Baroness Stowell, Chair of the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, said: “Decisions about funding mechanisms have to be led by a clear articulation of what the country wants from its national broadcaster, and how it will change for that to be delivered. The BBC needs to be more open and front-footed in setting that out, or else face change being imposed upon it.”
And there it is. The classic Tory playbook: intentionally underfund, declare unsustainable, and open up for private interests; in this case, likely advertising and other types of product placement.
Nothing is sacred to these malicious pricks.
That’s not restricted to the UK. Conservative parties across the world use the same tactic. American conservatives have been trying to sell off the US Postal Service for ages claiming it’s “unprofitable” while strangling it with regulations and dumb rules like forcing it to fund pensions 70 years in advance.
The notion that a public service needs to be profitable is so backwards.
Yeah but we’re in a UK community talking about the UK…
Sacred? Ridiculous.
The BBC, this “institution”, has used legal threats to screw the British public out of money to pay for the inane whims of Oxbridge alumni, stirred up hatred and support for the blood sucking elites of this country and shielded sex offenders for the better part of a century.
Then they turn around and sell the fruits of license fee payer funds to other channels internationally, via VHS, DVD and Blu-ray sales then finally to the premium streaming services. You have to pay to see the shows you paid to make!
That’s not to mention the amount of money they get in merchandise sales. Remember the Cyberman Voice Changer Helmet? That was the top toy one Christmas.
Times have changed, the BBC needs to die.
This has literally nothing to do with the tories’ agenda.
Take all the issue with paying a TV license that you want, but don’t for a second act like the Tories won’t have their cake and eat it with privatisation.
You’ll be paying the license fee, watching adverts, and thanking them for it if they can have their way entirely.
Much like the inevitable privitisation of the NHS - should they maintain power - won’t lead to any realized tax cuts.
They hate you and think you’re a piece of shit. Don’t let them distract you from that for a single damn moment.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of the Tories.
But you’re acting as if the BBC is some sort of benevolent public service working in the best interests of the country that the Conservatives are trying to bring down.
It’s truly a for-profit endeavour which hides horrific practices under the guise of caring about the nation and deludes the real workers in society into supporting it just so those at the very top profit obscenely. Sound familiar?
The BBC and the Conservative party are both dinosaurs of a bygone era slowly wheezing their last breaths as they become irrelevant in their respective spaces. All I can say is it’s about damn time.
You really need to read back what I said because i didn’t sing any praises of the BBC in any of my comments, nor really say anything about them at all.
I agree with some of what you said, I don’t know enough about their for profit endeavors to comment.
Regardless, my prior comments were entirely directed at the Tory party. The BBC are just another example of their classic three step death-by-a-thousand-cuts privitisation plan.
Their potential or confirmed crimes don’t matter. The enemy of my enemy is, in this case, very much NOT my friend.
So we both hate the BBC and the Tories. I’ll drink to that.
I don’t hate them. But I don’t think TV licensing is ethical, practical, or sustainable, so I’m right with you there.
As a Canadian expat, I was actually excited to start paying a license fee when I moved here. I’d grown up on a bunch of BBC dramas and comedies and thought it pretty cool to be able to contribute. I thought the BBC was like our CBC: publicly funded and not controlled by the state.
Then I started living here, and following the BBC coverage of issues I cared about. I was blown away by the amount of propaganda and straight up Tory shilling the BBC does. I cancelled my license fees after a year and didn’t look back.
I’m well aware of the Tory tactic of corrupting a service until the public calls for privatisation, but from where I’m sitting, there’s nothing worth saving anymore. The irresponsible journalism coming out of there is only slightly better than The Sun, but carries more weight due to their hard earned reputation.
I’d rather see it burn than let that reputation be leveraged to burn the rest of us.
straight up Tory shilling the BBC does.
I’d love to see you justify this. The BBC doesn’t shill for anyone as far as I can see. Its coverage generally is straight down the line -sure with a status quo bias.
Some of Laura Kuenesburg’s social media posts were idiotic, but new political editor Chris Mason is excellent in my opinion.
Sure, here’s a short list of just some of the terrible shit they did to bias the public toward the Tories:
- Laura Kuennsberg (senior political editor) revealed the results of secret postal votes two days before the election.
- She also falsely accused a member of the public of punching a Tory adviser.
- One of their reporters said "If Johnson wins the majority that he so deserves” live on air.
- They edited Remembrance Day epitaph footage and replaced it with 2016 footage.
- They edited out audience laughter at Boris Johnson during a Question Time special.
- They ran a special Question Time show for young people and stacked the audience with leavers despite 70% of the under 30’s wanting to remain.
- They claimed vote Leave was cleared of wrongdoing during the Brexit referendum (they weren’t).
- An Investigation into Facebook ads found that the Conservatives lie 88% of the time, while Labour didn’t lie at all. The BBC reported that “Ads are ‘indecent, dishonest and untruthful’” without citing who was doing the lying.
This is before we talk about their efforts to paint opposition as communists.
A lot of this goes back to 2016 when the Conservatives changed the rules around how the BBC’s board was appointed. Basically the BBC hasn’t been “arms-length” for years and it’s glaringly obvious in their journalism.
Quite an old bit of pasta, but lets go through them.
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The Kuennsberg stuff on social media with her shooting from the hip before establishing the facts was bad and she should have been censured.
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The “deserved majority” - she was describing the conservatives positioning of their strategy from their point of view. Clearly mispoke.
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The remembrance stuff was a cockup where at 5am someone grabbed a clip from the CMS that had been used the day before for the preview and was sitting in ‘recently use’. You don’t include Tim Farron and David Cameron in the clip if you are trying to be sneaky
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The laughter edit was wrong.
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The Question Time audience issue consists of someone on Twitter alledging the the audience was deliberately stacked to be pro Brexit. I can’t find any other coverage alleging that - can you? and if it was this programme, it wasn’t just about Brexit https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50722313#
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Question Time and Fiona Bruce claiming Leave was cleared of wrongdoing - Fiona Bruce shouldn’t be presenting the programme, in my opinion.
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The story does actually say who is doing the lying though I agree, having it buried in the second half isn’t great. Note the update though, saying that a small proportion of Labour’s ads (7%) were untruthful.
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The Jeremy Corbyn hat thing is just laughable.
I know you say that you’ve never looked back, but this pasta basically selects all the cockups that occurred on one side to try and paint a picture of instututional bias in news reporting.
You look at the political coverage of the Johnson unravelling, Truss or Sunak and the BBC are giving the government a well-deserved pummelling.
Here’s a more recent example. The bias at the BBC is palpable. These are not the actions of a public broadcaster. They do however look like what a state broadcaster would say.
That’s some amazingly heavily edited footage there. It’s worth seeking out the unedited version if you want to make the accusations of bias.
So firstly, as you’ll know - the BBC has come under a lot of political attack for refusing to call Hamas terrorists - and still don’t. Theres’s good evidence that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza - and the BBC has covered that.
But genocide is the deliberate attempt to wipe out an entire people and that’s a word that the BBC would argue - like ‘terrorist’ has to be used carefully. It does not simply mean a wilful disregard for civilian lives.
Interestingly enough, the biggest cockup in the BBC’s coverage during this was, was the misreporting of the explosion at the Gaza hospital as being due up an Israeli missike strike that flattened it.
This was jumped on by critics of the BBC as a flagrant example of anti-Israel bias.
Bottom line, the BBC is imperfect, but tries to report impartiality. People with strong opinions dislike impartial reporting.
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The public is never the one calling for privatisation, the government do that
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