Discussion
BBC says ‘irreversible’ trends mean it will not survive without major overhaul
blargthorwars: Imagine needing a government licence to look at a screen.
oxfordmale: I am happy to pay for the BBC licence fee if they stop harassing old grannies.
SirFatty: How about the young grannies?
ChocolateGod: I refuse to pay the license fee and watch BBC content simply because how TV licensing is enforced is grotesque and the cover ups of child molesters committed by the BBC.Put it behind a subscription and give me a choice whether the BBC deserves its revenue, my current opinion falls firmly on no.
felixgallo: I'm sure you feel the same way about Sky News and the tabloids, right?
dmix: > the corporation said 94% of people in the UK continued to use the BBC each month, but fewer than 80% of households contributed to the licence fee.That's a pretty good ratio no? Plenty of services survive with lower ratios than that. Do they really expect every household to pay? Or is the issue they have much bigger spending plans than they make from it.
alephnerd: You can't gentrify Manchester without more money. Won't someone think about the poor property developers in MediaCity
beardyw: It's a historical accident. At first there was no TV, so when the BBC started broadcasting I suppose it made sense. Moving away from that seems to be difficult without them introducing advertising for live TV, which would be a quick fix, but that seems to be a diminishing market.For streaming it's easy to manage.
tokai: It's not an accident. Funding state media with a licence fee instead of from the taxes/state budget, makes it harder to exert political control over said state media.
pjc50: Personally I'd choose an arbitrary point like the year 2000, and split the BBC into "heritage" (nationalized body that holds all the archives, like the British Library or the British Museum), BBC Radio (taxpayer funded by DCMS, this is not very expensive) and "continuity TV" (commercial body that has to fund itself like any other).This does mean Doctor Who getting split in half, but that's not the worst that's happened to him/her.
CommanderData: The BBC also behaved indefensibly when covering Israel's genocide of Palestinians.Their behaviour is largely what led to me siding with the Palestinians plight some years ago, the use of words on Israel's side VS Palestinians was enough to lead me down a rabbit hole and I have never seen the BBC the same since.It is literally state news with amazing bits of other content.
nailer: I refuse to because they have very consistently relayed communication from Hamas as news without attributing the source is Hamas. As a result a significant quantity of my left leaning friends in the UK have extreme takes on the war in Gaza.
dgxyz: 100% this. They published straight up misinformation as fact first, announced it as breaking news, pushed it to BBC app, then corrected it all later then pretended nothing happened.I don't pay for a license because the programming is crap now though.
mrexcess: >They published straight up misinformation as fact firstCan you add some specifics to this claim? I'm unaware of the BBC having reported "Hamas-sourced" substantial misinformation as fact. I'm sure some errors and retractions have been done - especially given that BBC like all Western media continues to be forbidden to operate freely in Gaza.
dgxyz: During the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital incident they posted an entirely unverified and unattributed story stating that the cause was an Israeli air strike, pushed this as breaking news and 43 minutes later changed the attribution to Hamas and PIJ sources confirmed.This lead to two of my female Jewish friends getting spat on and having their hair pulled on the tube.
pjc50: > This lead to two of my female Jewish friends getting spat on and having their hair pulled on the tube and called murdering zionistsDo you think this is specifically and only due to that specific, single story, or do you think it might be a cumulative effect due to all the rest of what's been happening? Not that this excuses or justifies random attacks on other people simply because they happen to be Jewish, that's how the cycle of reprisal happens.
graemep: Its a hypothocated tax.Its not required to "look at a screen". its required to watch broadcast TV and use the BBc's online TV services. You can watch as much as you like on Youtube or Netflix or whatever without paying it.it was very good value for money when half of all TV output (and the better half) was from the BBC and ad free.
mytailorisrich: > You can watch as much as you like on Youtube or Netflix or whatever without paying it.Careful here because there is live TV on Youtube and a valid licence is required to watch that. There are also live shows on Netflix, which may count as "live TV programmes" so requiring a licence.
IAmBroom: You're moving the goalposts.Watching non-live BBC programmes in the UK legally requires a license fee. The same is not true of Netflix.
nailer: The way it’s worded it is that any thing that could be deemed “live TV” is liable for the tax regardless of who produced the content.
alecco: Obligatory reminder BBC staff is "vetted" by MI5 since 1937:https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/anniversaries/august/mi5...MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5) is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency.
constantius: I'm not going to dispute what you're saying, but the causal relation (between BBC and the attack, or especially their faith and the attack) and the overall context seem murky and very ambiguous.
dgxyz: I'm not saying it was entirely intentional or there was an agenda, it's just unprofessionalism over and over and over again. At some point it becomes institutionalised at which point you become a propaganda outfit for a foreign entity publishing their statements verbatim.See my other post in the thread for some further extrapolation of the side effects, but this was quoted over and over again by social media using the BBC's reputation to legitimise it.
rich_sasha: People complain about the BBC's bias. And since everyone has a different idea of what "unbiased" looks like, it's almost impossible to please everyone.But it struck me how few serious, general, global news outlets there are left in the world that aren't tied to some major interest. Fox News, CNN, WSJ... So much stuff is owned by Murdoch or by some other mogul. The Guardian is pretty good IMO but does not even pretend not to have a lefty skew.I was thinking about the spiral of death that happens to so many media outlets where serious news doesn't pay the bills anymore, so they either have to rent themselves out to some deep pocket, or chase clicks for ads, losing veracity in the process.BBC is one of the few organisations left that's somewhat immune to that. I won't claim all their stuff is unbiased, but they're just as likely to publish something left- as right-biased. So now I'm rooting for them and hope they make it. Apparently it is the second most trusted news source in the US, right after the Weather Channel. So truly a global phenomenon: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52272-trust-in-media-2025-...
pjc50: The news coverage is in general OK compared to commercial news, and especially to US propaganda outfits, but Channel 4 (also public sector) are also pretty good. The UK politics coverage is abysmal. They have become cautious stenographers and promoters of whichever party Farage is heading at the time. Not surprising when you see what happens to reporting that genuinely challenges power.
asplake: Agree that Channel 4 is also pretty good, perhaps better even than the BBC for politics now. But so much UK politics coverage these days has moved to podcasts – some of them staffed by ex-BBC people.