On Tuesday the BBC published its annual report — the corporation's own audit of its own year. Then BBC News had to cover it, which is always the fun part. Their headline: “BBC's serious challenges laid bare in annual report.” Laid bare! By whom? By the report. Written by? The BBC. That passive voice is a getaway car with the engine running. * The Guardian read the same document and went straight for the number: “BBC faces 'real jeopardy' as licence fee payments fall faster than expected.” The number is 539,000 — households that stopped paying the licence fee in a single year, leaving 23.3 million. And “real jeopardy” isn't the Guardian being spicy; it's the BBC's own director-general, Matt Brittin, quoted from inside the report. * Then the pay list. The BBC's headline: “Scott Mills was highest-paid BBC star before sacking.” Top of the table at £745,000-and-change — for a presenter the BBC itself sacked this spring, after it emerged police had once investigated historical allegations against him (an inquiry closed back in 2019 with no charges). “Before sacking.” Sacked by whom? The headline genuinely does not say. When the BBC writes about the BBC, everyone in the sentence resigns. * Now the fair bit, because it matters: all of this is on the BBC's own front page. The salary list has its own article — “BBC pay 2025-2026: The full list of star salaries” — one tap away. Plenty of state-adjacent broadcasters would have filed this morning under “regional news, page 40.” Somewhere on this site today there's one that covered a bad national number in exactly two sentences. The BBC marks its own homework, but at least it publishes the marks. * One sleight of hand does deserve your eyebrow: the BBC's licence income actually went UP — £36 million more, £3.88 billion total — because the fee itself rose to £180. Half a million households walked out and the till rang louder. There's a headline in that. The one they wrote was “challenges laid bare.” * The passive voice did what it's always hired to do: it moved the subject quietly out of the room. It's just funnier when the subject, the author and the newsroom are all the same organisation.