Goodbye, BBC

You were never unbiased. But you were unbiased in your bias, and I respected that, ya know? But then you started giving inches to your "senior" staff whereby they proceeded to sound like morons talking at great length about topics they had no clue about about. Front page news is no place for some old guy to ponder about if he should use Twitter or not. Bill Thompson, you're not the only one, but I'm singling you out, because you had the gall to - incorrectly - go public saying I was wrong. Yeah, I'm talking about the BBC Radio 4 interview I did on "Smart Tags" and I casually mentioned that RFID tags existed that were just a bit bigger than a grain of (cooked) rice. You went out of your way to say that was "wildly inaccurate" and that the smallest RFID tags at the time were measured in inches. What you failed to understand (besides a basic understanding of how RFID tags work and the privacy issues associated with them) is that I was holding one such tag in my hand during the interview as I said it!

But I overlooked that, because it was obvious you were more interested in people seeing the photo of you with your garish-colored scarf than actually knowing what you were talking about. But then, others followed your lead, and the BBC started putting your opinion pieces scattered throughout the site, and in order to boost views, there were often disguised as actual news events.

Still, I overlooked this, it was easy to, you guys weren't that clever about it. You might have changed the headlines, but your authors were still too egotistical and required their photos next to the headlines.

Then I had to endure the painful process of watching the BBC sell itself out. First to RealPlayer, for making everyone who wanted to watch video news install their outdated crappy player, then to Hugot, pasting their watch ad on every page you could, with all the finesse of a cow in a chinese restaurant. Wait, scratch that, bull in a china shop. Still, I overlooked it. In fact, I installed an ad blocker so I wouldn't have to be embarrassed by your ineptness at selling out. All the while, I am still pushing others toward the BBC over local American news outlets.

But now, you've gone too far. What with Google ads at bottom and banner ads on top and on the side, well, you make CNN look like legitimate news!

I am so sad to say goodbye to you. For years, I championed your site and encouraged everyone to get their news from you because you were ad-free. But now, you're just like all the other greedy money-worshiping so-called news sites. You're tainted. I can't trust you; you've lost your journalistic integrity.

So farewell, and good luck with that.

As for me, well, 7 years of reading the world news hasn't done much for me. I think I'm going to read books instead.