Post by Teddy Bear on Jan 13, 2007 17:05:59 GMT
A wonderful article in todays' Telegraph that really encapsulates all that is being written here. After the article on the Telegraph website there is a 'comment' section, and I urge everyone to post their support there.
If the BBC is so good, we will give it money
By Charles Moore
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 13/01/2007
Most people reading this column will, like me, have a licence to drive a car. This certifies competence on the road and is compulsory for motorists.
We would be surprised, to put it mildly, if the money raised from these licences went to fund a corporation (the British Car Company?) that made cars.
Even if the BCC produced a wide range of vehicles to suit varying tastes, we would still ask why, in order to get on the road, we had to pay for it. Why should we subsidise cars which we might not want? Even if we did want them, why should they not be produced through normal competition, like other cars?
Yet we have the equivalent in television.
Although owning a television requires virtually no competence, it is a criminal offence without a licence. And the licence pays for the television work of a single corporation – the BBC. It also supports the BBC's wider empire – since it makes us pay for radio programmes, whether or not we own a radio, and websites, whether or not we are on the internet.
This legal obligation is fiercely enforced. On an oppressive guilty-until-proved-innocent theory, the TV Licensing authority persecutes the public.
In my London flat, I do not have a television (we have one in the country). TV Licensing cannot envisage this possibility, so it keeps threatening me with prosecution.
Once the BBC extorts this money, it spends it generously on itself. According to press reports last year, Jonathan Ross gets £530,000 a year for three hours a week on Radio 2 and Terry Wogan gets £800,000 for 10 hours a week.
As it happens, although I possess a radio, I have never listened to either millionaire. But I do not begrudge them their gold. I just don't see why I or anyone else should be made to pay for them.
The Prime Minister is paid £185,771 per year out of tax. The director-general of the BBC is paid £609,000. I shall not attempt to judge who is "worth" what as an individual. But my simple point is that I cannot see another way of paying for a prime minister except through tax (though I suppose he could be "sponsored" by McDonald's or something); whereas broadcasting could get on quite cheerfully without a director-general, because it could get on quite cheerfully without a BBC.
Yet the BBC Charter is once again to be renewed for another 10 years, and the licence fee (at present £131.50 a year) will have its increase announced next week.
It shows amazing docility on the part of the British people that we accept it. Perhaps this is to do with the fact that people over 75, who still have the habit of voting, get their licence free. People under 30, who have virtually no interest in the BBC, seldom bother to vote.
Once upon a time, there wasn't room for many channels, so it could be argued that such a powerful semi-monopoly needed regulation. In the digital, cable, internet age, the situation is wholly different. A child growing up now could spend several hours a day on a screen without ever watching a single production of the BBC; many do. Increasingly, the vaunted "national voice" is not heard.
But for the time being at least, the BBC remains dominant in our public culture, and its dominance is bad.
First, there is the bias, or perhaps mindset is a better word.
If (God forbid) you spoke to 100 journalists on the BBC, you would find that more than 85 were anti-American, pro-green and opposed to the war in Iraq. They would be happy making a programme about lying tobacco companies and unhappy making one about too many immigrants.
Virtually every single attitude can be predicted. This week, a new year memo by the BBC's Middle-East Editor, Jeremy Bowen, was leaked. He described the situation in Palestine as "the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel's military activities, land expropriation and settlement-building – and the financial sanctions imposed on a Hamas-led government".
What about the fact that Israel has actually left Gaza, that Palestinians have misappropriated aid, that "militants" (as the BBC likes to call them) have murdered Israelis, or that a Hamas-led government with Western money might not be a very good thing? Is nothing the fault of Palestinian leaders?
Look at the BBC history website's entry on the Provisional IRA. It fails to mention the fact that they killed actual people, whereas that on the loyalist UVF (rightly) gives the number of victims and uses words like "vicious". The BBC never surprises.
As someone who is rather more pro-American than pro-EU, pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian, pro-tax cuts than pro-higher public spending, and a lot more pro-Britain than pro-its enemies, I don't like underwriting a religion I don't believe in. It's like being frogmarched into the pew, preached at against your will and then having your wallet emptied.
This preaching provides us, the British public, with the dominant narrative of everything on which we are not, personally, experts. Perhaps even more damaging than the view it peddles is what it leaves out.
If you had to depend on the BBC alone, what would you understand of the changes in our times? Would you have a grasp of why Britain has become so much richer in the past 25 years, or the nature of the war within Islam, or what China is doing in the world, or why our hospitals and schools work so badly, or how the internet undermines state power, or what Christians believe?
The BBC's relation to our culture resembles the old British Rail's relation to our means of transport – it is an over-centralised, expensive, unresponsive, obsolescent, occasionally magnificent but mostly squalid enterprise whose faults the managers do not see because they travel first-class.
Why, then, do I suspect that many people reading this article cling to the BBC? It is to do with the natural conservative instinct that you should not throw out something which is quite good without thinking. And nowadays – when BBC TV is almost indistinguishable from all the other rubbish and there is plenty of good television which is not on the BBC – what educated, middle-aged people normally mean by "quite good" is Radio 3 and Radio 4.
Actually, I do not believe that Radio 4, in particular, is nearly as good as its loyal old audience thinks. Politically, it is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Mentally, it is a sheep full stop.
But I may, of course, be wrong. I am much attracted by Richard D. North's idea in his provocative new book "Scrap the BBC!" (The Social Affairs Unit, £15.95) that Radio 3 and Radio 4 – current cost: roughly £100 million a year – should be turned into the British Broadcasting Club, run along the lines of the National Trust, which raises two and half times that amount. It would be funded by annual subscription, and therefore carry no advertisements.
If we love the channels, why shouldn't we genuinely own them, and make them better? It would cost each of us a good deal less than paying the licence fee, and we would, at last, exercise control.
It is time for a big political party to argue for the abolition of the licence fee. None will, of course, because all are frightened of the power of the BBC to do them in. That, too, shows how, by its very existence, the BBC acts against the public interest. Time for a revolt
