The Beeb is my favorite British institution. No other nation on Earth has (to my knowledge) anything that can compare to the BBC. It broadcasts TV and radio to millions, worldwide; it operates the most extensive network of news and news journalists; it reaches a wider audience than any other broadcaster; and it does all this thanks to the British viewing and listening public.
The BBC gets a bad press in the UK. It's either too high-brow, too low-brow, too jingoistic, or too "unpatriotic", and sometimes a combination of all of these at the same time for the same people!
A good example of this is the current furore about the BBC's reporting of British intelligence agents claiming that Alastair Campbell, the director of communications at Downing Street (aka "Tony's Spinmeister"), added a few details to the Iraq weapons of mass destruction dossier to make it more "sexy". You can see some of the BBC's take on this story here and here. Regardless of whether the accusations are true or not, the BBC has effectively decided to take on the highest levels of British government. As a consequence, the BBC is literally biting the hand that feeds it. (The BBC is funded through a license fee, which all owners of TVs and radios in the UK pay. The fee is managed by the UK government, which occasionally threatens the Beeb with funding cuts unless it shapes up to whatever demands the government sees fit to make of it.) What other broadcaster would want to so alienate its source of cash?
I'm sure that many Britons don't see the significance of this. In its news operations, the BBC does not aim to please anyone. Rather, it sets out to report the truth, whether that is for or against British interests. During the Falklands conflict, for example, the BBC reported from British and Argentinian camps in order to provide a rounded view of the conflict. The BBC is a completely non-partisan and objective observer of world events and no other example of such an institution, with such audience reception, exists anywhere else in the world.
Due to its unusual mandate, the Beeb can do things that other media outlets cannot. It can run 6 separate TV channels and 4 national radio stations. It can broadcast to the world (the BBC World Service). It can build a web site entirely devoted to Arabic readers.
But lest anyone think that the BBC is all high-brow intellectuals with a fantastic toy, it's important to highlight some of the Beeb's mass-appeal products.
The BBC is so impressive because it possesses a reach and versatility that I simply haven't seen anywhere else. And, for that, Britain and Britons should be proud, and the rest of the world (and I hate to even type this, but it's true) should be grateful.