As someone who grew up in the UK then moved to the US where there is no functional equivalent I have little time for Brits that complain about the BBC. The value for money you get in return for the license fee is simply staggering. And while a genuinely strong public broadcaster has its downsides you’re much better off with than without.
No sorry the BBC we have today is not the BBC you grew up with and the fact that when I buy a TV off Amazon they're informed and start to send me threatening letters straight away demanding their license fee would be considered dystopian and a huge breach of privacy if it were in the US.
I love a lot of the BBC programming from the 70s-00s but I have zero interest in funding anything they're making today. They're not even making anything for me anymore. Just too concerned with trying to compete with the big kids not serving the niches that was supposed to be the advantage of a public broadcaster.
The BBC is still serving niches,for example fleabag, the night manager, inside no 9, Sherlock, Peaky Blinders, people just do nothing, Dr who, silent witness, death in paradise, and the detectorists.
The BBC isn't like Netflix - the license fee pays for TV infrastructure, public alerting, World Service, school revision programmes etc. - you just can't treat a public broadcaster like an opt-in service, it would cease to exist.
If COVID-19 has shown us anything in the UK, it should be that the BBC is still trusted and used heavily by the govt to get their message out clearly and loudly
> If COVID-19 has shown us anything in the UK, it should be that the BBC is still trusted
Oof, strongly disagree!
I do think the BBC has some great content, but the quality of their news has been going steadily downhill for at least a decade. Much of it appears to be written with the assumption that their average audience member is 7 years old, and they do the same scummy things that many others do now (click bait, fake outrage etc).
TV infrastructure these days is mostly satellite and cable based, sticks-on-hills broadcasting isn't that expensive and could simply be run by the government directly as it winds down over time.
Public alerting? Government can (and should) just serve videos itself, it can already SMS the entire nation.
World Service - was historically funded directly by the government, not the license fee. Should it even still exist?
School revision programmes can easily be handled by the private sector.
COVID-19 has revealed nothing about the BBC, which is now untrusted by >50% of the British population for the first time. All broadcasters have access to government broadcast updates.
YouGov figures show British trust in the press to tell the truth has fallen, with less than half believing BBC news journalists are honest and impartial
Seems a lot of people can't really handle criticism of the BBC, judging that my list of facts is now at -3.
I used to love the BBC. Globally respected, good programmes, a voice I trusted to be neutral and fair. They helped me study, they introduced me to new music, made cool documentaries. I bought into it all.
I guess like many Brits I'm not quite sure if it's the BBC that changed or myself. It just doesn't seem the same anymore.
I think it used to benefit from a 'false aura' of trustworthyness because radio and TV news has very little space, so in any given day there were only a handful of stories the BBC could break. Of those it'd usually be obvious what they should be, so the journalists and editors had quite limited leeway to pick and choose.
Now there's BBC News Online and that's how I get their news output. I don't watch TV news anymore. Online there's infinite space and so they can write endlessly about whatever topics they like, including using it as their own personal blogging space. Combined with Twitter it's painfully revealed their biases and desire to shape the audience, desires that were probably always there but limited by available airtime.
Throw in the millions of tests too, & I’m taken back to quote from developing nation’s diplomat in my book on financial crisis, saying he looked to Germany and Google as examples for how to run his country “both run by engineers, whereas US and UK run by journalists and lawyers”
This is just nonsense. Angela Merkel was never an engineer, she was an academic with a chemistry background but went into politics when the wall fell. She's been a professional politician for 30 years, so this tweet is just hopelessly misleading. I doubt Mr Islam is doing it deliberately, he just has low standards and doesn't bother to fact check even his own tweets, so what about the much harder job of checking stories?
When I go to BBC News Online and see endless articles with grotesque errors, distortions, biases and personal opinions I just can't care about them anymore. They should have stuck to TV. The internet is killing them, by revealing their true selves.
You’re conflating “the BBC” with “BBC News”. Given the sheer size and scope of the BBC that’s a mistake. The BBC as a broad organisation is trusted by the public. It's the same mistake you see often when people complain about the license fee then exclusively talk about news coverage. It's really not the same.
I’m not sure why a tweet by a reporter would be particularly noteworthy here. By their nature tweets are off the cuff, and I’m not even sure that one is all that inaccurate. “Run by” does not start and stop with the Prime Minister of a country, it’s a reflection of who is responding to a medical crisis from top to bottom.
What does trust even mean for most of their output? For music radio it's irrelevant. For comedy it's irrelevant. Trust enters the equation when things get serious and there's an aspect of teaching or communication of information involved.
The BBC's news output is symptomatic of a deeper set of political biases, it invades everything they do. Anyone can make a music radio station, many documentaries and dramas are produced by the private sector and then simply bought. There's nothing the BBC does that isn't already done just as well by other organisations, which is why they so often fall back on vague assertions of superior levels of trustedness or quality.
I sympathise with this position but on balance I'm against the idea. At-the-time popularity is very different to quality, and I think moving to a subscription service would favour the former. There's been a decent number of extremely good low key indie productions on the BBC that I don't think would see the light of day otherwise, e.g. fleabag, people just do nothing, and the detectorists. Then of course there's the World Service, which is something we can be hugely proud of as a nation. The BBC also spends a lot more time and money making its services accessible to people with disabilities than it would be able to otherwise.
I actually stopped my licence after the most recent election because I'm sickened by how sycophantic it is towards the ruling party. But I don't think a subscription model is the way to go.
That's pretty much how it works already. We don't watch any live TV so we just don't pay the fee. It takes 2 minutes to register as not needing a TV licence. So in a way it's already a "subscription" - you only pay if you're actually using the "service".
