The Conspiracy of Silence

[southern]

I guess with any government they will make money any way they can!

I hope your BBC is better than our PBS, which is our equivalent, at least our public stations have annual fund raising and not a tax or license ...our cable bills are enough.

[NaRvIcK DeViL]

Sell off the BBC ..............

Wrekin MP Mark Pritchard has called for the BBC to be broken up and sold off and for the £135 licence fee to be refunded.

The Tory MP urged the Government last night to privatise the state broadcasting corporation following a series of humiliations and mistakes for which no one has paid the price.

He said the BBC had been fined £50,000 for faking a Blue Peter competition and an inquiry had been set up over the deception of viewers watching programmes like Comic Relief and Children in Need.

“No BBC employee will have to pay the fine, it will be Shropshire taxpayers and licence fee payers who will be out of pocket,” said Mr Pritchard.
He also said there was evidence the BBC had, in part, been the Bias Broadcasting Corporation in recent years.

“It is often not ‘Auntie’, but ‘anti’ - anti-monarchy, anti-Christian, anti-Scottish, anti-Israel and anti-American,” said Mr Pritchard.

“Large parts of the BBC appear more interested in advancing a multi-cultural and politically correct agenda rather than listening to the needs and wants of hard pressed licence-fee payers.”

The MP said when he tried to table parliamentary questions about the BBC, he had been told it was a matter for the BBC Trust.

“This is unacceptable. Parliament is representative of the people and it is taxpayers who continue to pay the BBC’s rising bills. The BBC must be accountable to Parliament,” he said.

There were many first rate people working within the corporation producing excellent programmes, but these should not mask the “inherent and deep-seated rot” in many parts of the organisation, he said.

“The BBC should be broken up and privatised, giving every licence-fee payer free shares. The £135 licence fee should be handed back to viewers and listeners.”

Mr Pritchard said the Metropolitan Police should investigate allegations of “serial deceit and mass deception”, adding: “I cannot ignore the irony that TV licence-fee dodgers are more likely to face a custodial sentence than any BBC employee who might subsequently be convicted of deception or fraud.”

[NaRvIcK DeViL]

THE BBC is beyond the pale in securing a higher licence fee(£135.50 and rising fast !!!), which is a tax on owning a television.

It should have accepted that it is a public service provider and does not have to compete against the commercial channels.

The increasing globalisation of the BBC suggests that there is only one way for it and that is to become a commercial provider as it is around the globe (BBC America ,BBC Canada ,BBC India etc where you pay a voluntary subscription fee ,as part of a package and in some counties there's even adverts) and do away with the licence fee.

The impact of the BBC (on commercial broadcasters and the new technology they have to invest in to compete against others) is not necessary with the enforcement by law for its funding by taxation. The enforcement of this protectionism for the BBC by the UK Government is amazing and has greatly reduce commercial broadcasters' ability to compete. Therefore, it's fundamental we have a competition policy and not a protectionism policy for the BBC.

How in a modern economic and democratic society can this Stone Age enforcement of taxation (licence fee) to fund the BBC magically survive?

Time for this gravy train they have had for so long to come to a End

[NaRvIcK DeViL]

" BBC’s licence fee has become indefensible, says Paxman "

The presenter of Newsnight gave this warning that the BBC’s licence fee funding would become a thing of the past unless it was able to articulate “a clear sense of purpose and express it through much better protection of the defining brands”.

Speaking before an audience at the Edinburgh Television Festival, he predicted that there would probably be “one more licence fee settlement” but said that it would be “foolish to be too confident” that there would be a fourth or fifth to follow. He also high-lighted worries about a decline of standards in television, including the phone-in scandals on Blue Peter, Comic Relief and Children in Need.

Paxman said that working at the BBC “has always been a bit like working in Stalin’s Russia, with one five-year plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another” with a belief that “the system will go on for ever”.

He said that the “idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s” and created a risk that BBC could follow the British Empire into obsolescence. “It is too easy to imagine a future in which our grand-children will talk of having had an ancestor who worked for the BBC in the same way as people nowadays mention having a great-grandparent who worked for the Sudanese Political Service,” he added.

In an unprecedented attack on his employers, Paxman criticised BBC executives for allowing themselves to be “comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the Treasury” during the latest licence fee negotiations. He said that Mark Thompson, the Director-General, had undermined the corporation’s ability to “produce worthwhile programmes” by agreeing to spend £1.5 billion on the switch to digital by 2012 and moving children’s and sports programming to Salford.

He said that if cost-cutting continued the corporation was in danger of forgetting its “sole purpose” – making worthwhile programmes. As an example, he said that Newsnight had been required to make budget cuts of 15 per cent in the past three years, and would have to make cuts of “at least a further 20 per cent over the next five years”, which would lead to an inevitable loss in quality.

Paxman also asked whether there was enough news to sustain the “portentous immediacy” that 24-hour news channels require. Complaining that all “news programmes need to make noise”, he gave an example of an interview with a woman during the Suffolk bird-flu crisis as the “nadir” of excitable journalism.

“The reporter knew what was wanted. ‘We have a dead chicken over there’, the woman wailed. ‘Whether that chicken was knocked down by a car we don’t know’. And that was it. There was a dead chicken in Suffolk.” Paxman said that he agreed with Tony Blair’s criticisms of the media for being dominated by a herd mentality.

At a question-and-answer session after the speech, Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC chairman, asked the presenter what he would actually change about the corporation. Paxman replied that channel controllers should give producers a better sense of what they want. Last night a spokesman for the BBC said: “We welcome Jeremy’s contribution to this important debate.”

Meanwhile it was announced that Mr Thompson, Michael Grade, the ITV chairman, and Andy Duncan, the boss of Channel 4, had agreed to hold a summit on raising standards.

Petition to: Scrap the BBC licence fee.