FEAR AND LOATHING IN GLASVEGAS

Once again the Twitterati have been spurred into action. Last year it was Jan Moir, Stephen Fry's critic and Trafigura which sparked the ire of the 140-character chattering classes. Now it's the leaked report in the Times that the BBC is considering axing two of its DAB stations and halving the size of BBC Online.

As soon as it was mentioned that 6 Music, the digital network which offers both 'the cutting edge music of today, the iconic and groundbreaking music of the past 40 years'. was in the frame for the axe, the social media Avengers leapt into action, launching online campaigns and flooding the web with hashtags, Facebook groups and digital petitions to protect the channel.

Firstly, and fascinatingly, the vast majority of those launching into action to defend Auntie Beeb and battle the visigoths seem to have ignored that the Asian Network is also under threat, despite it offering an arguably far more vital service than 6 Music's often self-indulgent musical output

This is nothing new, of course. As we saw last year, if something's sacred ground for the Twitterati then the forces of hell are unleashed upon those who oppose it. Dare criticise Stephen Fry for being a teensy bit dull? Prepare to be burned at the stake. The Guardian wants to cover a story but has been gagged by a superinjunction? Let's sail as close to the contempt laws as possible by pointing people in the right direction as to what the story is anyway.

But if all these people flooding Twitter with their #save6Music tags and Twibbons were really concerned, either by the channel's potential demise or the BBC being under threat, surely they'd be listening to the channel already? There seems to be a substantial disconnect between the volume of campaigners demanding the channel be saved at all costs, and the 600,000 people who regularly listen to it. And if it were about defending Auntie's honour, surely we should be seeing an equal amount of #saveAsianNetwork or #saveBBCOnline tags about.

However, 6 Music is staffed by internet darlings such as Adam and Joe, Andrew Collins and Richard Herring, and Lauren Laverne. It's a channel aiming largely at a white, middle-class, digitally savvy, demographic that sits almost exactly in the same bracket as social media's main users. So the focus moves heavily towards protecting 6 Music rather than the ethnic channel.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't particularly want to see 6 Music shut. Nor do I want to see Asian Network close, or the BBC to feel the need to switch off half its website to appease news industry rivals. Nor do I think they should be forced to drop their iPhone apps. Yet the BBC Trust is the driving force behind these, clearly preparing for the potential of an incoming Conservative government by wanting to be seen to be scaling back in size and operation.

I had an interesting email conversation yesterday with a friend of mine down south, who was livid at the BBC even considering scaling back at all, and proclaiming that 'all newspapers are shit' in comparison with the BBC. I can't agree with that, for obvious reasons, but there's a lot in his angry defence of the BBC that I do sympathise with.

Auntie finds itself being attacked on three fronts simultaneously. It faces a battle agains the right wing papers, led by Murdoch's titles, who see it as a bloated, overfunded threat to the competitive broadcast and digital markets. And it faces equally niggling, damaging attacks from the leftist media, especially the Guardian, which sees it as a threat to Kings Place' bid to become the leading free, liberal home of news on the web.

Finally, it has to battle its own ridiculous eager-to-pleaseness. The spineless BBC Trust folds like a bad poker player every time someone peeps up to protest at a new BBC innovation which impinges on an area critics might be able to make some money from. Post Hutton, the BBC is so desperate to not be seen as the bad guy that it often upsets the people who actually watch and care about it the most.

Which is why we end up in the situation detailed in the Times' report. 6 Music and the Asian Network face the axe, to save money and appease those in the commercial sector who claim the BBC stifles competition. Radio 2 is told to play music for older listeners, again because commercial radio can't compete. BBC presenters' salaries come under scrutiny, despite in many cases the vastly inflated sums of money representing not just wages but production costs and fees for their shows.

Last week it emerged the BBC Trust could block the BBC's new news and sport iPhone apps, because newspaper companies object to the competition. This one really gets my blood boiling, and it's unsurprising to find the anti-paywall-but-charging-for-Apps Guardian chief among those wanting the apps killed before they even hit the stores. But it's also the worst example of pettiness, because there is a clear public demand for BBC phone apps, judging by the hundreds of thousands of downloads of the unofficial versions on the iTunes App Store.

And yet there's no attempt to counter some of the other ridiculous decisions being made by the Trust. Most notably, the likely move in Scotland to get BBC Alba on Freeview by sacrificing the BBC Radio channels. So while all the Twitterati south of the border scramble to join the hashtag bandwagon and save 6 Music, up here those of us who use the TV to listen to the radio - at last count a similar number to 6 Music's TOTAL audience - face losing not just 6M, but Radios 1, 1X, 2,3,4, 5Live, 5LSX, 7, Asian Network, World Service and, incredibly, Radio Scotland and Radio nan Gaidheal - for the sake of a £14m vanity project which isn't even accounted for by BARB.

And among all the talk of closing channels BBC Three, possibly the most pointless BBC network ever, still remains untouched.

Ultimately, we need a strong BBC, both to serve the needs of the country as its public service broadcaster, and also to provide a balance to the mainstream press. No other broadcaster in the world could produce shows like Planet Earth or The Nazis: A Warning From History or Screenwipe or Doctor Who. As a public service broadcaster it delivers that the public wants. It delivers regional radio and television at a time when the commerical sector's withdrawing from offering local content. And it needs to be preserved, rather than bullied, for doing what it does.

But that also means looking at delivering genuine value for money for the public - and if that means scaling back a radio channel here or dumping a TV channel there so be it, no matter what a few thousand media dahlings and Twitterati might say.