Dog eats man whole

It's not surprising that Paul Dacre's comments about the BBC and privacy have not gone down well at the Guardian. Polly Toynbee calls Dacre "the nation's bully-in-chief" and "a coward".

Peter Wilby's analysis is equally harsh:

He argues, with truly astonishing sophistry, that "the freedom to write about scandal" is essential to "the democratic process" because, otherwise, newspapers like his wouldn't sell copies and therefore wouldn't exist.Dacre says that "it is the duty of the media to take an ethical stand." Pick up the Daily Mail and you will see that his idea of ethics includes running stories that are, at best, distorted and, at worst, plain wrong.