sufficiently sobering to make me see that Howard's seriousness in taking on Blair, and the disservice that even the most moderate or supportive media are doing him, are really quite serious matters indeed. We need a serious leader for the coming years, and we can't afford a lame-duck Blair or a scheming Brown, but the MSM in Britain is likely to deliver us to them.