The TV Licence.

[The Baron]

What annoys me is that every time there is a incident in the world do we see the BBC reporter or correspondent for whatever who is at the place with a minimum of a sound and camera man.
Who pays for them to have these reporters to be either living within a reasonable distance of these events or to fly them out with a crew to be there plus the carbon footprint which is more relevant today than it used to be.
We can get a insite by using more independent reporters who are only paid for presenting when really essential also why do we need to see some of these events( a reporter stood at the perimeter of the police line)telling us about things when there is usually freelance video which could be used with a studio based reporter talking about it

 

[Chippy_Tea]

What annoys me is that every time there is a incident in the world do we see the BBC reporter or correspondent for whatever who is at the place with a minimum of a sound and camera man.

That is another of my bugbears, on the same lines what is the point in this -what does it add the person in the studio could have said the same.

 

[ScotchMist]

The letters, to be fair, are bloody ridiculous.

A friend of mine recalls a day in the mid '90s when the inspectors called at his mum's flat.

The woman in question (big lady, big personality, wicked sense of humour) let them in knowing full well that there wasn't a TV in the house, made a cup of tea and patiently waited till they were done before getting torn right into them. Absolute gold.

 

[ScotchMist]

The difference is Sky can afford to pay it because the price they charge customers is so high if the BBC want to lower the price wages are going to have to be looked at.

I watch MOTD and i can honestly say if Linaker and Shearer left and were replaced by some x football player on half the money it would not bother me and it would not harm the show at all i don't watch MOTD to listen to some retired players views on the games they show and TBH its a bit pointless as we have all just watched the same clips and can make our own minds up on who played the best, again like breakfast TV why do they need 3 people to show a few clips of the games, cut the chat and show more of the games.

It's hard to argue with that.

I still feel like it's not enough to justify the kind of cuts we're seeing bandied about now though. The Tories are talking about cutting 2billion by cutting the license fee. To put that in context, the combined 2021 salaries of the highest paid BBC 'talent' amount to less than 1% of this cut.

(Facts and figures? I'm bored on a long bus journey... Can you tell?)

 

[Bjorn Toulouse]

I haven't seriously watched the BBC news in years as it annoys me because it is so biased. The weather forecast is a joke, its only accurate inside the M25 . Carol gets 400,000??? wtf. I'll do it for 40,000. I still can't get over the time they said it was going to be dry and sunny all day and you could see it was raining through their window!
Don't get me wrong I don't like Piers Morgan, but, he must have been doing something right when the government refused to speak to him throughout the pandemic.
The other thing the hacks me off is when you write a letter of complaint to them they never respond. The last one I wrote was about Morning Live promoting kissing strangers at Christmas Parties.....In a pandemic.
As for "its not just BBC1 you are paying for" well I don't want to pay for podcasts, cbbs, radio 1 or any of that other ****.
The BBC's programming just is not for me why should I be forced to pay for it.

 

[The Baron]

I know I will get some flack from this but reiterating what Bjorn said why should I pay for minority things the BBC decide to publish/broadcast some of it is real minority stuff.
I may be selfish but it is my money and I want it to go where the majority of and lets call them paying members want it to go.
Another thing is they are making cheap TV from editing floor clipping ( the Best of) and class it as a new series

 

[Chippy_Tea]

I believe BBC weather used to use the met office but stopped a couple of years ago I use a few weather apps for my job and I can honestly say the BBC is now the worst of the most popular ones.

 

[Tanglefoot]

Zoe Ball's on £1.13 million ? No wonder she's so bloody cheerful first thing in the morning



( Don't begrudge Ken Bruce a penny of his wedge though ! )

 

[DocAnna]

I very rarely post on Snug threads, however I do want to add a voice of balance in defending the BBC. Whether you consume of value the BBC at whatever particular time in life you are at now is not the point of the BBC. By definition it is the public broadcaster, it provides both mainstream, and yes @the baron they also cover relative minority areas, which are still important to many people. As to it being 'our money' that's not how public funding works for health or any other public service. Children cannot contribute to paying for BBC content but the educational and child orientated content is genuinely world leading and so much more than the animated or Disney programmes on so many other channels. As to why they have someone on scene of reporting or in a country, is that is how you get objective information rather than the press release or santised information from a government. Contrary to the comments about flying UK staff out to report abroad, in most cases the BBC do use local journalists that are retained by the BBC as part of their role, providing the very independence that is so valuable.

While you may not listen to a particular Radio station, or watch a particular TV show now, you may do in future, or your parents, your children, or anyone else you value now, or in the future, may find support, interest of value in that content. The license fee is not so much about paying for services for us as individuals right now today, it's about ensuring that independence and value is there for whoever we are and whenever we might need to turn to it. The license fee is a flat tax, and yes funding could instead come through government taxation, but that loses the very independence that allows the BBC to operate worldwide without being seen as a mouthpiece of the government of the day. It is the British Broadcasting Company, not the UK Government Broadcasting Company.

The last thing I want is to only ever watch, listen or have available only media content that I want to watch right now. That way is Fox news, of only hearing and seeing content that confirms and validates the views I have. I want to have my views challenged, to sometimes dip into things that I might not have watched or listened to before. As to how much broadcasters are paid, you'd pay an awful lot more for them on a subscription or private channel, recognise what a brilliant country we live in that there's transparency that we actually know about those rates of pay.

Ok Anna out - trying to add a bit of balance here.

 

[TonyT]

I haven't seriously watched the BBC news in years as it annoys me because it is so biased. The weather forecast is a joke, its only accurate inside the M25 . Carol gets 400,000??? wtf. I'll do it for 40,000. I still can't get over the time they said it was going to be dry and sunny all day and you could see it was raining through their window!
Don't get me wrong I don't like Piers Morgan, but, he must have been doing something right when the government refused to speak to him throughout the pandemic.
The other thing the hacks me off is when you write a letter of complaint to them they never respond. The last one I wrote was about Morning Live promoting kissing strangers at Christmas Parties.....In a pandemic.
As for "its not just BBC1 you are paying for" well I don't want to pay for podcasts, cbbs, radio 1 or any of that other ****.
The BBC's programming just is not for me why should I be forced to pay for it.

I’m genuinely curious as to why you think that the BBC is ‘so biased’. I’ve heard people with right leaning views say that It’s too left wing. I’ve also heard people with left leaning views say that is too right wing. So it must be pitched about right. If it was genuinely biased in any way it would be obvious. One of the things I missed about the UK when I lived in Canada, was the BBC because it was so balanced.

 

[DavidDetroit]

Our PBS (Public Broadcasting System) is on the up-and-up. It's as close to uninfluenced as we can get in the US.
Do you have a UK version of FOX News or do you carry the US FOX News in some manner?

 

[moto748]

I actually can get PBS on my TV, But I doubt it shows the same things you can see. Looks to be mostly a diet of war stuff.

Fox News no longer operates in the UK. They had a problem with a lack of viewers! So we don't get to see Laura Ingraham laughing as she announces that a US general has contracted Covid. A recent attempt to set up a Fox-style operation in the UK with a new channel, GB News, is mired in failure and is a running joke here. They appear to aiming at a segment of the market that could best be called Trumpist, but although we have our fair share of nutters, there aren't too many here interested in buying into their diet of culture wars and anti-vaxx. And flags. More flags than a Nuremberg rally!

 

[Agentgonzo]

I think that the government are smart and know that the public are stupid enough to get distracted by another story. It works time and time again, like the fact that the half-a-billion-pound fraud largely got missed by the public due to Partygate

They also used the latest Partygate narrative to quietly pass a bill on voter suppression without it getting much mention in the news. From now on, it is going to be disproportionately harder for labour voters (working class voters have a higher proportion without a passport or drivers licence and also have a higher proportion voting Labour) to exercise their democratic right to vote and cast their ballot.

 

[TonyT]

They also used the latest Partygate narrative to quietly pass a bill on voter suppression without it getting much mention in the news. From now on, it is going to be disproportionately harder for labour voters (working class voters have a higher proportion without a passport or drivers licence and also have a higher proportion voting Labour) to exercise their democratic right to vote and cast their ballot.

My issue with that is that electoral fraud isn’t even a big problem in the UK, it’s a problem that the government has invented. According to the electoral commission in 2019, the year of the last general election, there were a total of 595 alleged cases of voter fraud which were investigated by the police. Of these, there were only 4 convictions and 2 of those were dealt with by caution.

 

[Spratt]

Our PBS (Public Broadcasting System) is on the up-and-up. It's as close to uninfluenced as we can get in the US.
Do you have a UK version of FOX News or do you carry the US FOX News in some manner?

I used to think that the BBC led the world in the quality of its documentaries, but the quality now is dire. The focus is all on the presenter rather than the subject itself and full of fancy camera angles and over dramatic music throbbing with percussion.
By contrast I've been watching PBS documentaries for the past few month and they are pure class. Measured, intelligent, and interesting - they look like programmes made by adults for adults, whereas sadly the Beeb's showings look like stuff made by 18 year olds to impress their 14 year old brother.

I wish the Beeb would go and take lessons from PBS

 

[Agentgonzo]

Do you have a UK version of FOX News or do you carry the US FOX News in some manner?

Fox news thankfully got taken off the UK air some point last year or the year before. I think that there is another right-wing propaganda channel called GB News that is similar to Fox news that is available on Freeview/Sky.

 

[Clint]

I don't know much about such stuff but...
The BBC is an information service...fed by the government, who are apparently trying to shaft them...I don't think so. The government could have used another news channel service for example all their covid announcements. Also the BBC is very good at not reporting what's going on..because there's a government press ban on something they don't want the natives in the outlying provinces to get excited about.
Al Jazeera has often quite different "news" about what's going on in the UK to what the BBC tells us.

 

[DavidDetroit]

I used to think that the BBC led the world in the quality of its documentaries, but the quality now is dire. The focus is all on the presenter rather than the subject itself and full of fancy camera angles and over dramatic music throbbing with percussion.
By contrast I've been watching PBS documentaries for the past few month and they are pure class. Measured, intelligent, and interesting - they look like programmes made by adults for adults, whereas sadly the Beeb's showings look like stuff made by 18 year olds to impress their 14 year old brother.

PBS is very different than anything else here as is how they get funding. We try to make a donation every year to them. IF I were to go back to watching news, I'd pick that. Incidentally, online, BBC was a news source I was okay with.
The hard part for news stations I guess is eliminating as much vested-interest as possible.

 

[DavidDetroit]

Fox news thankfully got taken off the UK air some point last year or the year before. I think that there is another right-wing propaganda channel called GB News that is similar to Fox news that is available on Freeview/Sky.

My respect for the UK increases with that move (I already respect the UK--and Germany, France, etc.)
We are stuck with FOX. It dominates the RWers' TV viewing (last I checked). I'm actually a little angry that the person responsible for that "gem" isn't even some unethical, scumbag American. Trust me, we don't need help here with bad ideas.
To even it out, there is a lot to be proud of here but if we're addressing specific issues, it can look all negative.

 

[Clint]

It's seems there's never any good news...all doom and gloom to keep us miserable. Covid hardly gets a mention now so they must be plotting the next "horror story".
I bet the last good news the UK had was the end of WW2.