Your analysis of the dreadful BBC is correct. You might add that it is effectively free of accountability to elected representatives. (Its "journalistic integrity" requires no less.) Similarly, Freedom of Information legislation recently enacted substantially exempts it.

Recently the organization has suggested that the license fee be extended to computers, because people will soon be able to download or stream much TV output. It is deemed too powerful to reform.

Having just returned from three weeks in England in a rented car with BBC Radio Four prominent among the preprogrammed stations, I heartily concur. I grew up with Lord Reith's BBC, when spoken English was a language of beauty which I, a born Dutchman, learnt and mastered with an almost religious fervour. The programming was instructive, balanced, and analytical--at least on what was then the Third Programme. Now the staff speak (at best) Estuary English, and the programming doesn't bear listening to for more than five or ten minutes.

This said, David Cameron is not a Conservative leader who has the slightest idea of conserving anything, and the solitary activity he was asked about may end up being both compensatory and symbolic.

And yet, and yet. What a decent country England is, in spite of its dumbed-down public discourse. If someone could shut down all its "media" (from BBC to Sky, from the Sun to the Times) hermetically for five years, we might well see a remarkably pleasant society re-emerging from the rubble of the rubbish.