By BEN CLERKIN

Last updated at 10:49 27 August 2007

Former newsreader Anna Ford has spoken for the first time of the "atmosphere of fear" in the BBC that led to her quitting the Corporation.

Miss Ford, who spent 17 years at the BBC and presented the lunchtime news, has revealed that she quit 15 months ago because she had become marginalised.

And to add to the BBC's woes, the editor of Newsnight has hit out at the Corporation's stance on climate change.

Peter Barron said it was "not the corporation's job to save the planet".

He said the BBC was going beyond its remit by planning an entire day of programmes dedicated to highlighting environmental worries.

Meanwhile, Miss Ford has spoken for the first time about observing a "dumbing down" in standards at the BBC and her decision to quit.

She said: "I think the BBC is now a very unkind and badly managed place.

"There is an atmosphere of fear based on the fact that people have very short contracts, and the youngsters are pushed and pushed and pushed.

"You no longer see people smiling when they work on news programmes," she told the British Journalism Review.

"The nature of the BBC changed fundamentally with the advent of John Birt.

"The fact was he didn't have the self-confidence to manage the place himself but spent millions of pounds - it was said at the time £22m - on management consultants... well, management consultants don't know about programming.

"They are to do with streamlining and the bureaucracy grew and grew and became unkind."

Explaining her decision to quit, she said: "I was so uninvolved that it prompted me to hand in my notice.

"I just thought, I can either take the money and run and go on doing this job, or I can decide it isn't a job that's worth doing," she said.

"The BBC must differentiate itself from all other television companies by making extremely high-class programmes.

"That doesn't mean they shouldn't be popular but they should be the best."

She went on: "I do think complaints about dumbing down are justified.

"I must sound very old fashioned when I use the word vulgarity, but we are constantly seeing people on screen who are of low intelligence and low educational and whose views on everything seem to be made important."