Iron Bru › Forums › Non Football › The BBC Just Cancelled Itself › Reply To: The BBC Just Cancelled Itself
Just to get back on track for a moment…
The BBC is excellent and one of this country’s crown jewels. But that’s not to say it’s perfect. Last week we saw Fiona Bruce say that Johnson’s dad had only hit his wife once, which she dismissed as if unimportant, despite evidence he’d hit her on repeated occasions. Bruce subsequently resigned from her post as ‘ambassador’ for a domestic violence charity and quite right too, it was a stupid remark.
Perhaps more serious was the way on which the BBC interviewed expert economists and others during the Brexit campaign, and for ‘balance’ they also interviewed Kippers and others, most of whom were thicker than a whale omelette. Now, if everyone can see it’s raining outside and someone says ‘no, the sun’s shining’, you don’t interview the ‘shiners’ in the name of balance! Yet, this is what happened on too many occasions. Complete idiots were treated with deference / reverence, as if they were experts.
Same with Johnson – he’s a proven liar and deserves to be called out when he tells lies, yet auntie failed and fails still, to do this on numerous occasions.
And then there’s this ‘ere chairman, a man with no experience in broadcasting, and one who has does big favours for Johnson, and compromises the ‘arm’s length’ principle of the BBC.
Despite these weaknesses it has proved a reliable source of info during Covid and still is a leading source on international news, such as the reporting from Ukraine, which is why the rest of the world looks to it as a beacon of excellence, and totalitarian governments fear and ban it.
Privatise the news, and what are you left with? Trump-supporting conspiracy stations like G-Beebies and Sky, with an avalanche of adverts in which the first casualty is truth. In fact the news itself would become like an advert… for the liars and charlatans on the far-right. Why? Because it suits the agenda of those funding them, and because it’s so easy for others to pay/sponsor a broadcaster to churn out sensational, exaggerated and plain untrue stories about foreigners, scroungers, teachers, doctors, lefties… all without a shred of evidence.
Yep, the BBC has it’s problems, but the way in which it’s funded allows it to keep at arms length from government, and consistently be the best there is, not only at news but at bringing the country together. That’s because it can commission programmes which are not necessarily profitable, but are nevertheless important, e.g. documentaries about history, nature, science and so on, even religious programmes which I resent but accept. That’s in contrast to channels of wall to wall commercial ‘messages’ interspersed with game shows, etc. – as informative, educational and entertaining as an ocular migraine.
All that said, the BBC has two of the most annoying people on TV – Winkleperson and Balding. Aye, shut it down now!
