Is the licence fee worth it? Poll discussion

Dan29

RRatchet wrote: »

So were stuck with paying the licence fee and Sky subscription or no tv.

http://www.freesatfromsky.co.uk/

Or, when you've had Sky a year, just cancel your subscription. You'll still get most of the 'free' channels.

westernpromise

teddybaker84 wrote: »

In an era were we are force fed ideas and views by the papers who are independently owned and consequently it would be naive to believe that they cannot be bought, the BBC offers an infinitely more balanced view point.

:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

westernpromise

guppy wrote: »

Maybe the BBC is biased...but if the Tories say they're biased, Labour hate them and say they're biased, the LibDems criticise them, the BNP hate them...that nutter Kilroy (where's he gone recently, anyway?) definitely hates them...then they're doing something right in my book.

Hitler was hated by the USA, the Commonwealth, the USSR and most of Europe too. I guess he was doing something right too.

Tetsuko

Originally Posted by teddybaker84
In an era were we are force fed ideas and views by the papers who are independently owned and consequently it would be naive to believe that they cannot be bought, the BBC offers an infinitely more balanced view point.


Hmmm BBC unbiased?

This is from my bf's newsfeed at work. Apologies for the length but I couldn't really edit it without losing what it had to say and I can't get the link because it was from an internal newsfeed.


"It never happened ...": concealed during the Alan Johnston kidnap crisis was the fate of a Palestinian cameraman shot by the Israelis. The BBC, desperate to deny charges of "bias", refused to follow the story.(MIDDLE EAST COVERAGE)(British Broadcasting Corp)

Source: New Statesman (1996)


One of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston was a Palestinian news cameraman, Imad Ghanem. On 5 July, he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he filmed them invading Gaza. A Reuters video shows bullets hitting his body as he lay on the ground. An ambulance trying to reach him was also attacked. The Israelis described him as a "legitimate target". The International Federation of Journalists called the shooting "a vicious and brutal example of deliberate targeting of a journalist". At the age of 21, he has had both legs amputated.


[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]


Dr David Halpin, a British trauma surgeon who works with Palestinian children, emailed the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. "The BBC should report the alleged details about the shooting," he wrote. "It should honour Alan [Johnston] as a journalist by reporting the facts, uncomfortable as they might be to Israel."

He received no reply.

The atrocity was reported in two sentences on the BBC online. Along with 11 Palestinian civilians killed by the Israelis on the same day, Alan Johnston's now legless champion slipped into what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four called the memory hole. (It was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth to make disappear all facts embarrassing to Big Brother.)


While Alan Johnston was being held, I was asked by the BBC World Service if I would say a few words of support for him. I readily agreed, and suggested I also mention the thousands of Palestinians abducted and held hostage. The answer was a polite no; and all the other hostages remained in the memory hole. Or, as Harold Pinter wrote of such unmentionables: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened ... It didn't matter. It was of no interest."


The media wailing over the BBC's royal photo-shoot fiasco and assorted misdemeanours provide the perfect straw man. They complement a self-serving BBC internal inquiry into news bias, which dutifully supplied the Daily Mail with hoary grist that the corporation is a left-wing plot. Such shenanigans would be funny were it not for the true story behind the facade of elite propaganda that presents humanity as useful or expendable, worthy or unworthy, and the Middle East as the Anglo-American crime that never happened, didn't matter, was of no interest.


The other day, I turned on Radio 4 and heard a cut-glass voice announce a programme about Iraqi interpreters working for "the British coalition forces" and warning that "listeners might find certain descriptions of violence disturbing". Not a word referred to those of "us" directly and ultimately responsible for the violence. The programme was called Face the Facts. Is satire that dead? Not yet. The warmonger David Aaronovitch is to interview Blair in the BBC's "major retrospective" of the sociopath's rule.

Bringing democracy

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four lexicon of opposites pervades almost everything we see, hear and read now. The invaders and destroyers are "the British coalition forces", surely as benign as the St John Ambulance, who are "bringing democracy" to Iraq. Newsnight describes Israel as having "two hostile Palestinian entities on its borders", neatly inverting the truth that Israel is actually inside Palestinian borders. A study by Glasgow University says that young British viewers of TV news believe Israelis illegally colonising Palestinian land are Palestinians: the victims are the invaders."

guppy

westernpromise wrote: »

Hitler was hated by the USA, the Commonwealth, the USSR and most of Europe too. I guess he was doing something right too.

I think there was a breakdown in logic there.

guppy

That was very interesting, Tetsuko.

Personally I think that all of the media organisations tiptoe around the Palestine issue too much.

On the other hand a lot of right-wing people howl about the BBC being anti-Israeli and anti-American.

Personally I think the BBC is more balanced than say, Murdoch's Sky and The Sun. But where should the balance be drawn?

hetheron_2

We should not pay a TV licence as it is soley a tax on having equipment capable of receiving pictures and sound which is not exclusive to them so why should only the BBC benefit from this? There are hundreds of various broadcasters now yet we don't pay them.
Like many others, I have Sky which is expensive enough so why do I also have to pay to the BBC as they having nothing to do with the programmes I watch via Sky. Let them raise finance by advertising if it has to be but they are NOT exclusive so let them get off their backsides and find the money else where as other businesses have to do.

t8769

Hethron

The BBC would not survive in the open market because its views (largely Middle-Upper class, Leftist, anti-American, Socialist) are not shared by the majority of the population.

Sky must reflect the views of the population, and thus is rather moderate.

In the US open market, you can watch Leftist ABC or Rightist Fox, you have a choice.

The BBC distorst the market by preventing us from choosing by dominating the market with its own view, or that of the Left.

You choose to pay for Sky, but you must pay for the BBC, because they know perfectly well that - given the choice - you would not pay for it, you would pay for Sky.

The BBC exists by force of law, because it cannot exist by free citizens choosing what to pay for. If it was anywhere near as popular as it claims, there would be no reason to throw people in jail and sell their furnature for refusing to pay for it.

Can you imagine Tesco coming round to your house, having you arrested, and thrown into jail, becuase you'd refused to buy groceries at their store.

Its that crazy, Americans are amazed.

Well, we can imagine it, we know what life was like in the Soviet Union. The last bastion of Soviet control exists in Broadcasting house.

achtunglady

In this day and age of digital tv, where many channels are subscription based and encrypted if you don't subscribe, then that is what the BBC should do, if you want to watch it pay the license fee, though i bet they would probably set the broadcast so a license paying person couldnt record it and show it to his/her non license paying friends.

Another thing that gets on my nerves with them, is the paltry discount offered to partially sighted or blind people, and as for the free license for pensioners over a certain age, how many of them of this age and over live in their own place?

t8769

Yes, but that wouldn't work, because people wouldn't pay to watch the BBC, they'd pay for SKy, or Channel 4, but not a bunch of Lefties in Broadcasting house.

The system you propose is fair, free, democratic and moral, and that is why it will never be allowed.

Nice idea though!