7 ms·

One of the great things of the Licence fee was that the Government does not get to control the national TV like it does when the one who pays is it directly. I

One of the great things of the Licence fee was that the Government does not get to control the national TV like it does when the one who pays is it directly. In places like Spain the national TV(and regional TV too) becomes a propaganda machine for the exclusive service of the Government(s, national and regional). It is awful to have your taxes redirected for the private interest of the Party in charge. In fact with the crisis and private TV also being subsidized, the Media is being captured like the Gramma, Pravda, or Global Times, when the government never can go wrong or do mistakes.

cromka 5y ago
> In places like Spain Spain? Spain pales in comparison with Poland. Where they collect the license fee, too.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Depends on what you compare. State control of television given things like the Catalonian crisis probably swing the bar.
- EL_Loco 5y ago
  Poland? Poland pales in comparison with Brazil, where there's a R$5.7 billion (about 1 billion US$) 'Electoral Fund' used for political campaings by the thirty something registered political parties. All paid for by the taxpayers. And let's not forget that there's also a 'Political Party Fund'. And I just love the reason for the creation of the 'Electoral Fund', but that's another story.
  - Hokusai 5y ago
    Are not that funds created so taxpayers are there ones in control of party finances instead of corporations? The USA seems a good example of what happens when politicians are fully dependent on corporations if they want to be elected, and it's servitude to the interest of the few.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      I guess this depends on what the requirements are to access said fund. If accessing said fund requires being on good terms with the establishment then it's the worst of both worlds.
      - sofixa 5y ago
        In Bulgaria It's similar to Brazil, parties get a fixed funding from the taxpayer and have a limited amount of funding they can collect from donations, with strict reporting requirements. Just having a party present itself with the minimum required amount of signatures (500 IIRC) for an election is enough to get the official funds, and of course spending is tracked. It certainly seems a much better way of doing things than the US.
      - lobocinza 5y ago
        Throwing public money on elections didn't solve the problem it aimed to solve, corps financing candidates for favors. Even before the prohibition most of it was transferred over the counter or in deals where corp X pay for something for Y in the name Z. This is illegal and people got arrested (mainly the intermediaries) but it's a widespread practice. What this achieved is making running a campaign as a grassroots politician more expensive and prohibitive while empowering parties leaders. The 'caciques' have enormous financial power in their hands and act as gatekeepers of who will get elected. The share of the pie to parties is proportional to the number of votes their congressmen received in the last election. And the voting system is bizarre. Multiparty system in Brazil is a joke, mostly parties doesn't have ideology or political coherence. It's simply power for power. If you vote for candidate A from party X that is a good guy with nice ideas you will probably help instead to elect candidate B from the same party which is a piece of shit. On last election a popular Youtuber and outsider of the political system received a large number of votes but due to how the system work a bunch of trash from his party got elected along. End of day, when he tried to make the right thing he didn't have the support of his own party.
Nextgrid 5y ago
The BBC is welcome to encrypt their broadcasts and sell subscriptions directly.
- lozenge 5y ago
  No they can't, their remit is set by the government.
- johnday 5y ago
  This is not feasible. In the UK we have Freeview [1], a free-to-access television platform which manages ~all terrestrial output. The BBC administrates this system along with the other major broadcasters (ITV, C4, ...). If the BBC did not put out its own output under Freeview, not only would Freeview collapse but the BBC would effectively be wiped off the face of British television. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeview_(UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeview_(UK)
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Freeview just a marketing name for DVB-T (or T2 nowadays), which supported encrypted content since its inception and can mix encrypted & non-encrypted channels in the same multiplex?
    - lozenge 5y ago
      This is correct but not every TV will have the slot for a decryption card. The UK has good broadband but far from the level of a universal public service. (That would be communism apparently)
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        That's a chicken & egg problem though. In fact CI slots used to be more popular but declined as the system was pretty much never used (pay-TV is typically only used for high-end services which then provided their own set-top-box offering extra features such as recording or catch-up TV services over the internet). The problem can also be trivially solved by cheap set-top-boxes (during the migration to digital TV, DVB-T tuner set-top-boxes were already inexpensive and technology has advanced even more since then) for the immediate future to avoid forcing people to upgrade their entire TV sets. Key distribution is already a solved problem as well, the UK has a large userbase of smartcard-based prepayment systems such as for electric/gas meters or transport cards (Oyster card) and every tobacco/liquor store has a terminal that can sell or reload these cards. Expanding this system to reload TV cards is just a software update.
pmontra 5y ago
Italy has a license fee but the parliament nominates part of the board. It's a little less clear cut now but until the 90s the only three channels of RAI at the time were clearly aligned to demochristians (RAI 1, center), socialists (RAI 2, left) and communists (RAI 3, when they were almost what you would think a communist is.) The three major parties of the time.
koolba 5y ago
> It is awful to have your taxes redirected for the private interest of the Party in charge. In the USA this is solved by having your taxes only go towards liberal media outlets regardless of who’s in power: https://wcti12.com/news/nation-world/pbs-attorney-fired-after-video-shows-him-pushing-for-re-education-camps-for-trump-voters https://wcti12.com/news/nation-world/pbs-attorney-fired-afte...
iqanq 5y ago
In Spain both public and private TV channels are at the service of the government. The government always finds an excuse to give money to private channels to make sure they say what they have to say. It's a disgrace.
- Hokusai 5y ago
  > both public and private TV channels are at the service of the government I have a different take. Private channels support parties that align with their interests. But private channels will criticize there government non-stop if they do not like the current ruling party. So, it's way more complex that everybody works for the government, that seems to be true in China, thou.
  - kunagi7 5y ago
    It used to be like that, every television outlet had their own political views and openly criticized the opposing ones. However, when the pandemic started the government spent over 15 million euros directly in private televisions [1], and gave over 100 million euros in institutional advertisements to radio outlets, newspapers and the aforementioned private televisions [2], supposedly to avoid their economic collapse. Also some regions did the same with regional or local outlets. So, it's not like they're at their service... But why should the media in Spain criticize the hand that feeds them? [0] Note, sources are in Spanish (and both sources got institutional advertisements!): [1] https://www.lavanguardia.com/television/20200331/48219498329/mediaset-atresmedia-ayudas-coronavirus-subvecion-gobierno-beneficios.html https://www.lavanguardia.com/television/20200331/48219498329... [2] https://www.elespanol.com/invertia/medios/20200407/moncloa-activara-millones-euros-publicidad-institucional-medios/480452802_0.html https://www.elespanol.com/invertia/medios/20200407/moncloa-a...
1cvmask 5y ago
The BBC is a propaganda mouthpiece of the state just like everywhere else. Even private media outfits in the UK are mouthpieces of the state like Reuters and Bellingcat. https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-office-russian-media/ https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-of... https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-25/Reuters-BBC-participated-in-UK-FCO-s-project-to-weaken-Russia-report-Ya0X5PBHTq/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-25/Reuters-BBC-participat...
rhn_mk1 5y ago
What about the license fee prevent the control by the government? The money goes through the government, and government chooses who pays and how much, so it's pretty close to as if the government was "paying" it directly. Poland, as mentioned by a sibling, is a counter-example. How does the license fee prevent the propaganda?
- IAmEveryone 5y ago
  It works by setting a license fee by law and making it hard enough / take long enough to change to make it impossible to punish or reward journalists for their work. This could mean requiring 2/3 majorities for anything but a default adjustment for inflation. Or a 10-year lag for any budget changes, etc.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
> One of the great things of the Licence fee was that the Government does not get to control the national TV like it does when the one who pays is it directly. Don't know about that. Here in Germany public state broadcasters have a board elected by parties, churches, unions and other large bodies aiming, on paper, for proportional representation. The results are insufferable, mediocre palliative-care TV shows, corrupt sports (I hear they have that in UK, too ;), and news shows, with the occasional outstanding documentation (public radio stations are better IMO). Until recently, I regarded their news as ok-ish, but the hysterical focus on CoVid and their tendency to polarize and putting every critique against the party line into the realm of Corona deniers or some such in the last two years has pulled the curtain for me, to show a self-referential political-medial complex bringing up topics irrelevant for large parts of the populace.
- IAmEveryone 5y ago
  Their coverage is well within the range of opinion of every political party except far-right AfD. As such, it represents >90% of the voters in last year‘s election. They are not neutral when it comes to values such as democracy itself, and expecting them to be is silly.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tannhaeuser 5y ago
    > They are not neutral when it comes to values such as democracy itself, and expecting them to be is silly. That's exactly the kind of Skinner box reflex conditioned by public news I was talking about. You know, there are good reasons to defend a civil society threatened by lockdowns, unconstitutional curfews, contact bans, and restricting freedom of assembly. And to criticize our government's over-reaching, yet ineffective counter-measures such as contact tracing and plans for compulsory vaccination in the absence of any facts regarding its long-term consequences (in fact, when all that's known is that its effect lasts about 3 months).
    - 5y ago
kaashif 5y ago
> the Government does not get to control the national TV like it does when the one who pays is it directly. You may want to double check who's in charge of the BBC. The Director-General Tim Davie is a former deputy chairman of a local Conservative party and Conservative councillor candidate. Not that bad, perhaps. But the Chairman of the BBC, Richard Sharp, was a banker at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, advisor to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, and has donated more than £400,000 to the Tory party. The Conservative party does control the BBC, selecting the leadership according to their political aims or whichever donor has thrown them the most money recently. And the BBC budget and license fee are decided by the government, of course the government can cut funding at any time... None of this is to say that the BBC is as bad as the worst of state controlled media, just that there are obvious elements of government control, and having one model of funding over another doesn't really change that - the government can still squeeze funding whenever it wants to (and they have done this before).
- dankboys 5y ago
  If this is the case, why did the BBC vote 5 to 1 in favour of Remain[1], despite the Conservative party being down the middle on Brexit. 75% of comedians are explicitly left wing [2] Anecdotally, the sidebar of BBC News UK edition is littered with articles attempting to argue that any inequality between sex or race of people in a unvaried analysis is indicative of system X-ism. Very rarely do people leave the BBC and join right-of-centre media - more often than not they join left wing private organisations. [1] https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1549752/Abolish-the-BBC-licence-fee-cancel-boycott-gb-news-licence-fee-over-75s https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1549752/Abo... [2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9047049/Seventy-five-cent-BBC-comedy-gigs-handed-brazenly-left-wing-comedians.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9047049/Seventy-fiv...
  - btdmaster 5y ago
    The first paper[1] comes from authors of News-Watch[2], which from the website seems to have a clear agenda against the BBC. This is at least mildly ironic. [1] https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/brusselsbroadcastingcorporation.pdf https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/brusselsbroadcastin... [2] https://news-watch.co.uk https://news-watch.co.uk I could not find the source (and methodology) used for the second article.
mbirth 5y ago
We have a license fee in Germany, too. The income from that comes out at about twice of that in the UK. (With most of it burned for pensions.) And the public TV stations still appease our government so they (the government) never question the license fee amount.
- digianarchist 5y ago
  The BBC appeases the government of the day. They’re not the firebrand impartial service folks here make them out to be. Their domestic political coverage over the last 5 years has really damaged their brand.
C19is20 5y ago
I often get BBC "you're not in the UK, can't watch' messages. Fine. Can't pay, won't pay.

cromka 5y ago

> In places like Spain Spain? Spain pales in comparison with Poland. Where they collect the license fee, too.

tyingq 5y ago
Depends on what you compare. State control of television given things like the Catalonian crisis probably swing the bar.
EL_Loco 5y ago
Poland? Poland pales in comparison with Brazil, where there's a R$5.7 billion (about 1 billion US$) 'Electoral Fund' used for political campaings by the thirty something registered political parties. All paid for by the taxpayers. And let's not forget that there's also a 'Political Party Fund'. And I just love the reason for the creation of the 'Electoral Fund', but that's another story.
- Hokusai 5y ago
  Are not that funds created so taxpayers are there ones in control of party finances instead of corporations? The USA seems a good example of what happens when politicians are fully dependent on corporations if they want to be elected, and it's servitude to the interest of the few.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    I guess this depends on what the requirements are to access said fund. If accessing said fund requires being on good terms with the establishment then it's the worst of both worlds.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      In Bulgaria It's similar to Brazil, parties get a fixed funding from the taxpayer and have a limited amount of funding they can collect from donations, with strict reporting requirements. Just having a party present itself with the minimum required amount of signatures (500 IIRC) for an election is enough to get the official funds, and of course spending is tracked. It certainly seems a much better way of doing things than the US.
    - lobocinza 5y ago
      Throwing public money on elections didn't solve the problem it aimed to solve, corps financing candidates for favors. Even before the prohibition most of it was transferred over the counter or in deals where corp X pay for something for Y in the name Z. This is illegal and people got arrested (mainly the intermediaries) but it's a widespread practice. What this achieved is making running a campaign as a grassroots politician more expensive and prohibitive while empowering parties leaders. The 'caciques' have enormous financial power in their hands and act as gatekeepers of who will get elected. The share of the pie to parties is proportional to the number of votes their congressmen received in the last election. And the voting system is bizarre. Multiparty system in Brazil is a joke, mostly parties doesn't have ideology or political coherence. It's simply power for power. If you vote for candidate A from party X that is a good guy with nice ideas you will probably help instead to elect candidate B from the same party which is a piece of shit. On last election a popular Youtuber and outsider of the political system received a large number of votes but due to how the system work a bunch of trash from his party got elected along. End of day, when he tried to make the right thing he didn't have the support of his own party.

Nextgrid 5y ago

The BBC is welcome to encrypt their broadcasts and sell subscriptions directly.

lozenge 5y ago
No they can't, their remit is set by the government.
johnday 5y ago
This is not feasible. In the UK we have Freeview [1], a free-to-access television platform which manages ~all terrestrial output. The BBC administrates this system along with the other major broadcasters (ITV, C4, ...). If the BBC did not put out its own output under Freeview, not only would Freeview collapse but the BBC would effectively be wiped off the face of British television. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeview_(UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeview_(UK)
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Freeview just a marketing name for DVB-T (or T2 nowadays), which supported encrypted content since its inception and can mix encrypted & non-encrypted channels in the same multiplex?
  - lozenge 5y ago
    This is correct but not every TV will have the slot for a decryption card. The UK has good broadband but far from the level of a universal public service. (That would be communism apparently)
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      That's a chicken & egg problem though. In fact CI slots used to be more popular but declined as the system was pretty much never used (pay-TV is typically only used for high-end services which then provided their own set-top-box offering extra features such as recording or catch-up TV services over the internet). The problem can also be trivially solved by cheap set-top-boxes (during the migration to digital TV, DVB-T tuner set-top-boxes were already inexpensive and technology has advanced even more since then) for the immediate future to avoid forcing people to upgrade their entire TV sets. Key distribution is already a solved problem as well, the UK has a large userbase of smartcard-based prepayment systems such as for electric/gas meters or transport cards (Oyster card) and every tobacco/liquor store has a terminal that can sell or reload these cards. Expanding this system to reload TV cards is just a software update.

pmontra 5y ago

Italy has a license fee but the parliament nominates part of the board. It's a little less clear cut now but until the 90s the only three channels of RAI at the time were clearly aligned to demochristians (RAI 1, center), socialists (RAI 2, left) and communists (RAI 3, when they were almost what you would think a communist is.) The three major parties of the time.

koolba 5y ago

> It is awful to have your taxes redirected for the private interest of the Party in charge. In the USA this is solved by having your taxes only go towards liberal media outlets regardless of who’s in power: https://wcti12.com/news/nation-world/pbs-attorney-fired-after-video-shows-him-pushing-for-re-education-camps-for-trump-voters https://wcti12.com/news/nation-world/pbs-attorney-fired-afte...

iqanq 5y ago

In Spain both public and private TV channels are at the service of the government. The government always finds an excuse to give money to private channels to make sure they say what they have to say. It's a disgrace.

Hokusai 5y ago
> both public and private TV channels are at the service of the government I have a different take. Private channels support parties that align with their interests. But private channels will criticize there government non-stop if they do not like the current ruling party. So, it's way more complex that everybody works for the government, that seems to be true in China, thou.
- kunagi7 5y ago
  It used to be like that, every television outlet had their own political views and openly criticized the opposing ones. However, when the pandemic started the government spent over 15 million euros directly in private televisions [1], and gave over 100 million euros in institutional advertisements to radio outlets, newspapers and the aforementioned private televisions [2], supposedly to avoid their economic collapse. Also some regions did the same with regional or local outlets. So, it's not like they're at their service... But why should the media in Spain criticize the hand that feeds them? [0] Note, sources are in Spanish (and both sources got institutional advertisements!): [1] https://www.lavanguardia.com/television/20200331/48219498329/mediaset-atresmedia-ayudas-coronavirus-subvecion-gobierno-beneficios.html https://www.lavanguardia.com/television/20200331/48219498329... [2] https://www.elespanol.com/invertia/medios/20200407/moncloa-activara-millones-euros-publicidad-institucional-medios/480452802_0.html https://www.elespanol.com/invertia/medios/20200407/moncloa-a...

1cvmask 5y ago

The BBC is a propaganda mouthpiece of the state just like everywhere else. Even private media outfits in the UK are mouthpieces of the state like Reuters and Bellingcat. https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-office-russian-media/ https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-of... https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-25/Reuters-BBC-participated-in-UK-FCO-s-project-to-weaken-Russia-report-Ya0X5PBHTq/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-25/Reuters-BBC-participat...

rhn_mk1 5y ago

What about the license fee prevent the control by the government? The money goes through the government, and government chooses who pays and how much, so it's pretty close to as if the government was "paying" it directly. Poland, as mentioned by a sibling, is a counter-example. How does the license fee prevent the propaganda?

IAmEveryone 5y ago
It works by setting a license fee by law and making it hard enough / take long enough to change to make it impossible to punish or reward journalists for their work. This could mean requiring 2/3 majorities for anything but a default adjustment for inflation. Or a 10-year lag for any budget changes, etc.

tannhaeuser 5y ago

> One of the great things of the Licence fee was that the Government does not get to control the national TV like it does when the one who pays is it directly. Don't know about that. Here in Germany public state broadcasters have a board elected by parties, churches, unions and other large bodies aiming, on paper, for proportional representation. The results are insufferable, mediocre palliative-care TV shows, corrupt sports (I hear they have that in UK, too ;), and news shows, with the occasional outstanding documentation (public radio stations are better IMO). Until recently, I regarded their news as ok-ish, but the hysterical focus on CoVid and their tendency to polarize and putting every critique against the party line into the realm of Corona deniers or some such in the last two years has pulled the curtain for me, to show a self-referential political-medial complex bringing up topics irrelevant for large parts of the populace.

IAmEveryone 5y ago
Their coverage is well within the range of opinion of every political party except far-right AfD. As such, it represents >90% of the voters in last year‘s election. They are not neutral when it comes to values such as democracy itself, and expecting them to be is silly.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  > They are not neutral when it comes to values such as democracy itself, and expecting them to be is silly. That's exactly the kind of Skinner box reflex conditioned by public news I was talking about. You know, there are good reasons to defend a civil society threatened by lockdowns, unconstitutional curfews, contact bans, and restricting freedom of assembly. And to criticize our government's over-reaching, yet ineffective counter-measures such as contact tracing and plans for compulsory vaccination in the absence of any facts regarding its long-term consequences (in fact, when all that's known is that its effect lasts about 3 months).
  - 5y ago

kaashif 5y ago

> the Government does not get to control the national TV like it does when the one who pays is it directly. You may want to double check who's in charge of the BBC. The Director-General Tim Davie is a former deputy chairman of a local Conservative party and Conservative councillor candidate. Not that bad, perhaps. But the Chairman of the BBC, Richard Sharp, was a banker at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, advisor to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, and has donated more than £400,000 to the Tory party. The Conservative party does control the BBC, selecting the leadership according to their political aims or whichever donor has thrown them the most money recently. And the BBC budget and license fee are decided by the government, of course the government can cut funding at any time... None of this is to say that the BBC is as bad as the worst of state controlled media, just that there are obvious elements of government control, and having one model of funding over another doesn't really change that - the government can still squeeze funding whenever it wants to (and they have done this before).

dankboys 5y ago
If this is the case, why did the BBC vote 5 to 1 in favour of Remain[1], despite the Conservative party being down the middle on Brexit. 75% of comedians are explicitly left wing [2] Anecdotally, the sidebar of BBC News UK edition is littered with articles attempting to argue that any inequality between sex or race of people in a unvaried analysis is indicative of system X-ism. Very rarely do people leave the BBC and join right-of-centre media - more often than not they join left wing private organisations. [1] https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1549752/Abolish-the-BBC-licence-fee-cancel-boycott-gb-news-licence-fee-over-75s https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1549752/Abo... [2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9047049/Seventy-five-cent-BBC-comedy-gigs-handed-brazenly-left-wing-comedians.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9047049/Seventy-fiv...
- btdmaster 5y ago
  The first paper[1] comes from authors of News-Watch[2], which from the website seems to have a clear agenda against the BBC. This is at least mildly ironic. [1] https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/brusselsbroadcastingcorporation.pdf https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/brusselsbroadcastin... [2] https://news-watch.co.uk https://news-watch.co.uk I could not find the source (and methodology) used for the second article.

mbirth 5y ago

We have a license fee in Germany, too. The income from that comes out at about twice of that in the UK. (With most of it burned for pensions.) And the public TV stations still appease our government so they (the government) never question the license fee amount.

digianarchist 5y ago
The BBC appeases the government of the day. They’re not the firebrand impartial service folks here make them out to be. Their domestic political coverage over the last 5 years has really damaged their brand.

C19is20 5y ago

I often get BBC "you're not in the UK, can't watch' messages. Fine. Can't pay, won't pay.