Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

For discussions on politics and current events.

BBC Poll

1 :clap: I'm British. The BBC is the best broadcaster in the world and is very fair, impartial and great value for money. I cannot fault it and have no complaints.
11
24%
2 :angel: I'm British. The BBC isn't as good or representative of my tastes as it used to be and needs to be reformed, but I still willingly pay its licence fee without question.
13
28%
3 :sad: I'm British. I enjoy watching live TV, but I do not watch the BBC, but I'm FORCED to pay its unfair mandatory licence fee because the law says I have to. TV Detector Vans might be real, although I've never seen one. Ever!
11
24%
4 :ugeek: I'm British. I do not need to pay a TV Licence Fee, as I do not watch live broadcast television and only watch online streamed pre-recorded videos instead (excluding BBC I-Player).
7
15%
5 :twisted: I'm British. I watch all live television (including the BBC) without a licence fee, free and illegally. I am not afraid of prison food and communal showers. Heh heh.
0
No votes
6 :yawn: I'm not British, I don't live in the UK. I don't have access to the BBC anyway.
2
4%
7 :mrgreen: I'm not British, I don't live in the UK. But I can watch the BBC for free. Muahahahaa!
2
4%
 
Total votes: 46

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SKB
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Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by SKB »

A thread for you to rant about the nation's supposedly "impartial" national broadcaster.

A poll for the thread has been included. There is no "winning" vote, it only counts your opinion, so don't just vote for the current most popular.

A history of the BBC can be found at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC ,which may be as 'impartially' written as the BBC itself.

Below is a nice complilaton of the BBC news opening intro's since the 1950's.


bobp
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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by bobp »

Love option 5.

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SKB
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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by SKB »

I'm guessing that option 1 voters all live in London...

Scimitar54
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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by Scimitar54 »

I think the incoming PM should move to restrict the BBC's increase in the licence fee (In essence remove the extra funding that the BBC hopes to extort from the "over 75s"). This would effectively force the BBC to abide by the terms of the agreed transfer of responsibility that was part of the 2016 Licence review. If the BBC want to behave in a biased and irresponsible way, they should be stripped of the ability to raise funds through a licence fee and be forced to operate commercially or go under.

I have got such a bee in my bonnet about the Bull****, B******s & C**p brigade that I vented my spleen before seeing the opening poll. Will respond to that next. :mrgreen:

Defiance
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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by Defiance »

Biased in which direction?

Seems like every week I see people on the left and the right whinging that the BBC is biased towards the other, so wondering which camp people put themselves in.

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SKB
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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by SKB »

Clue: The BBC is not "right" or "centrist"....

Defiance
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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by Defiance »

Not really a clue is it, more of a definitive statement ...

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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by bobp »

Defiance wrote:Biased in which direction?
North or South, East or West,
Hot or Cold, Left, Middle or Right,
Brexit or Remain, Blue or Red,
Black or White, Coffee or Tea.....The list is endless....so are the choices.

For me its the quality of their reporting, its almost like their stories are copied from the gutter press. The BBC once had very high standards I don't believe they are the same today. They were without doubt the best Radio and TV service in the world but once they started expanding into more and more channels an stations, all funded by the taxpayers licence fee which has grown from a few shillings to almost 150 pounds a year, the quality dried up.

Defiance
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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by Defiance »

bobp wrote:For me its the quality of their reporting, its almost like their stories are copied from the gutter press. The BBC once had very high standards I don't believe they are the same today. They were without doubt the best Radio and TV service in the world but once they started expanding into more and more channels an stations, all funded by the taxpayers licence fee which has grown from a few shillings to almost 150 pounds a year, the quality dried up.
Yeah that's a more reasoned argument I think, one I can absolutely empathise with. I have gripes with their online articles regurgitating so much stale information, this is particularly frustrating if you're trying to keep up-to-date with an evolving current event.

For me this is the real issue. I can manage biases in news articles*, but if the journalism is junk then that's much more frustrating.

*sometimes I embrace the biases to challenge my own perspectives. I'm not a fan of the Guardian for example, but I don't want to become that stereotypical old fart who doesn't want to read anything that challenges my own internal biases, so I give it a read every now and then.

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Pseudo
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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by Pseudo »

I've chosen the first option, but my personal opinion is that the BBC is a reasonably high quality broadcaster that has its problems, but it would be sorely missed if it was gone and that's why I don't object to the licence fee. My main problem with it is its tendency to confuse impartiality with nondiscrimination. I think that its giving equal weight to the opinions of highly qualified professionals and dubious kooks and charlatans has contributed to a decline in the level of national debate, but nowhere near as much as Murdoch, Rothmere and the Barclay Brothers have.
Scimitar54 wrote:I think the incoming PM should move to restrict the BBC's increase in the licence fee (In essence remove the extra funding that the BBC hopes to extort from the "over 75s"). This would effectively force the BBC to abide by the terms of the agreed transfer of responsibility that was part of the 2016 Licence review.
I don't think that the government should have been so gutless as to forced the BBC to enact its policy decisions and I don't think that the BBC should have agreed to do so.

Though fundamentally, the current generation of pensioners are probably the best off in history with pensioner poverty at historic low levels and being about half that of the overall poverty level. While I'd prefer to cut child poverty by two thirds to bring it down to the same level, I do think that if that's not possible then as a society we'd be better off rebalancing our resources towards the future taxpayers who will fund future pensions.
SKB wrote:Clue: Not "right" or "centrist"....
I'd contend that the BBC isn't biased to either left or right, but toward the establishment. You can kind of tell that by the fact that it's attacked by both the left and right with the most vitriolic attacks coming from the extremes.

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Pseudo
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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by Pseudo »

bobp wrote:For me its the quality of their reporting, its almost like their stories are copied from the gutter press. The BBC once had very high standards I don't believe they are the same today. They were without doubt the best Radio and TV service in the world but once they started expanding into more and more channels an stations, all funded by the taxpayers licence fee which has grown from a few shillings to almost 150 pounds a year, the quality dried up.
I'm sympathetic to your concerns about the quality and share them to a degree. I think that the advent of twenty-four hour rolling television news has been detrimental to editorial standards across the industry. The rush to keep up with the competition in breaking news stories has led to some very dubious decisions by all channels. If I had my way I'd merge the BBC News and the BBC Parliament channels and try to break out of the cycle a bit.

Other than that I generally find its entertainment and factual output of high quality, particularly BBC Four. I've seen some very interesting shows that wouldn't be made by commercial broadcasters and on a more general level it acts as an excellent training ground for the broadcasting profession and is key in keeping the UK's media sector on the global stage as well as being a major contributor to the UK's global soft-power.

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SKB
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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by SKB »

Every BBC news report:
"The British economy grew by 0.3% in the last quarter DESPITE BREXIT".
"Unemployment in Britain fell by 50,000 last month DESPITE BREXIT".
:evil:
not biased?

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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by Jake1992 »

I think it should be stripped of the licence fee and be made to float or sink as a commercial broadcaster, the whole premise of being made to pay for a TV/Radio set up whether you watch it or not through punishment of potential jail time is just ridicules and out of date.

The content and quality of the programming has dropped so much to the point that most of the programming is repeats through the day.
The quality of the new broadcasting has dropped at an even faster rate with the lose of presenters like Andrew Neil. I believe this is because they have become lazy and content on the licence fee knowing that they won’t lose income no matter what they put out ( unlike a commercial broadcaster )

It also shocks me that an organisation that is meant to be unbiased receives funds from out side political sources ie the EU. No matter how small or large the amounts the bbc should no be in receipt of any funding from any political organisation any where, we wouldn’t put up with this from Russian or even our own parties Con or Lab.

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Pseudo
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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

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SKB wrote:Every BBC news report:
"The British economy grew by 0.3% in the last quarter DESPITE BREXIT".
"Unemployment in Britain fell by 50,000 last month DESPITE BREXIT".
:evil:
not biased?
The overwhelming consensus amongst economists who aren't Patrick Minford is that Brexit will and is damaging the economy. It's a statement of fact to say that since the referendum GDP growth has slowed, inflation has increased, sterling has lost value and average house prices have fallen.

You even have hard-Brexit supporting MP's complaining about the economic uncertainty that Brexit has caused. They put a different spin on it, but fundamentally that's what they're complaining about.

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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by Defiance »

Besides which, Brexit is a major economic headwind in the short term, is it not fair to highlight that influence when discussing immediate financial results? To pretend that in the short term Brexit doesn't represent a major period of economic uncertainty (and all the bells and whisles that come along with it) would be a flat out lie.

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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by clivestonehouse1 »

A colleague of mine is an ex TV licencing and he comes up with some interesting stories.
One household was checked as they have no licence, Inspector knocks & introduces himself then asks occupant why he has no licence.
Occupant states he has no tv to which the inspector comments "well you have a tv aerial on your chimney".
Occupant replies "well I have milk in my fridge so does that mean I should have a cow in my ####### garden?"

Also confirmed by my oppo- tv detector vans are bullshit.
The old image of people driving past your house and a needle pointing and flashing is crap.
They have a list of unlicenced properties and look through your window to check, end of.

BBC only has 2 viable options- go commercial or become a subscription service.
They'll never go subscription as they would go broke overnight, I watch maybe 2 BBC based programmes but currently pay basically £13 a month for this.
I also watch Netflix which is £8ish per month, Amazon and also Sky which includes phone & internet so I have all the content I would ever need.

The other BBC option- commercial is far more workable and would likely be a popular decision.
They would probably complain that the trsnsition would leave them short of cash until advertising was established but I recall when Channel 4 first came on air that they had no advertising content at all and just showed a revolving station logo for 4 minutes as a placeholder, they survived and thrived just fine.

My parents are both retired and have now had a licence fee dumped back in their laps, they can barely make ends meet already so to me the BBC are money grabbing scum.

Their news is so biased it makes my teeth itch.

Sent from my SM-G965F using Tapatalk

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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by Pseudo »

clivestonehouse1 wrote:BBC only has 2 viable options- go commercial or become a subscription service.
They'll never go subscription as they would go broke overnight, I watch maybe 2 BBC based programmes but currently pay basically £13 a month for this.
I also watch Netflix which is £8ish per month, Amazon and also Sky which includes phone & internet so I have all the content I would ever need.
The streaming landscape is going to change big time over the next few years. Broadcasters and studios are going full tilt in to developing their own subscription services. I expect that eventually it'll settle down and there'll be package deals for multiple services, but until then expect streaming to get a lot more expensive for similar levels of content to what you get from a single Netflix subscription today. And I wouldn't be sure that Netflix to survive it, they've got a mountain of debt and a relatively small amount of existing IP to leverage compared to what will be its competitors.

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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

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Pseudo wrote: is key in keeping the UK's media sector on the global stage as well as being a major contributor to the UK's global soft-power.
Hmm true, perhaps they should be funded a bit more from the foreign aid department.
I used to think BBC Sports was the best but sadly most major events are now PPV.
In my younger days BBC 2 used to air Open University Programs and so was a good source of education.
BBC News and Parliament Channel should indeed merge.

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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

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bobp wrote:
Pseudo wrote: is key in keeping the UK's media sector on the global stage as well as being a major contributor to the UK's global soft-power.
Hmm true, perhaps they should be funded a bit more from the foreign aid department.
I think that the world service should definitely return to being funded by the FCO like it was until 2014.
I used to think BBC Sports was the best but sadly most major events are now PPV.
I think that the BBC's sports coverage represents a pretty reasonable compromise between the commercial opportunities that sports want to take advantage of and public service broadcasting. For instance, with football I think that it's perfectly fine for premiership games to be on pay-tv but for the BBC to provide a highlights show. I think that they also provide a reasonable selection of major British sporting events with Wimbledon, the FA Cup, the Six Nations, The British Open etc.

That said, I'm not a huge watcher of sports so I'm probably not the best person to judge.
In my younger days BBC 2 used to air Open University Programs and so was a good source of education.
Yeah, I really miss that too. It's amazing what you could learn if you had a touch of insomnia. Though I think that youtube has probably killed that off permanently.

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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by SKB »

One of the first things Tony Bliar's 1997 Labour government did was to sell off all the BBC's sports deals to Sky, the Conservatives had locked all the major ones to free to view channels under John Major's Conservative government.

Some sports events are still locked to freeview, such as the World Cup, Olympics, Wimbledon and the University Boat Race. But not much else.

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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

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Pseudo wrote:Yeah, I really miss that too. It's amazing what you could learn if you had a touch of insomnia. Though I think that youtube has probably killed that off permanently.
They used to broadcast in daytime on BBC2 on a weekend, back then it was all black and white tv for me.

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bobp wrote:
Pseudo wrote:Yeah, I really miss that too. It's amazing what you could learn if you had a touch of insomnia. Though I think that youtube has probably killed that off permanently.
They used to broadcast in daytime on BBC2 on a weekend, back then it was all black and white tv for me.
I hadn't really thought about it, but of course they must have broadcast them during the daytime before VCR's entered the consumer market. That really must have taken some dedication to your education to give up your weekend mornings. :P

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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by Scimitar54 »

I miss very much what the BBC used to be, but it has been on a slippery slope for some time and has recently been visibly deteriorating in both it's content and impartiality to an alarming degree. They have been getting by for too long relying on viewers remembering glory days long past. If they cannot or will not do the job they are paid to do, they should be closed down. :mrgreen:

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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

Post by topman »

I don't mind them at all. Some of their stories in an effort to look trendy are a bit dozy. But I do like their long reads online in the news section especially about the more obscure stories or parts of the world.

As to the pensioners in future having to pay for the fee I think it's fair enough, without the government subsidies it was totally unsustainable. The government knew it after all why do you think GO handed it over to the BBC to fund? He was hardly likely to take aim at a big chunk of his parties core vote, let the BBC take the hit instead.

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Re: Biased Brainwashing Corporation (BBC)

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topman wrote:As to the pensioners in future having to pay for the fee I think it's fair enough, without the government subsidies it was totally unsustainable. The government knew it after all why do you think GO handed it over to the BBC to fund? He was hardly likely to take aim at a big chunk of his parties core vote, let the BBC take the hit instead.
One possible and not inconsiderable silver lining here is that the TV licence remains free to over 75's claiming pension credit, but take up of the benefit is around 60%, so this might well encourage those pensioners who qualify to claim the pension credit that they're entitled to, which would mean an income increase for up to 1.6m of the poorest pensioner households.

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