Is the BBC doomed?
12 November 2012
The BBC has always had a bloated status as a broadcaster, one that it has not deserved for decades.
It should be.
It has an institutionalised political bias against the right. It is an inefficient custodian of the licence fee. It is rotten to the core with political correctness.
Now its poor standards of journalism at at the fore.
Time for change.
No longer should the licence fee be used to the benefit of a single broadcaster. The BBC channels should be sold off to commercial broadcasters and the licence fee be used in a more imaginative way providing a means to fund public service broadcasting across the channels and to provide a 'quality threshold' for drama. The BBC should be reduced to a commissioning body selling its programmes to ITV, Channel 5 and other broadcasters.
- I still think the BBC is a marvellous organisation..well respected around the globe,and I am going to go against the grain here as I feel that Mr Entwistle was something of a sacrificial lamb in all this. I believe he should get the one years salary, this after 28 years at the BBC and doing a superb job all that time. Perhaps the Director General job was a bit too far for his skill levels, but the mistake in the Newsnight programmes were not directly to do with him.
It is quite clear in any organisation the size of the BBC, a huge level of delegation is needed
for the place to run effectively. Today Helen Boaden, Head of News, and has been asked
to step aside during further enquiries..also her deputy too. Perhaps they would have been the
more appropriate duo to have fallen on their proverbial swords in all this.
I still think the BBC can bounce back but perhaps minus Newsnight..the Newsnight brand is tainted. Interestingly though…they removed the editor after he didn’t do the Saville programme.With him not being there the programme went ahead and did the Lord McAlpine fiasco. With no editor in place it got even worse.
I think Lord Patten should stay on. To have a totally headless BBC chicken running about
the airwaves is not the way forward. Look what happened to a headless Newsnight. - the bbc is still looked at by people overseas as a benchmark in broadcasting. i would much prefer that they stuck to public service broadcasting and left others to employ expensive entertainers.
any union leader or shop steward that calls for industrial action will tell you that there is not a left wing bias after they have been savaged by a bbc news journalist. - It's part of the British psyche to have a pop at the BBC; I'm not entirely convinced that the journalistic failings of Newsnight are the fault of the outgoing Director General, although I do agree that the BBC is having to face up to its own shortcomings on a number of issues. Perhaps a new regime at the top will make the changes required if those shortcomings are to be fixed.
Before we call for the BBC to be binned, perhaps we should look at the rest of the world and realise that we have a public service broadcaster that is the envy of many others; that will not remain the case unless failings are corrected, but whilst it is time to put right what is wrong, it is not time for getting rid of a superb broadcaster.
The BBC should not be permitted to receive funding from the EU, as is the case now, because that will bring into jeopardy its independence and leave itself wide open to accusations of bias. It needs to much more commercial and fund itself from the sales of programmes overseas and to other broadcasters, and if that means it has to lose much of what it already carries out then that must be addressed. Getting rid of the BBC in its current format is not the answer. - Howard - that may be the case when it come to drama and the licence fee has a role to play in creating a quality threshold but it does not have to go to the BBC for that. It current affairs and news programmes and some of its trashier output are a different matter though.
As for a Trade Union official caling for strike action, from their perspective some such may well even see Red Ed as right wing but that does not make him right wing. The institutional bias of the BBC is well established and in many ways is quite subtle. I am not suggesting a pro-Labour or anti-Conservative bias as such but there is a definite left/liberal bias. This can be judged from the way they 'big up' and give preference to the Conservative left as opposed to the right as much as anything else. Their over the top treatment of environmental issues and pro-EU slant to give two very specific issues. - dont panic,they dont like it up emm.
- Tom, you claim to invoke Occam's Razor while using no fewer than eight different assertions (some relevant, some not, and one which totally begs the question). I think I shall call it Austin's anti-razor. Definition: any long-winded twaddle, as long as it starts or finishes with the statement: "I can't be wrong."
All we have here is the coming together of the friendship and fidelity ring, "One Ring to rule them all." The ring to unite Might with Right, Digger with Dave and Conservative with co-conspirator.
While I would like to get the World Service and much else on Radio back to full strength and less of the soaps [and I do mean 'less' and not simply 'fewer'.]....
Alas, whenever was the time when one could not spend more wisely than another?
"a more imaginative way" That's a cracker.
Commercial Television, as the name suggests, survives upon the age old principles so beloved of our dear Blogger. The Market decides. In addition to which the advertising budgets that sustain commercial television are tax deductible, how else could the likes of poor old Starbucks afford it?
I shall have to apply Occam's Razor and conclude that; If you wish it Barry, it must be wrong!
And given the list of those who think like you...I can't be wrong.