The letter appears in today's Guardian, refuting a story the paper carried yesterday, , regarding the BBC's coverage of events surrounding the war in Iraq.
The Guardian's piece said: "The Murdoch papers have acted as the most amazingly disciplined attack force on behalf of the government, savaging the BBC in identical terms, from The Sun, to The Times, to the News of the World, using columnists, editorials and front-page splashes to pursue the cause."
The piece went on to say that the reason for this is because of the communications bill and News International owner Rupert Murdoch's desire to own a terrestrial television station in the UK.
Hinton described the article as "hallucinatory ramblings" and rejected claims made in the story. In his letter, he wrote: "News International does not, and never did, want to buy Channel Five. David Puttnam and his followers refuse to believe this; I promise you they are wrong."
He denied that there is a company-wide line on the government or the BBC at its newspapers, backing his evidence by quoting from The Sun's polemical columnist Richard Littlejohn who, Hinton said, regularly describes Cherie Blair as a "wicked witch".
"The government and BBC are both institutions riddled with qualities and faults; our editors and columnists need follow no agenda from the top in deciding what they are," he wrote.
In the UK, Murdoch's Sun has been in favour of the war in Iraq all along, and the news that Saddam Hussein's sons had been killed was greeted with the headline "Got 'em". Fox News in the US has been noted for its similarly pro-war attitude, but the Times is more circumspect in its coverage.
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