The BBC takes a lot of stick from the left. And some of it, no doubt, appears justified. Like others, I have my concerns about Laura Kuensberg's objectivity on occasion.
But the reaction to Lord Hall's resignation is interesting. I do, for the record, think he was pushed. As he said:
“I love the BBC … If I followed my heart I would genuinely never want to leave.”
But he has. A think a quiet word was had....and a sop was offered.
The reaction is what interests me. Suddenly the left has another concern. It is that things might get very much worse.
I agree, they might.
My point is that we do, then, need to be careful. By all means, criticise the BBC. That's fine. But to suggest that there is no role for it and that what it does is not important? That is a step way too far for me. I value and appreciate the BBC even when it out John Humphrys in the Today programme, and even more so on the days he interviewed me.
I suggest now is the moment for people of concern to say why they do want an independent BBC. Nicky Morgan has shown a remarkable lack of political judgement in recent years (maybe, forever). She is responsible for this appointment. Any pressure to act in the public interest has to be appropriate right now.
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The BBC Natural History Unit’s programmes are far and away the best nature programmes made anywhere (though they have been slow to assign climate issues the central role they deserve). Nothing the private sector produces comes close, in terms of technological innovation and storytelling – just compare Blue Planet to the stuff produced for the Discovery Channel. To me, that’s one of the clearest examples of public sector innovation.
Your right Peter,
British people who are questioning the existence of the BBC need to go overseas and see how bad the options are over there. Especially in the other English-speaking countries.
Does the BBC have many REAL friends? I think that if the electorate is bribed with the abolition of the licence fee, there will be few mass protests as yet another check and balance goes.
No Alan,
The public, by and large, would accept the abolition of the license fee and then expect the BBC to remain.
That’s the main reason that no politician has considered your idea before and are unlikely to do so in the future. Politically, the whole idea is all risk with no particular upside.
Agreed
The BBC cheated Scotland, and in many ways the rest of the UK, out of the debate we should have had in 2014 on Scotland and on the Union more widely. That applies whichever side you are on. Probably naive to expect better but the bias, backed up by ignorance, was shocking and moved me the last few steps to ‘Yes’.
The BBC networks are made almost entirely in, and for, England. Politics, cultural life, reality, sport, history from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are either absent from the networks, both TV and radio, or are ludicrously conflated with England. The bulk of Scotland’s Licence Fee pays for that, while BBC 1 and 2 Scotland produce largely low budget parochial shortbread for Scottish consumption only. There is no exchange between the four countries ; it is all one way traffic, which goes some way to explain the ignorance of English politicians – currently being demonstrated by some of the Labour leadership candidates. The BBC has gone about its declared aim of keeping the Union together in precisely the wrong way, by effectively denying its existence as a Union and catering only for its biggest market, England.
No offence to England but it’s hard to understand why we should should want to pay for another country’s broadcaster.
Pretty sure he was pushed. The BBC has always irritated the Conservatives and it is an open secret that they want to privatise most of it. BBC Worldwide and BBC studios are already private corporations and that just leaves the bit that runs news and decides what goes on the screen. The unions have been emasculated so there is no obstacle to a political appointment who will see through the Tory agenda for the BBC.
One would have thought the Tories would want to keep the BBC – it is unmistakenly BRITISH – as we pitch our wares around the world.
Hopefully it can hang in there long enough for the subscription services to lose more of their gloss. As discussed on Radio 4 this morning, the BBC does need to connect more with a younger audience. Yes, they are going to consume content differently to the older folk and the BBC should continue to develop that.
Provided it keeps to its mandate to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ it should have a better than Brexit chance of survival.
I think there are several UK institutions with ‘brand’ resonance around the world – the BBC and the NHS being two of them – and possibly the most important. However, it is far from impossible to retain a facade and a brand name for international presentation and internal electoral purposes, while undermining, and then removing, the institutions as we know them.
I am happy to confess that I have been TV licence free for the last 15 years. I don’t watch live tv or the BBC IPlayer. If I do watch anything it is pre-recorded and via the web, all perfectly legal. And yes, I get plenty of threatening letters from Capita TV Licensing, about one a month on average. Despite their treating you like a criminal if you choose not to watch live tv, unlike some, I have no axe to grind with the BBC or the licence, but I do think that it is now too big and has moved well beyond it’s original remit.
For example, how many people know that the BBC own UKTV, which includes the channels Gold, UK Drama, Dave, Alibi and Yesterday. Even if you pay for your licence you can only get these channels via satellite or cable, probably by paying Sky or Virgin Media or a set top box. In other words, today if you do not have the technology your tv licence no longer gives you all the BBC owned services available.
In the good old bad old days, you paid your TV licence and you got 2 TV channels, BBC 1 and 2, 4 radio stations, local BBC radio and the World Service. Your tv and radio covered everything. Oh, and you don’t need a licence anyway to just listen to BBC radio. The radio licence was abolished years ago and you don’t need a tv licence if all you do is listen to BBC radio. At the time it was abolished one argument by the politicians in support of providing radio free was that it was older people that listened mainly to radio and didn’t watch tv, so why should they pay a licence.
It use to be argued that the BBC ensured quality and that the non licence free market alternative would dumb down. Unfortunately, the BBC now actually competes for a lot of the dumbing down. It still produces a lot of quality, but I feel that it could do that probably on about a third of its current budget. It’s now bloated, the tv licence is 75.7% of the BBC’s total income of £5.0627 billion in 2017—2018. So, the bbc makes 5 billion quid a year, 25% of it from non licence sources. I would say it’s bloated size makes it an easy target for both the left and right. Is there really a need for a public broadcaster that does all that the BBC now does? I would say no.
It’s worth being aware that UKTV is part of BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC. So no BBC licence fee money goes into funding it, so no reason why you should expect to get those channels for free. And BBC Worldwide also makes a profit with that money going back into the BBC itself.
The tories are good at dilemma actions.
They found a way to corrupt the only terrestrial station free from the clutches of constantly needing to please the advertisers. To put it in the position where it is either a tory party mouthpiece or it gets shut down – either way being a win for the conservatives.
A plan that seems to have worked pretty well.
Did you see Ann McEvoy’s piece in the Evening Standard yesterday? Pointing out that be resigning now he ensures that his successor will be appointed while the current committee chair is in post. If he waits a new Boris appointed chair will make the appointment.
And yes, the thoughtful left are definitely being played: we have to make sure frustration at the ‘othering’ of Corbyn by the BBC doesn’t push people to want to do away with the world’s best broadcaster.
Agree 100% Valerie. The BBC is one of Britian’s greatest assets, producing a variety of and quality of programs far in excess of any of it’s competitors. And enhancing the image of this country abroad. Given the loss of prestige this country has suffered as a result of Brexit any intelligent government would back it to the hilt. As would any politician of any party with an ounce of sense. Actually, so would any member of the public with an ounce of sense.
But as we see, we have a government of appallingly low quality individuals, led by a man who is known for his dishonesty, incompetence, laziness and vanity. At the head of a party of hard right ideologues and small minded nationalists, who have it in for the BBC because it is public sector and isn’t just a vehicle for right wing propaganda like most of printed press. Since they regard themselves as the ‘natural party of government’ I’ve no doubt they want the BBC to be nothing more than a vehicle for their own narrow hard right view of the world.
Left wingers who accuse the BBC of Tory bias, and would be happy to see it go, should be aware of this. I would suggest that it is the polarisiation of political debate in the last few years that results in the BBC being accused of bias by both the left and the right. Left wingers who go along with an anti BBC Tory government ARE definitely being played for fools. Just as left wingers who back Brexit have been.
The BBC is indeed a highly valued, unique institution.
Many of its programmes are just exceptional, sold and watched in admiration around the world.
As you say, you just have to travel around and compare with what’s on offer.
The BBC still has a team of outstanding individuals working for it, as it always had.
I have always deplored its lack of interest for European and world news, as in that respect I have seen a lot better elsewhere, a lot less reverence for power too…but no institution is perfect, none offers everything to everyone, and the BBC used to be the best I’d seen, all things considered. No longer, in the News programmes specifically.
Institutions can lose their way when under huge pressure, in extreme circumstances and with a set of individuals in charge steering it one way, rather than allowing it to stay on track.
There will always be a degree of bias in any political journalist, they cannot totally hide their leanings, and that’s ok so long as they don’t start using those leanings to manipulate audiences.
Laura Kuenssberg’s style of interviewing and reporting, her editing choices, her linguistic manipulation of the audience are just shocking, way below journalistic standards of the BBC. It is tabloid standard, despite the sleek, polite, well spoken veneer. Any observer with linguistic knowledge and analytical training will see that.
As for Humprhys….I’d better stop before I say anything that upsets you, as you seem to appreciate him.
Beyond individual journalists whom one may or may not appreciate, there are programming and editing choices made right now which steer the BBC towards bias.
Those who value it must speak out, as huge numbers stop watching, stop paying their fees, thus jeopardising its future.
However, its future cannot be what it is at present. It would fail. There’s too much choice, too many alternatives elsewhere. Yet those are bubbles. They can also be steered, and far more easily than the BBC as they’re far less regulated. We simply cannot afford to lose the BBC, it has to be mended.
I don’t think I’ve watched a BBC TV show in 5 years. Nor do my teenage kids. My wife watches Call the Midwife, that’s all.
But we still have to pay the licence fee. Can you still go to jail for not paying?
Seems unconscionable in this day and age (where subscriptions are possible) to force people to pay for something like this they don’t use.
We should contribute via tax to public services we don’t necessarily use, such as emergency services, schools, roads, social services etc.
But I don’t think TV shows about ballroom dancing, baking, football, or comedy (all covered amply elsewhere) are ‘public services’ in the same sense. Others (eg ITV and Netflix) can produce decent costume dramas.
Simon,
That’s really hard to believe unless you don’t watch TV generally. Nonetheless I will agree that the license fee should be done away with. It is a relic of a bygone age.
On this occassion Marco, I have to disagree with you over the licence fee. One of the reasons the BBC is able to produce the range and depth of the prgrams it does is the funding provided by the fee, both in it’s relative predictability as an income stream, and it’s scale, although that has been reduced by the freeze the Cameron government put on it.
As I said above, the BBC is one of the very few remaining British institutions recognized and admired by the rest of the world. Subscription wouldn’t provide the level of funding required to keep it a world class contender with the likes of Netflix and Amazon. The real question is, does this country want a world class public institution like the BBC, or are the hard right politicians and their ilk (Cummings being one of the BBC haters, of course) going to be allowed to diminish or destroy one of the few things this country still does really well? (Aided of course by the deluded fools of the hard left).
Given the nihilistic and self-destructive course the UK is now on, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this happens. Those of us who believe in trying to promote liberal democracy need to defend the BBC to the hilt from its extremist detractors. The same goes for the NHS.
I was listening to Any Answers one Saturday afternoon about a year and a half ago, (I often listen to Any Answers and not to Any Questions since I find the whitewashed answers of the panelists make me angry and the publics answers are so much more illuminating).
A caller described himself as a retired director of a large company who was responsible for overseeing large contracts around the world. The subject was brexit and he stated that the only 2 things the Americans were interested in Britain for were the NHS and the BBC. The presenter in a flustered state immediately cut him off unceremoniously. The poor man must have wondered what he said wrong, now we know. The demise of the BBC must have been cooking for a long time.