Busy day. I have been afforded the opportunity to comment on the future of the BBC itself on BBC Scotland, BBC 5Live and BBC London today. In essence, my argument is that the BBC is an anachronism, built on a financial model from a previous century that is TOTALLY unsuitable to digital 2015. The tide of history is going out and the BBC is being left high and dry on the foreshore.
I pointed out that the BBC is like a junkie, hooked on a £3.5bn license tax, and it needs to get off this. It needs to stop hiding behind the apron-strings of Government and compete in the free market. It needs to have the confidence to BELIEVE the things it says. IF it has great output, people will choose to subscribe. If they don’t want it, why should they be forced to fund it?
I also went on to point out that the BBC has a left wing bias that many people take exception to. I see no issue with the BBC being BIASED so long as it stops pretending it is UNBIASED and pocketing £145 from everyone who owns a TV license.
I have to say I found the presenters perfectly reasonable in how they treated my heretical views and it would be ungracious not to acknowledge this.
Witness Giles Fraser on “The Moral Maze” last night.
Even Michael Buerk accused him of being a religious zealot and evangelist for the BBC as cultural provider-clearly that bloke on that cross he marches up and down his empty church aisles is not ponying up enough for his liking.
Fraser also spoke of the BBC being the “soul of Britain”-as opposed to that Christian guff he was wont to parrot before he got his berth on Radio 4 do-gooding slots.
AND-the lazy cliche ridden dope was able to genuinely say that “we`re all in this together” was a mocking comment to slate the Tory meme…and is no less facile and crass when he appeals to THAT Cameron claptrap by way of argument to keep on paying the license fee…and indeed be grateful for the privilege-and pay even more for Graham, Gary, Russell and Claire,Jenni and Evan.
Worra spent holy hole of blackness Giles is…Satans no so little helpers come in all manner of sizes-extra large included.
If it is decided that every household has to “pay” a levy to fund the BBC, I will take my case of not paying this imposed tax from a corporate body to the Human Rights lawyers that are out there. To force (by default) someone who chooses not have a television, to pay for it, is obscene. No wonder that the BBC are now heavily promoting this line of “giving” in most of their news articles about the BBC licence fee. A win win situation and let us see how the BBC prime their audience in this promotion of idea. Sorry, not in my name BBC. F8ck Off. And I will lobby my M.P.
Hard to disagree with you. Your case is sound and succinctly put.
.. and so on, ad infinitum.
Oh, dear… orphaned as the widow is smite.
Anyway, to make up, here are two URLs to follow:
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/celebrities_protest_letter_15th?
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/bbc_letter_to_all_members_of_par?
Wishing Mr. Willmore all the good luck in the world, it is possible the result may be forgone.
However if, as seems likely, the BBC DPA Dept. default blows it out for ‘purposes of’ reasons like the BBC Press Office default presumes the BBc is laying and hence lies about it, it will rather prove the BBC actually has a licence to do and say whatever it darn well feels like because… it can.
The questions are valid, well structured, to the point, and polite.
They are also entirely legitimate under the Act.
It is all very well saying that the BBC can do what it likes as long as we have a choice whether we buy into it or not but it is so dominant in the (non) market that I’m not sure that changing the financial model will produce the changes that you want.
I wouldn’t mind having a tax-funded broadcaster if its news reporting was broad-ranging and factual. Newspapers used to claim to do that, the body was full of facts and the opinion was in the editorial.
The other thing that a national broadcaster should do is to provide a platform for national opinions, plural, and those opinions should be weighted according to the audience demographic. So, for instance, if we continue to have Thought For The Day and 40% of the population profess to being Christian and 40% atheist but only 0.1% are Cargo Cultists then the later get a voice but only once every three years. At present all minorities are treated as equals and the majority are treated like scum!
There needs to be a representative oversight board too, with teeth! Like the Trust should be but with a majority of members from the majority of viewers and listeners, not ‘Buggins Turn’ slot-ins for the ‘great and good’ or favoured vocal minority.
Alternately break the whole lot up with separate commissioning boards, say for high culture and science. These boards would be tax-funded and the commercial broadcasters would put out their commissioned programmes in slots set in their licence agreements. As an example a Culture Board would be concerned with producing the best classical music for a prom programme. That would be its agenda. No climate change, no austerity, no ethnic (c)rap music, no box ticking.
What I most certainly don’t want is a tax-funded monolith promoting a minority messages embedded into every it does, yet accountable to no-one except Allah and Marx.
Yes.
You can have an openly partial (biased) broadcaster. You can have a publicly-funded broadcaster. What you cannot have is a partial, publicly-funded broadcaster.
The issue of exactly how a publicly-funded broadcaster should be supported – poll tax, license fee, hypothecated portion of any other tax – is a canard.
If, as the BBC keeps saying, it’s not ‘their’ BBC, it’s ‘ours’, then logically, it is our choice, as individuals, whether to fund it. It is not, in that case, for the politicians to decide on our behalf whether, or to what extent, to support the Corporation. It is for us, in an open market-place, to make that decision individually, and from time to time, as we see fit.
That is a direct consequence of what the BBC is now claiming.
If it is indeed ours.
Conversely, if it is to be protected from the market-place, then it must have impartiality imposed on it, once and for always. I have stated before that the bias of its output is not the issue. It is the refusal to admit that bias that is at issue, and the separation of the Corporation as such, from the output it broadcasts. The Corporation is at the moment institutionally corrupt through identifying with its output, and promoting certain viewpoints above others.
It should be required to become, instead, a synoptic container for truly independent output, whether or not it is prejudiced, and whatever the direction of that bias; where there can be a clear distinction between respect for the Corporation itself, and legitimate disrespect for clearly ‘labelled’ output arising through its channels. In the interests of promoting a truly consensual communications framework for our society, if the BBC claims to ‘hold the ring’, then it needs to be truly inclusive: the ring must contain the whole of our society, not just a claque of lobby groups, campaigners and minorities.
This is a difficult point to absorb at first – it does not correspond to the usual ‘break it up, melt it down’ view expressed so often here – but it does avoid the destruction of a national medium, in the necessary obliteration of its manifold and overwhelming current prejudice.
And now Newsnight have a piece from Steve Hewlett about the Tories threat to his waistline-sorry “creative and artistic independence”.
This follows on from Jon Snow snivelling for the BBC as he cosied up to James Purnell…FFS, Purnell is on Newsnight as I write!
Evan Davis sees common cause with lawyers and consultants-the likes of Lineker being Atticus Finch, Chris Evans as Harold Steptoe.
James Purnell was a Labour stiffie was he not?
The BBC are unbelievable-watch their news and see if I`m not wrong
Very well put David 🙂
Unfortunately, beyond the real inferiority complex that underlines the BBC mindset and their subsequent pretence to be superior, the question is whether our government would want to lose the illusion that they have a world class media organisation under their ‘rule’. The way it is they can believe that they preside over ‘Great Britain’, instead of the inner rotting society that we see in a continual erosion.
The fact that the BBC is the dominant cancer in bringing that about would only have relevance to a truly ethical and moral government, and I have yet to see that. Just their posturing!
Well this ‘happy chappy’ supports Al Beeb, I wonder why ? ………………
http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2015/jul/16/lenny-henry-save-the-bbc-goddammit-no-bbc-no-me
Not sure that headline is necessarily making the case intended.
this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to deal with the bbc. Subscription makes complete sense for a variety of reasons but I don’t think the Tories will go that far and will just lump it all into one big tax and the status quo will continue. The reality is the next generation of kids use Netflix and catch up more than live TV so the TV tax is obsolete anyway
I posted this on the open thread, maybe more pertinent here, its clear that the BBC (Greg Dyke) with the opportunity to go future subscription in 2002, blocked such a move.
ITV’s ON Digital had failed and part of the agreement with the BBC in rescuing it and renaming Freeview, was that ON Digital’s conditional access (subscription) be removed, thus removing any easy future (and cheap) way of the bBC becoming pay to view and protecting the licence fee. This was 2002, remember ON Digital terrestrial boxes even then had pay to view ability .
Greg Dyke – the man who is now doing his best to ruin lower league football with his barmy b-team idea. These same faces go round and round the highly paid civil service bandwagon and fail miserably everywhere they go
I think the first thing to remember whenever a liberal progressive suggests there that is some kind of ‘debate’ to be had is that they actually mean precisely the opposite. Liberal progressives don’t want ‘debate’ – what they want is to hear their own prejudices reinforced, endorsed and reflected back to them unquestioningly. What they want is a mutually agreeable echo-chamber.
We hear all the time that the BBC is happy for the ‘debate’ around the license fee – actually this is completely untrue. David Vance, in his opening post here, makes the case that any reasonable, clear-thinking, logical person would make against the license fee: that it is out-dated, inappropriate and above all that it is unfair and morally wrong to force people to pay for something they might not want (and that they don’t feel represents them or their world view).
This is the crux of the debate around the whole future of how the BBC is funded. This is the ‘debate’ the BBC (and it seems most commentators) don’t want to have. By staying away from the only really important question – yes, really the ONLY pertinent question that need be asked at all – the BBC manages to misdirect the ‘debate’ towards subjects it would rather we all focus upon, such as issues of ‘quality’ and ‘value’, etc.
Mr Vance has it absolutely spot-on when he says:
“[The BBC] …needs to have the confidence to BELIEVE the things it says. IF it has great output, people will choose to subscribe. If they don’t want it, why should they be forced to fund it?”
This is the only ‘debate’ that needs to be had. And this is why the BBC will never allow it.