Sunday 17 August 2008

This is BBC . 1


CU proposed a few weeks back that the BBC should be stripped of its ability to charge a licence fee from every home in the land and compete on a level playing field with its rivals.

Contentious issue for sure. There is an awful lot of love for 'Auntie' as it provides so much for relatively little from its audience. £139.00 a year compared to Sky's average of £450.00 or £320 if you bought The Times every day.
BBC gets some £4 billion a year budget and employs 28,500 people. ITV has around £1.2 billion revenue and needs to make a profit to stay in business. ITV are shedding staff in an attempt to reduce costs by some £40-50 million.

The usual arguments for the BBC are quality of programs, news coverage , global recognition, innovation , children's channels , political coverage, sports coverage , unbiased reporting, radio , culture and current affairs excellence websites and plenty more.
Against is biased coverage , left wing , slow to respond , overmanned , wasteful , dumbing down , Politically Correct and others.

To attempt to tackle this emotive subject let's break it down into easy to digest pieces.

So, let's just look at News.

The usual argument for the BBC's news is that its the best in the world and without state funding it would some how morph into FOX NEWS.
Quite how the BBC would suddenly become a right wing news station I don't know. Channel 4 isn't. ITV news at 10 isn't. Channel 5 news [if you can call it that] isn't either. Sky news isn't Fox news yet they come from NewsCorp.
The fact is Fox news is an American channel for an American audience. It isn't for Europe.

As for the best in the world I recently watched coverage of two major events on foreign TV. The Olympics and the Russian incursion into Georgia. Coverage was on BBC Prime, BBC World, Sky News, EuroNews, TF1 News and CNN.

On the Olympics BBC was unsurprisingly very good. Plenty of coverage, lots of reports and reporters, lots of comment. It was easily as good if not better than anyone else.
But on the Russian story it was lacking the pace of Sky, the pictures of CNN or the depth of Euronews. Little content for a good long while as the story unfolded. It seemed that the BBC was waiting to see how events unfolded so as to decide how to report it. The other networks had already made their decisions and were running with the action / what would happen next / comment / history / opinions / economists / what does this mean for ... stories / human interest story etc.
The Beeb appeared, to me at any rate, very slow of the mark . Lots of pictures of a map of southern Russia and a narration.
CNN had them beat.

I missed all of C4 and ITV so maybe BBC was better here in the UK, but so far in the News arguments its Rest of the World - 1 BBC - 1

16 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Whether we should have a State Broadcaster or whether it should be privatised, I dunno. But I do know that the licence fee is a property-related tax and hence ought to be rolled into Land Value Tax.

Anonymous said...

There is no justification today for a tax on television; whether there should be a state owned broadcaster is another issue entirely.

I don't want to pay for the BBC, and why should I? I don't pay for Channel4 but we all own that and it seems to work fine.

If the BBC is so loved and revered, and so full of quality programming, and scrapping it would be a contentious issue, which BTW I think is ridiculous, then they should be able to survive with subscription.

They wouldn't survive because they are not revered, not respected and do not show or make quality programming.

BTW: The BBC uses more than the £4 billion because of revenue from its commercial arms.

Anonymous said...

I should add too that I'm not sure where you get your Sky figures from as they are for the full packages, almost and there is a sliding scale that starts at a little more than the licence tax.

Bill Quango MP said...

Houdini: I took Sky as £45 for the full + £16 for the cheapest and divided by 2.

When I had sky+ multi myself a few years back it was running at £650-£720 PA.

Anonymous said...

Single receiver Sky package with 50+ channels, access to Sky Box Office pay-per-view, no Sky sports and no Sky movies is £22/month = £264/year.

However, you can pay for a Sky receiver, get a decoder card for the free channels and not pay anything per month (similar service to Freeview).

In either case you are still required to pay for a TV licence, even if you refuse to watch the BBC channels, and even if you don't have the capability to receive terrestrial TV.

Anonymous said...

The BBC amalgamated all its newsrooms into one entity. It now employs 3500 in its "newsroom" compared to 350 for most other news outlets. It is the biggest "newsroom" in the world by far.

Anonymous said...

The BBC is indeed revered by most of its viewers (especially if they are not Tories). But the question is "Couldn't a popular TV programme like Eastenders survive quite happily on, say, ITV or Sky 1?"

Anonymous said...

£4bn of taxpayer subsidy when its nearest commercial and direct competitor has to survive on £1bn is ridiculous. It would only be acceptable if the Beeb was legally bound to avoid doing anything that the commercial channels were doing and was still considered to be "revered" by the teletax paying viewer.

Old BE said...

If we are to have tax-funded media, they should complement the commercial sector not crowd it out. There is absolutely no need for the BBC to be running Celebrity programmes, soaps, or most sports. If we are to keep a BBC it should be for news and high-brow comment, educational programmes and perhaps some "cultural" stuff which wouldn't cut it elsewhere.

Bill Quango MP said...

Anon: Main complaint with BBC news is that for all its advantages in manpower and global reach it doesn't seem much better than its rivals.
True, I would watch BBC 1 over news at ten, but I would watch C4 news over both.
And local news, which they spend a lot of resources on, is really quite trivial, as local news often is.
Stories of hospitals closing , protests over by passes, school pupil wins trip to China.
Real local paper stuff..
No wonder ITV want to ditch merge most of their local newsrooms.

As to your points on Eastenders and other issues we shall tackle them in later posts.

Simon Fawthrop said...

The beeb's coverage of the Olympic games was good when we had British athletes in with a chance of a medal, but other than that it has been fatuous at best. And don't get me started on that jock git who does the breakfast show.


Sorry I should add except for Michael Phelps, the gushing over him is toe curling.

As for the rest of it, as someone famously said - if the beeb's that good and that popular whuc is the subscription mandatory and backed up by law?

Anonymous said...

Houdini said..

Pretty much everything that needed to be said about the BBC.

But I am going to add my two penneth worth anyway. The BBC should be funded by voluntary subscription, cut down to two, perhaps three channels, most of their digital channels are off the air during the day anyway. BBC Childrens TV is execrable.

They MASSIVELY overstaff their overseas missions and regardless of the staffing levels, the news coverage is trival.

CityUnslicker said...

Glad to see that despite BQ's best efforts most votes are on my side.

privatise the beeb and let's see if the whale beaches itself or conquers the ocean.

Anonymous said...

Houdini: I took Sky as £45 for the full + £16 for the cheapest and divided by 2.

When I had sky+ multi myself a few years back it was running at £650-£720 PA.


I would put like for like as he cheapest as there is plenty of channels.

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