The BBC has never been perfect. It gave Spike Milligan an audience for a  kind of humour that surely none of its executives could even begin to fathom, but then over-worked him into multiple nervous breakdowns. It accomodated Thatcherism to the extent that by the late 80s the only television drama produced in-house was Doctor Who, and then that was gone, too. At any one time, for every arm of the corporation that seems at its nadir, there's always another that is producing something miraculous. You can't pick tomorrow's winners at the expense of the day after tomorrow's winners. It must respond to valid criticism (at the moment, the state of news and current affairs is dire), but it also deserves a reasonable measure of security, across the full breadth of its services, that recognises its globally unique role, and its capacity for—dare I say?—regeneration.

Update: John Sheil at openDemocracy argues that we should be defending the BBC based not on its past, but its potential future.