Did you see that BBC Director General Mark Thompson has used his Edinburgh TV festival (Where else, natch?) speech to hit back at the corporation’s critics. He accepted the need for “radical change” in the corporation but rejected calls for the licence fee to be cut. Why? It seems to me that the license fee must be abolished (or at least savagely cut!) to enable the BBC to play on a level playing field! What say you? The bias can continue but we should not be funding it.
BEYOND THE FRINGE…
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Why doesn’t he agree to going over to an encrypted subscription based service like Sky?
Then the BBC can charge what they like and if people like it they will pay, if they don’t then they won’t pay.
Hey. Telling the truth or filming real news as it happens, is cheap. Anyone with a camera can do it.
Manufacturing news though, making events appear as they never were, is an art. There arent many who can do it, and they cost a lot of money.
Moreover the public (atleast the ones who get offended and start slitting throats and blowing up buses), as well the people who pay the BBC, like their news and current affairs vetted for PC content, as well approved to EU guidelines(Reading the tomes of EU guidelines by an EU approved lawyer, costs a lot of money) + sharia compliant.
Nothing comes cheap. If you want real news, go see it yourself, as there is no such thing as ubiassed news.
/sarc/irony/
“Stuart Murphy: BBC is 90% meetings, 10% action”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/27/bbc-sky-stuart-murphy
The BBC knows that not enough people would choose to pay for it in it’s present form, But there is a danger that we could fall out of the frying pan into the fire. The BBC would accept direct funding from the government supported by general taxation, We would then have a worse situation where no one could choose not to pay.
I doubt if even this noodly Government would want to increase taxation on the BBC’s behalf. Yes, the licence fee is in effect a tax – but not a Government tax.
Thompson’s stupid speech has merely increased the general level of criticism of the flabby and arrogant BBC – much of this morning’s press hangs attacks on the BBC on their reports of the speech. The fool would have done better to stay quiet – but the Festival always has a keynote speech at a special TV event, trust Thompson to rush in.
Nothing the illshaven Thompson says is worth listening to. His sole directive is to keep dragging money from the people and to keep his ridiculous salary and pension. It’s just special pleading and we all know it. The technolgy exists to make the BBC subscription. Just get on with it and put this bloated state quango out it it’s misery.
Isn’t the licence fee one of those dreadful regressive taxes that the Beeboids campaign against?
Mr Thompson is arrogant and out of touch to ask Sky to make more home grown programmes.
The BBC makes plenty, and most of them are complete and utter trash. Eastenders, Casualty, Holby City, Doctors, Flog It, Car Booty, Cash in the Attic, Cash in the Celebrity Attic, Bargain Hunt, Celebrity Masterchef, The Lottery Show, Homes Under The Hammer, To Buy or not to Buy, Cars, Cops and Criminals, Motorway Cops etc etc.
Perhaps Thompson wants Sky to provide some quality to balance the torrent of downmarket rubbish that is now his corporation’s speciality. in. Surely he can’t think that more of the same garbage the BBC already provides is required from Sky too.
The list of programes above demonstrates that the licence fee system has failed completely, unless of course its objective was the supply of vast amounts of dumbed down dross at huge expense in generous salaries, pensions and expenses.
Sky don’t make much so called quality programming as they already carry TV channels that specialise in it (Discovery, Nat Geographic, History etc.), the BBC just don’t get the concept, rather than try to provide everything (like the bloated BBC does) you concentrate on offering people a choice.
I don’t pay for the movie or sports channels as I don’t want them, but I do enjoy the informative channels. Discovery have run two excellent series that I enjoyed, one by Stephen Hawking and one on the Universe. both high quality programming and would put the leftie crap that passes as ‘science’ at the BBC to shame.
Sky does provide two dedicated arts channels which I occasionally watch, but Sky 1,2,3 etc is mostly US imported shows (many of which are high quality)
The BBC just don’t get it, they are no longer relevant today, the beeboid mindset is one of “everyone pays for the BBC because we are the finest broadcaster”
Well they are not.
Well, in terms of talk vs. action, it has certainly sparked ‘debate’…again.
Here’s a view from the periphery of the establishment, that nonetheless does seems to have cropped up on twitter a bit:
http://theviewfromcullingworth.blogspot.com/2010/07/on-line-news-bbc-is-problem-not-murdoch.html
I do note that the ‘inevitable Tory trolls’ do not seem to have arrived first in response. One presume those who set out this stall first on many a Graun CiF will see their doing so here as entirely legitimate for… er… well… it just is.
I am not quite as enthusiastic about Mr. Murdoch’s empire as is the good councillor, but it does seem to exist in other countries without them suffering, and requiring a force-funded state broadcaster to act as ‘balance’.
Almost all arguments are out there, and get re-hashed enough to spin in one place to run Kirsty Wark’s villa tennis court’s floodlights, so it is getting tiresome enough to wonder where one goes from here. A bit like the corporation’s risible complaints process.
But just for the absence of doubt, simply basing a few points on the ‘respondents’ to the good councillor thus far, plus one of my own:
* I don’t care if ‘others do it’. I don’t (have to) pay for them. Two wrongs making a £3.6B ring-fenced pot does not come close to being right.
* I simply don’t accept that my only simple option is to cease paying, and hence also accessing any means of broadcast.
* ‘The BBC’ (though I accept it comprises many folk, most of whom I am sure are but passengers, albeit silently complicit ones) has brought almost all this upon itself by confusing the delivery of entertainment and information with the need to change behaviour, across the board, based on, and via the broadcast of personal and/or corporate opinion/agenda.
* Breathtaking hypocrisy in how the BBC views its words, images and actions, and arrogance at near every turn in how it addresses legitimate concerns.
In short, I think Mr. T has placed even more feet in his ample gob, and is now in the process of shooting each one, secure in the knowledge that a thru&thru will not carry on to do any damage to functioning vital organs.
£800k+ well siphoned off the people of this country. Not.
Scrappydoo’s caution is well taken, but if such a route is even floated, my MP will be left in no doubt (beyond that I have already shared on his outfit’s spineless tolerance of elitist propaganda) his vote will evaporate if any support is shown.
“The bias can continue but we should not be funding it.”
I disagree. The BBC has far too great a foothold in the public mind to now be allowed to continue its bias, even if the licence fee were abolished. It would be perceived as unbiased by too many due to its former status.
One problem is that many people accept the licence as inevitable, rather like car road tax enables car useage the TV licence is a levy to enable broadcasting?
Maybe opponents should change our language and never ever refer to it as a TV licence but always as a BBC tax or BBC fee. Anything that changes perceptions might help.
“BBC to feel Pensions wrath”
http://www.express.co.uk/money/view/196252/BBC-to-feel-pensions-wrath
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Mark Thompson’s speech shows that like the French Bourbons the BBC learned nothing and forgot nothing and it would take a public awareness revolution for things to change.