Category Archives: BBC bias

Well then, it looks like Alan Yentob is a man with a lot of explaining to do with regard to HIS role in a/The Kids Company and b/Newsnight coverage of this story. Guido has additional insight here. The increasingly bizarre behaviour of this senior BBC executive raises more questions than answers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncRGoqNUb1w

Most Black youths in America, and in the UK, that are killed, are killed by other Black youths.

The BBC doesn’t want to know about that, their sole concern is the black men killed by white police officers or the callous disregard of society for black lives…and the BBC isn’t too interested in the whys and wherefores, just in portraying the issues in a stark black and white way that strips the debate of any real meaning.  The police officer in the video is right…why is there a sudden lack of concern about those black men killed by other black men from the people who shout and scream about the deaths of people like Michael Brown in Ferguson?  Why do they suddenly go MIA?  Do they not think all black lives matter, or is it only those black lives that have been ‘snuffed out’ by white police officers that they think will get them on the news?

In 2013 of 2,491 black Americans murdered only 189 were killed by a white killer.  Hardly seems like there is a race war going on ouot there.

The BBC chose a US journalist, Jessica Lussenhop, to write a piece on black youths being shot by police knowing that she is highly partisan on this and that she has a history of critical reports on the police.

This is in essence her view of what happens to black people on the streets of America at the hands of the brutal police….

‘More than you ever wanted to know about the police attitude to feral Blacks and how they kill them. When federal agents are picking them off from helicopters, there’s obviously more at stake than just nuisance. Between the millions of dollars in damage and the idea of the Blackman as an ‘invasive species,’ I was shocked by the serious problem (and solution) posed by these animals, who are smart but ugly, therefore fair game for mass eradication in police eyes.  This is, to me, a classic, successful alt-weekly story — take something that’s under the snout of normal people, zoom in, examine. ‘Some species just don’t play nice with others.’

No, no of course she didn’t really write that about the police, it’s been slightly edited, but it is pretty representative of the undertone and narrative that the BBC  seeks to present but in a slightly more measured way about supposed police attitudes with a not so subtle subtext that suggests they really do think white police officers are trying to eradicate Black youths…because it’s in their white genes.

As an example of that Lussenhop brings us a long list of Black deaths that ‘prove’ either that the Police are racist killers or that they and the rest of society just don’t care that black lives are being lost….though Lussenhop is coy about the racial identity of the killers other than when it is a police officer.

Here’s her piece……..Ferguson: The other young black lives laid to rest in Michael Brown’s cemetery..

It is an enormously long denouncement of American police whilst ignoring the real cause of most deaths.  She starts off with a complete fabrication and continues in that vein.

Michael Brown, remember him….That extremely large and threatening Black thug who attacked a police officer by punching him in the face whilst he was in his police car, then tried to take his gun and who was subsequently shot as he refused to surrender and instead charged at the police officer?

This is Lussenhop’s description...’One year ago this August, former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot Brown, who was unarmed, six times.’  You get the idea.

She admits that there might be some doubt about the version that claims Brown was a completely innocent victim of police brutality but she dismisses this with the suggestion that the police officer, Darren Wilson, was subconsciously influenced in how he reacted to Brown by the racist culture of the Police…

Supporters of Wilson referenced the security footage of Brown pilfering some cigarillos at a convenience store and manhandling the clerk just prior to the incident. Opponents pointed out shoplifting is not an offence worthy of execution.  [er what?  Why include that?  He wasn’t ‘executed’ and he wasn’t shot for shoplifting but for asaaulting and further threratening to assault a police officer]

After two separate inquiries, the officer who shot Brown was found to be acting within the law. A St Louis grand jury declined to bring charges and a US justice department investigation concluded “Darren Wilson’s actions do not constitute prosecutable violations”. They cited “no credible evidence” that Brown had his hands up, and in fact found evidence of a struggle between the two.

But another justice department report found that Wilson was working within a system plagued by inequity and unfair practices. The citizens of Ferguson, where the average per capita income is $21,000 (£13,500), were routinely and repeatedly stopped and fined for minor transgressions that filled the city coffers – and though African Americans made up 67% of the population, they constituted 93% of the traffic stops…. It painted a portrait of a city populace straining under the weight of racial bias and classism.’

She goes on to describe another young Black life lost...’Directly across from Brown’s grave is another that, according to the small stone marker, belongs to Jarris Brown. Michael and Jarris are not related. However, some quick arithmetic reveals that Jarris, like Michael, also died young, at just 16 years old. ‘

But hang on…Jarris Brown was shot by his own friend as Lussenhop admits…and many more of the deaths she is trying to exploit in an attempt to conjure up a picture of a community under some sort of siege are in fact from car accidents, suicide or ill health…she tells us the majority are shot but not who shot them…other Black youths shot them that’s who.

We get the sad statistics of Black victims…but no statistics for who shot them….

As homicide rates rise around the country, the vast majority of the victims are young black men. Blacks in St Louis are 12 times more likely to be murdered than whites. So far in 2015, there have been 116 homicides, which is at least 50% higher than it was at the same time of year in 2014.

The number of victims jumped from 120 murders in 2013 to 159 in 2014. While that may be new for the city, what has been true for years is that the state of Missouri has the worst rate of black homicide victimisation in the country – twice the national rate for black victims and seven times the overall national rate.

‘The state of Missouri has the worst rate of black homicide victimisation ‘…. What the hell does she mean by that highly misleading phrase…..‘victimisation’…by who?  Who is doing the shooting, that ‘victimising’? 

Nor do we get the statistics for white victims…either shot by police or killed by black youths.

We hear that black people are more likley to be poorer but then gives us a long story about ‘OJ’ who actually comes from a very respectable family but who turns out to have been a drug dealer with a very nice car…

OJ is shot by ‘three masked men charging up the driveway towards her [OJ’s mother]. When they demanded to know where OJ was, Jennifer feigned ignorance. But his distinctive car gave him away.

“Where is the money?” she remembers them screaming as they pushed her towards the basement door. When they threatened to kill her, OJ opened the door to his room and the basement exploded in gunfire.’

Why is this story relevant?  Lussenhop is claiming the Police don’t bother with black deaths and don’t try to find the killers and yet they spent years trying to find ‘OJ’s’ killers as she admits…‘St Louis County Police investigated OJ’s murder, but after several years and several pushes in the local media for information with thousands of dollars in reward money available, no one has ever been caught. A letter from a tipster in jail led to nothing. OJ’s case eventually got reassigned to a different detective and Jennifer stopped calling to check on the progress.’

So a young black man, probably owing money to a drug gang, shot by that drug gang, and the police spent years trying to solve the case. and she admits that ‘the police have cleared at least three times as many cases with black victims as with white.’  So what exactly is Lussenhop’s point?

She quotes this…“This is systemic. This idea that black people are ‘less’ – that it suffuses everything in our culture in America,” says Jesamyn Ward’.  Guess that’s how they got a black president.

We get to the meat of the matter at the end when you realise the police can’t win…“When people were saying, ‘black lives matter’, one of the things that made that appealing is the fact it was ambiguous. It could be related to police brutality, but it could also relate to the callous indifference with which we regard the abysmal homicide numbers,” says the New Yorker’s Cobb.

Either the police are ‘brutal’ or they are indifferent.  No other choices available.  Guilty of something. Guilty by virtue of being white.

Oh but hang on….Lussenhop slips this in as well….”The narrative in which someone’s morality and stereotypical ideas around morality can be deployed to invalidate their humanity or right to equal treatment – we’re very familiar with that,” says Jelani Cobb, a staff writer for the New Yorker who has written extensively about these issues. “Don’t be surprised if black people, too, don’t think those dudes’ lives matter who died in these types of ways.”

So do black lives, the lives of black criminals, not matter to black people?  Seems maybe not so much.  So a criminal gets killed and nobody, black or white, cares too much…they probably think he deserved it.  And yet that’s not an attitude that gets reported on the BBC and in this case it goes against the stream of Lussenhop’s whole narrative…..and yet a whole campaign, a barrage of accusatory rhetoric, is aimed at white people because of that narrative, one that the BBC keeps on playing up, a narrative that is ultimately hugely dangerous in the way it whips up racial tensions using exaggerated and false claims to incite black anger at white people.

The BBC plays with fire.

Relax.

How times change…or not.

Dennis Potter laid into the BBC in 1993 in a vitriolic and bile filled rant against the predations of John Birt whilst also, naturally, raging against Thatcher and Murdoch.

What’s interesting is the BBC’s defence of itself when it was under review as it is today…….

“Broadcasting is at the heart of British Society. The structure and the competition of the broadcasting industry, the purpose and motivation of broadcasters and the programmes and services they offer are vital factors in reflecting and shaping that society.”

Pretty much the Hall line today.

Potter launches into a tirade against ‘management’ and commercialisation as he saw it that was tearing the heart out of the BBC…..curious that the BBC seems to have not only survived but thrived since those supposed threats to its existence were highlighted…..could it be that the BBC once again comes out of any review with a renewed vigour, sense of purpose, a flourishing success despite all the doom-laden predictions?  Note Potter suggests a smaller, more nimble BBC, maybe other broadcasters also taking on the remit of ‘Public Service Broadcasting’.  No doubt he would be horrified to find he was thinking on the same lines that the current review is at least contemplating.

Here’s some choice cuts from Potter’s rage against the machine…..

Our television has been ripped apart and falteringly re-assembled by politicians who believe that value is a monetary term only, and that a cost-accountant is thereby the most suitable adjudicator of what we can and cannot see on our screens. And these accountants or their near clones are employed by new kinds of Media Owners who try to gobble up everything in their path.

The cry of Yuppie to Yuppie sounded in the land, as chilling as any call from the carnivores in swamp or forest. And the deep hatred of any other claim, any other way of seeing, of anything other than the forces of law and order in the public domain, was always going to be arrowed with poison-dipped barb at the slow, decent, stumbling and puzzled giant run from Broadcasting House.

We must protect ourselves and our democracy, first by properly exercising the cross-ownership provisions currently in place, and then by erecting further checks and balances against dangerous concentrations of the media power which plays such a large part in our lives. No individual, group or company should be allowed to own more than one daily, one evening and one weekly newspaper. No newspaper should be allowed to own a television station, and vice-versa. A simple act of public hygiene, tempering abuse, widening choice, and maybe even returning broadcasting to its makers.

As a writer who needs to clutch his pen as though it were a lifebelt, I have to admit that I have nevertheless improved many a shining hour with a probably untransmittable little playlet about one of the more intriguing encounters of our time. I was not there when Fortnum met Mason, Laurel met Hardy, or Murdoch met Mephistopheles but I would have given my old Thesaurus or my new sequence of Readers Digest Prize Draw Numbers to have been a hornet on the wall at that surely entrancing fascination and maybe even comical occasion when dear old Marmaduke first met dear young John and each of them sort of half-discussed what was sort of half-wrong with the greatest broadcasting organisation the world has ever seen.

Where, I wonder, did they meet? Who was the first to smile – lethally? Who said, um, “structural walk-through” as he ordered the mineral water? And did the waiter say “Pardon?” Was the table well laden and did it groan when the un-advertised post of the twelfth and not thirteenth Director Generalship was finally settled?

I fear the time is near when we must not save the BBC from itself, but public service broadcasting from the BBC. The old Titan should spawn smaller and more nimble offspring if its present controllers cannot be removed. Why not think about it anyway?

Why not separate Radio from Television? Why not let BBC2 be a separate public service broadcaster? Let us begin to consider afresh how the thousands of millions of pounds of licence money could be apportioned between two, three or four successors to the currently misled Corporation. One of the successors could certainly be a publishing or commissioning authority on the model of Channel 4.

Indeed, Channel 4, if freed from its advertisements, could continue to evolve out of its original, ever precious remit into a passably good model of the kinds of television some of us seek. Michael Grade is becoming, by default, the new Director General, and the ironies if not the comedy of such an unexpected grace remind me that it is time to wind down before I exhaust myself with my own restraint.

Well, it’s pretty clear that the BBC want to see another President Clinton in the White House but the spotlight was on her GOP opponents last evening and in particular Donald Trump in the Fox News debate last night. I thought this was a telling quote from the BBC analysis of the debate…

“Donald Trump was generally seen as an amusing sideshow.”

Not a hint of bias there. FYI – Trump leads the field of GOP contenders by a massive margin at this point.

And so to the wonders of the weekend! Here is a new OPEN THREAD for you to detail the bias.

The dynamic duo are back, the climate change tag team of Richard Black and Roger Harrabin return for, hopefully, one performance only.

Black is harrumphing loudly, in the Guardian, about Quentin Lett’s asking ‘What is the Point of the Met. Office?’

This is heresy and a damnable breach of BBC protocol. Damnit!

Harrabin joins in and expresses his displeasure with a sneering tweet…

• roger harrabin ‏@RHarrabin Aug 5

  #Climate sceptics have demanded “their” programme. They just got it. Radio 4. 09.00. @QuentinLetts_ on @metoffice. @ECIU_UK @CarbonBrief

Harrabin must have a short memory having himself asked a similar question….

The trouble is that we simply don’t know how much to trust the Met Office.

How often does it get the weather right and wrong. And we don’t know how it compares with other, independent forecasters.

Can we rely on them if we are planning a garden party at the weekend? Or want to know if we should take a brolly with us tomorrow? Or planning a holiday next week?

In a few year’s time hopefully we’ll all have a better idea of whom to trust. By then the Met Office might have recovered enough confidence to share with us its winter prediction of whether to buy a plane ticket or a toboggan.

Hope the tag team doesn’t fall out over that one.  Harrabin is not shy when it comes to a punch up with those who disagree with him such as Delingpole or was it Booker? ….

“I’m not sure whether I should shake your hand. I want to punch you.” He sounded jolly cross indeed – and ranted that I was utterly irresponsible and had disseminated lots of lies – though he later apologized to me saying he was jet-lagged and had confused me with Christopher Booker. Hmm.

Black tries to dismiss the claims of those on the programme as rubbish…

Mr Stringer is allowed to claim without challenge that there is “no scientific evidence” linking the 2013/4 winter floods, to climate change, which is untrue; it’s not a simple link, but it does exist. [Possibly only in his own little head]

Unfortunately it’s Black who is being ‘untrue’ as even the Met. Office [ah, I’ve found a use for it…rubbishing old Blackie] says there was no link between the floods and climate change…

Prime Minister climate change opinion not backed up by science, says Met Office
Nicola Maxey from the Met Office said the Prime Minister failed to draw the crucial distinction between weather and climate change.
“What happened at the end of December and at the beginning of January is weather,” she said.
“Climate change happens on a global scale, and weather happens at a local scale. Climate scientists have been saying that for quite a while.
“It’s impossible to say that these storms are more intense because of climate change.”
She added: “In real terms we had a low depression over the Atlantic which deepened, which caused the swell, and that combined with the spring tide caused the coastal waves.”

or….em…

Paul Davis, chief meteorologist for the Met Office said that very strong winds much of the UK experienced which was caused by jet stream.
“December has been the windiest spell since 1969, but unprecedented perhaps not. It probably feels unusual because the last few winters have been fairly settled and cold and we haven’t had the story conditions that just experienced.”

or…em….

Direct from the Met. Office:   There’s currently no evidence to suggest that the UK is increasing in storminess

Ever wonder how the Swarm arrives at Calais? The BBC doesn’t and the Today programme reports that “Four hundred people have been rescued from a capsized ship carrying migrants in the Mediterranean. Will Turner, an emergency coordinator with Medecins sans Frontieres was on a rescue ship that provided help.” Captain Will demands that the EU steps up to the plate and accepts MANY MORE of these “poor vulnerable” people who pay the people traffickers to get access to our welfare system. This was met with a murmur of agreement from Humphrys. The idea that Europe protects its borders is beyond the ken of the BBC and so they present these hordes leaving Libya as victims and then when the ranks at Calais bulge the BBC acts ever so surprised.

70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. BBC coverage focusing on the pain and hurt caused to the Japanese with scant acknowledgement that Japan brought this upon itself and that whilst it was indeed terrible that so many innocents perished nonetheless had this NOT happened many many Allied lives would have been lost. Through the prism of the BBC all war is wrong when it is the WEST carrying it out and so they pick over the radiated bones of Hiroshima whilst failing to recognise precisely WHY it was necessary to for Enola Gay to drop its payload.

BBC today in tears that the Kids Company has closed. Both last evening and this morning it is playing clips of angry Mums and Kids marching through the streets DEMANDING that this “charity” remains open. A tearful Camilla has been on to blame everyone for the collapse of this “organisation” but herself. All that’s missing is Elton John doing a tribute single. I notices that the Mums and Kids expressing their fury at the demise of this government funded “charity” all seemed to be of ethnic extraction, how odd. I also note that the “world class” journalists at the BBC are not asking any hard questions as to the financial running of this “charity” even though it is THAT which had led to its collapse.

The Guardian keeps pumping out the pro-BBC stuff.  Here’s BBC executive Jane Tranter telling us how fabulous the BBC is…and yet not only is she jumping ship for the commercial world she also puts a whacking great hole in the BBC’s main line of defence…that it is the central prop of the creative industries in the UK which would whither and die without BBC support.

The Guardian says…

As Jane Tranter prepares to head her own UK production company, she talks about Doctor Who, her fears for the BBC – and why Wales is like New York.

It quotes Tranter saying this in response to the government’s review and the suggestion that the BBC should be smaller and do less…..

‘The BBC should mean something to all people, it should be the people’s broadcaster. To think the BBC should be made for a cultural elite with a more narrowcast is patronising.’

But the BBC is made for a cultural elite, made by them, for them.  They have zero interest in your views on immigration, Europe, Islam or austerity.

Tranter goes on….

“One thing that really strikes me is how much time politicians have got to tell the BBC what programmes they should be making. You wouldn’t get Barack Obama doing that over here.”

Apart from the obligatory mention of the sainted Obama does she say anything of note here?  Is she right? Should politicians keep out of BBC business?  If not politicians who?  The BBC itself?  Why should that small coterie of culturally elite, metropolitan media types, have the monopoly on what the BBC produces and the values and views it propagates?

The BBC has a very self-serving view of its place and role in society.  In its own eyes it is a unique stand alone organisation beholden to no-one.  An organisation that has a very religious view of itself in that it is untouchable, beyond criticism and reproach and yet has the right to pass moral judgement on society and dictate the shape and behaviour of that society. Much like Jesus it believes itself to be the product of a virgin birth unsullied by association with mankind, sent to save us from ourselves…and claims it is being sacrificed, crucified, because of its beliefs and values.

Unfortunately far from springing from nowhere in an immaculate conception the BBC’s first incarnation was as a commercial enterprise before being nationalised by those dreadful politicians…it is the love child of politicians and commercial companies, and even those companies had their broadcasts shaped by government.  When the BBC was nationalised as a public service, which the BBC seems to forget, it was still shaped by the government and owes its initial success to toeing the government line on the General Strike.

The BBC is a creation of the politicians in its present form….it owes pretty much everything to its unique status gifted to it by those politicians who set out its mission in the Charter.

To claim that politicians should have no role in deciding the size, shape and role of the BBC is absurd….it is their creature to start with…..and it is curious that when the likes of Harriet Harman, or Tories like Lords Fowler and Patten, speak up for the BBC then the BBC is happy to be the subject of their benevolent scrutiny and quote their warm words extensively.

The BBC is in any case far from independent of politics.  Its charter obliges it to maintain civil society and citizenship….a very political charge on it.  That’s an obligation given to it by parliament…politicians.  They therefore have an interest in the BBC to ensure that it is carrying out its duty…one they generally neglect which is why this site exists.

The BBC, a public service, should not be left to decide what a ‘civil society’ or ‘citizenship’ looks like.  That is surely for a democratic Parliament to decide not a small group of culturally, socially and financially elite people who happen to have got jobs at the BBC and then recruited like-minded people to work with them….the result of which we see today as they try to impose their very particular notion of what society should look like…and if you disagree they use all the resources of the BBC to either lock you out of the debate or to attack and destroy you as with Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson.

Politicians have an important role in deciding what such a society should look like and to require the BBC to work towards promoting and ‘maintaining’ that vision.  The BBC’s independence comes in only in its decisions on how to carry out that obligation, but certainly not in deciding what that obligation should be.

That is of course if you believe the BBC should have such a role in engineering what a society should look like…which I doubt it should…being too open to manipulation by its own employees….

Tranter goes on to say [Funny how she allows herself to have ‘very strong views’ about the BBC’s shape]….

“I have got very strong views about BBC Studios and they may not be the BBC’s,” says Tranter. “What they need to look at is why was it once the most exciting place in the industry to work in and why is it not now.

“I always felt the BBC was a really cool place to work, where you could make the kind of programmes you couldn’t necessarily get your hands on anywhere else. For me it was just really exciting and energising and challenging and they need to put that feeling back.”

That’s interesting isn’t it?  The BBC insists that it is the lynchpin that the whole creative industry swings around and that the British economy would lose out if the BBC were somehow ‘diminished’ and yet here we have a BBC executive telling us the BBC maybe past it having lost its energy, its excitement and its challenge.

She tells us that she believes her new commercial enterprise will itself be a ‘lynchpin’ for the creative industries bringing huge benefits to the economy……

It is forecast the new company could bring in as much as £100m to the Welsh economy over the next 10 years.

Tranter said Wales could be a “world leader” within the decade.

“TV has changed beyond all recognition in the past decade. Huge international productions made on movie scale budgets have put British TV at the forefront of this revolution,” she said. “Bad Wolf has the potential to be a game changer for the creative economy in Wales.”

So now we know, the commercial sector is not only growing but bursting out and generating other businesses and creative opportunities…..as the Times tells us when it reported on the ‘Top Gear’ Amazon deal….with a sub-story headlined “Big money digital media are biggest threat to the BBC”.

The Guardian has noticed the huge success and massive investment that commercial media is putting into production…..

Such changes are happening fast. BT, with turnover of £18bn plus, is buying giant packages of TV sport. Sky, with revenues of just over £11bn, is fighting as seldom before. Netflix has billions to spend. American giants are expanding everywhere: Liberty on the point of buying another chunk of ITV, NBCUniversal to invest $250m in Buzzfeed. The temptation at takeover time – when, say, Nikkei pays £844m for the FT – is to see these deals in isolation. In fact, the information and entertainment world is solidifying.

However they still want to paint a picture of a world blighted  by a ‘diminished’ BBC….

“Small” doesn’t mean beautiful; it may mean peripheral. Some critics know this well. They want a nobbled BBC. Some politicians are less savvy. They don’t understand the blight that threatens Britain’s creative sector. There’s a warning for the BBC here. Why concentrate on digital news at the expense of drama and entertainment? The royal charter writers must see a world queuing up to buy BBC content. Why turn it away, failing to understand what may be lost?”

The BBC’s Steve Hewlett, masquerading as an impartial observer, also notes the success of the commercial sector but tries to use it to deny the claim that the BBC’s licence to print money is a huge advantage over the private companies….

BBC’s rivals aren’t feeling the pinch as much as green paper suggests

What about its [The BBC’s] impact in the heartland arena of TV – where the big money is spent?

Conveniently, last week offered a chance to look at exactly how the BBC’s commercial rivals are spending that money, and how well they are doing at generating a return. And what a week they had – profits galore! Commercial television is on quite a roll.

Taken together the numbers make the idea mooted in the green paper – that the BBC is “crowding out” or in any way impeding its commercial rivals, in TV at least – seems almost absurd.

Indeed if there’s any cause for concern it might be something nearer the opposite: in other words that, after round after round of cutbacks (and in fairness an ongoing struggle too with its own inefficiency), the BBC could be in danger of being left behind.

 

So once again we hear of hugely successful commercial media companies that are ‘splurging’ money on investments in the industry and yet we keep hearing that without the BBC the industry might wither and die, or at least be reduced to a shadow of its former self.

Doesn’t seem like that is going to happen.  The majority of hugely popular and successful TV is produced by commercial companies, even the BBC’s productions are more often than not done as joint productions with outside companies or totally produced by outsiders and bought in….The Voice is one example, produced by a Dutch company…now owned by ITV ironically.

The BBC’s own production facilities have been put on a commercial basis so it’s hardly a relevant argument anymore that the BBC is the backbone of the creative industries when clearly there is massive money flowing in from the commercial companies.

That’s not to say that the BBC shouldn’t do pretty much what it does now, less the bias, but claims of being the creative industries’ bankroller and mentor are shown to be an argument that doesn’t have much weight or credibility as a reason to keep the BBC as it is.  The BBC is that comfortable fit, one that most people grow up with and enjoy its familiarity…and as Stalin said ‘Quantity has a quality all of its own’…the BBC is everywhere, nationwide, and provides a familiar backrop to whatever you are doing, wherever you are.  Shame to destroy that in the quest for that elusive target driven efficiency that will never result in quality….and its not the amount of money we pay the BBC that is the problem, it is the way it is extorted from us under great duress.  Subscription [not per programme] or a charge on income tax [not council tax] are the only two sensible funding options.  It costs over £100 million to collect the licence fee at present…what a waste of that money.

As the Telegraph says the licence fee has been made redundant…

The news that Amazon, which recently entered the content market with Prime Instant Video, has signed up Jeremy Clarkson and his crew is another seminal moment in the demise of the old TV structures. The programme will air in 2016 and take on the BBC’s new Top Gear show presented by Chris Evans. Next year’s launch could be remembered as the tipping point – the moment a new generation of content producers finally dethroned the old TV incumbents, and the BBC in particular.

Even the BBC admitted that when discussing the Amazon deal on the radio last week…and reminding us that there are no adverts on Amazon.

And the Telegraph backs up the argument that the BBC isn’t needed as the industry prop…..

All of this is a major blow for the BBC’s model and rationale. Supporters of the current taxpayer-financed set-up argue that without public service broadcasting we would see a race to the bottom – but that is not what the investments that are increasingly being made by US entrants into the market would suggest.

Thanks to new technology, it is now possible to produce cutting-edge content that is both extremely upmarket and commercially viable. It is also possible to produce water cooler, mainstream TV that was once the preserve of terrestrial players.

The BBC’s licence fee needs to go, for two related reasons. It is unfair and a horrendous distortion of the market, allowing vast amounts of taxpayer-financed content to be dumped for free on its website. Streaming services, national and regional newspaper websites and commercial TV all suffer.