Thread: The BBC Television Licence

As far as i was aware if you didn't watch broadcast TV you didn't need a license. However as i do i am happy to pay the subscription.

I think the thing you need to factor in to your mind is that the BBC is more comparable to PBS than, say, ABC. Something like 40% of PBS's revenue comes from state / Federal taxes doesn't it? Therefore in theory people who haven't even bought a TV are paying for PBS?

Originally posted by Trooth
As far as i was aware if you didn't watch broadcast TV you didn't need a license. However as i do i am happy to pay the subscription.

I think the thing you need to factor in to your mind is that the BBC is more comparable to PBS than, say, ABC. Something like 40% of PBS's revenue comes from state / Federal taxes doesn't it? Therefore in theory people who haven't even bought a TV are paying for PBS?

To the tune of $125 million a year.

Originally posted by Trooth
As far as i was aware if you didn't watch broadcast TV you didn't need a license. However as i do i am happy to pay the subscription.

I think the thing you need to factor in to your mind is that the BBC is more comparable to PBS than, say, ABC. Something like 40% of PBS's revenue comes from state / Federal taxes doesn't it? Therefore in theory people who haven't even bought a TV are paying for PBS?

I'm not arguing that PBS is better then the BBC. PBS should be cut off from federal founding. Its a waste of money.

Point is Trooth, the TV license is mandatory. It is something that must be paid by all who own a television.

If people in the UK want additional programming on top of what the BBC forces you to purchase, you have to pay extra. I wouldn't equate BBC with US cable television.

The UK government ought to let the market decide.

Well, that isn't true. The first post above explains the fact that you don't have to pay it if you don't watch broadcast TV. And TV penetration is so high that it is actually, really, not worht the cost benefit of sorting out, IMHO.

but, perhaps you are right. At least the tax is linked to the TV, though. what would you propose ofr sorting out PBS?

Originally posted by Trooth
Well, that isn't true. The first post above explains the fact that you don't have to pay it if you don't watch broadcast TV. And TV penetration is so high that it is actually, really, not worht the cost benefit of sorting out, IMHO.

but, perhaps you are right. At least the tax is linked to the TV, though. what would you propose ofr sorting out PBS?

No one said that PBS is the greatest thing on Earth. I'd like to see it gone, but we are talking about the BBC not PBS.

Sorry, i was taking my lead from those other threads were it jumps onto the UK if i post a reply.

Originally posted by Trooth
And TV penetration is so high that it is actually, really, not worht the cost benefit of sorting out, IMHO.

but, perhaps you are right. At least the tax is linked to the TV, though. what would you propose ofr sorting out PBS?

Well, that isn't true. The first post above explains the fact that you don't have to pay it if you don't watch broadcast TV.

I'm simply not buying the assertion that one can own a TV in the UK and legally not pay tax on it.

Furthermore, the TV Licensing Authority in the UK has equipment that detects TVs that are on, not whether they are receiving broadcasts.

And TV penetration is so high that it is actually, really, not worht the cost benefit of sorting out, IMHO.

Huh? 50% of people in the UK receive cable or satellite channels on top of what they are forced to pay for the BBC.

Why can't people in the UK pay for these services alone without being forced to pay the BBC tax?

Originally posted by Trooth
Sorry, i was taking my lead from those other threads were it jumps onto the UK if i post a reply.

The tread is about the UK. So it wouldn't be "jumping on to the UK" to reply about the UK.

Is it? Well blimey, what was i thinking? Iw as referring to jumping to the US :roll .

I'm simply not buying the assertion that one can own a TV in the UK and legally not pay tax on it.

Well, i had a friend at School (1980s) whose had exactly that situation. The family didn't want a TV for the programmes, but instead used the TV purely as a computer monitor (zx spectrum or commodore something i think) and didn't pay the Licence fee (i remember being in the Physics room discussing it ... How sad is that?.

However if by Tax you mean things like VAT, then no, you have to pay that and, if bought for business purposes etc etc claim it back

[quote[
Furthermore, the TV Licensing Authority in the UK has equipment that detects TVs that are on, not whether they are receiving broadcasts.
[/quote]

:LOL
this myth has now crossed the pond. They used to claim they had "TV detector vans". I am not sure anybody ever saw one outside of a poster. And empty old brown metallic Ford transit with a white painted aerial on top!
:LOL

What they do now is merge the myth of the detector van with the reality of a postcode. Just marketing.

Huh? 50% of people in the UK receive cable or satellite channels on top of what they are forced to pay for the BBC.

Why can't people in the UK pay for these services alone without being forced to pay the BBC tax?

As i have said on several occaisions, i think the license fee is an anachornism. However the British people really don't care . I don't know if it is because of apathy, of it being traidtional, a recognition of the quality for little money etc. But they genuinely don't care. The last complaint i had heard about TV pricing was that his satellite bill was his biggest single bill and he couldn't understand how it couldbe justified.

BBC's Selective Sensitivity

The BBC suspends a TV host for anti-Arab statements, further revealing its double standard vis-a-vis Israel.

Observers have long recognized BBC as one of the worst violators of media objectivity when covering Arab-Israeli and Jewish-Muslim issues. This latest example of BBC corporate policy adds to that mountain of evidence:

Robert Kilroy-Silk

On Jan. 9, BBC took Robert Kilroy-Silk's morning program off the air after Kilroy-Silk made offensive statements against Arabs in a newspaper article. The BBC action followed a complaint from the Muslim Council of Britain.

While one can understand the offense taken by the Muslim community to Kilroy-Silk's views, HonestReporting is startled by the quick action of the BBC in this affair, in light of the years of BBC tolerance of vicious anti-Israel statements by its on-air personalities ¯ in particular, poet and frequent BBC host Tom Paulin.

In April 2002, Paulin stated in an interview to the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram that "Brooklyn-born" settlers in the occupied territories "should be shot dead." "I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them," Paulin said, adding: "I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all." Despite complaint from the Jewish community about these statements and Paulin's other comparisons of Israelis to Nazis, the BBC continued to allow Paulin to be a regular contributor to the BBC Newsnight Review arts program.


Tom Paulin

A British parliament member, quoted in the Telegraph, questions the BBC's double standard:

Andrew Dismore, the Labour MP, said he found it hard to understand why the BBC had moved against Mr Kilroy-Silk but had not taken any action against Mr Paulin. "I am not defending anything Mr Kilroy-Silk has said, but I was greatly upset by what Mr Paulin said, and I think the rules should apply to people equally," said Mr Dismore. "Mr Paulin said awful things about Israel and Jewish people. He should have been kept off BBC screens while his own comments were investigated. I was surprised that that did not happen. It smacks of double standards on the part of the BBC.

A number of American universities, including Harvard, cancelled planned readings by Paulin after his call to murder, but the BBC never sought to remove Paulin from Newsnight Review. BBC had only this to say: "[Paulin's] polemical, knockabout, style has ruffled feathers in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive."

The 'Jewish question'? This is the language of official 1930's Germany, where the Jewish people were considered a 'question' to be 'solved'. And why does BBC consider sensitivity to these issues as 'notorious'?

BBC was the ignoble recipient of the 2001 Dishonest Reporting 'Award', and last year the government of Israel broke all official contact with BBC (after BBC broadcast the false accusation that Israel used nerve gas against Palestinians). And now, the parallel circumstances of Tom Paulin and Robert Kilroy-Silk demonstrate even further that a level of tolerance exists for Israel-bashers that BBC will simply not countenance elsewhere.

How ironic that the Muslim Council of Britain's complaint to the BBC was worded as follows: "We wonder whether you would consider it proper to give the same kind of prominence to a presenter who was so openly anti-black or anti-Jewish?"

In fact, with Tom Paulin, the BBC is doing just that.

--- BBC's Royal Charter Renewal ---

The British public, meanwhile, pays for BBC's irresponsible journalism: The BBC is largely funded by the 2.3 billion pounds ($3.9 billion US) it receives yearly from a mandatory 116 pound ($213) licensing fee levied upon every UK television owner. In return, BBC's Royal Charter demands "authoritative and impartial coverage of news and current affairs in the United Kingdom and throughout the world" ¯ a far cry from what BBC delivers.

It is high time that the BBC be forced to compete in the open marketplace like all other news agencies. In that scenario, the general public could demand journalistic integrity from the BBC front office, editors and reporters.

The time is right to act ¯ the BBC's Royal Charter and funding are presently under British governmental review. HonestReporting encourages subscribers to support the cancellation or non-renewal of the charter by writing to UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell: tessa.jowell@culture.gsi.gov.uk

British citizens are further encouraged to support the petition drive to end the TV licensing fee that funds the BBC: just click here.

http://www.honestreporting.com/artic...ensitivity.asp

The PRAVDA BBC
By Alexis Amory
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 16, 2004


I don't know about you, but this "multicultural Britain" business is beginning to feel like an interim phase. – Mark Steyn, writing in The Daily Telegraph.


British TV talk show host Robert Kilroy-Silk had his show canceled by the BBC for revealing a robust opinion of the Arab world in The Daily Express, a newspaper. A sample: “What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000 civilians on September 11 and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate the murders? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors?”


Not only was his 20-year old BBC talk show canceled at the speed of light, but a deeply authoritarian and ignorant chap by the name of Trevor Phillips who heads up a nasty organization called the Commission for Racial Equality, reported Mr Kilroy-Silk to the London police for “incitement to racial hatred”. Phillips, of West Indian descent, lost his bid to become mayor of London to Ken Livingstone. As a self-promoter with an impeccable thought-fascist pedigree, Phillips ranks right up there with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. He said that although there was no incitement of any kind to violence in Kilroy-Silk’s article, “some people may read it that way”. So now we have a new definition of “incitement to racial violence”. How some dimwits might interpret a newspaper article.


Kilroy-Silk quickly proffered a semi-apology. His article had originally run in the lead-up to the war against Saddam and was written as an opposing view against the appeaseniks. When it ran originally, he had referred to “some Arab states” rather than “Arabs”. When it originally ran last April, it raised nary a twitter. It was run a second time, last week, by a mistake made in either the Daily Express editorial department or Kilroy-Silk’s office, and a sub-editor seems to have altered it slightly.


Kilroy-Silk’s openness, however, got him nowhere with the BBC, which was beside itself with the explosive fury normal people reserve for the mass murder of innocents. Like, say, 9/11. It announced his show would remain canceled until “we have completed our investigations”, although there was no word on how they were going to investigate an opinion column. Parse it?


Meanwhile, Trevor Phillips, on a roll, has adjudged Kilroy-Silk’s apology for the changes in his text (which weren’t made by him) inadequate. He needs to offer a fuller and much more abject apology, opined the mighty Mr Phillips, donate a portion of his substantial earnings as a TV talk show host to an Islamic charity, and “learn about Islam”. Only then, can we “let the matter rest”.


Mr Phillips, clearly an ill-educated, self-satisfied buffoon, went on to lecture the British public about former great Islamic achievements. They were great mathematicians, he informed us. Oh? Mathematics passed through the Arab world on its way to Europe from India, where the concept of zero had already been intuited and where they were already using the decimal point. In any event, this was before the advent of Islam. Even if the Arabs had been responsible for any of the scientific achievements Phillips claims for them , with the advent of Islam, all scientific and other inquiry into the nature of the universe ceased. The Prophet delivered his message from Allah, and everything was settled.


Although public outrage has caused the BBC to back-pedal slightly and say they will be re-instating Mr Kilroy-Silk’s show after all, the TV host still finds himself “under investigation” by both the BBC and, at the behest of Trevor Phillips, the Metropolitan Police.


Note that at no time, even in the altered rerun article, did Kilroy-Silk advocate racial or religious violence.

He stated some indisputable facts about life in some Arab states.


Note also that although some British Muslims had been a bit huffy about the wording in the newest edition of the article (when it was thoughtfully drawn to their attention by Mr Phillips), they shrugged and settled down when told the original piece had referred to “some Arab states” rather than “Arabs” in general. The BBC and Trevor Phillips alone are carrying the torch of indignation on behalf of British Muslims, who, in the main, seem unperturbed.


Now, the BBC’s heavy-handed instant self-abasement to the Islamofascists and their apologists is doubly hypocritical, because there is a British Oxford-based poet, lecturer and attention-seeker by the name of Tom Paulin who appears regularly as a panelist on the BBC.


In contrast to the mild Kilroy-Silk, Mr Paulin has indeed freely incited violence. A pick ‘n’ mix selection of Paulin’s comments made during an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram last April: "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank "should be shot dead"; "they are Nazis"; "I feel nothing but hatred for them". A few days after his violent views were published, Mr.Paulin's script was acted out as a Hamas Death Squad shot dead four Israeli settlers in their beds, including a five year-old girl.


I am not saying it was cause and effect. And I am not saying that Mr Paulin is anti-Semitic as opposed to anti-Israel. I am, however, saying that his words were an incontrovertible incitement to hatred and violence. Yet, while Kilroy-Silk was scraped off the air with indecent haste for an article in a British newspaper, Paulin continues his regular appearance on the BBC’s The Late Review, his wrist not even lightly tapped for comments he made to an Arab newspaper. Nor does Trevor Phillips have any words of admonishment for him.


The BBC wriggled in its seat when tackled about this by British journalists, and offered the disingenuous statement that airing the views of Mr Paulin, who it styles “ a poetic polemicist”, was OK because he was “being paid to have opinions”. So that’s OK, then. Harvard University withdrew a speaking invitation after his comments appeared, but the BBC is relaxed about that too, saying he appears to have “ruffled some feathers” in the United States, “where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive”.


Meanwhile, if the Metropolitan police decide to charge Mr Kilroy-Silk with incitement to violence and he is found guilty, he could face a prison sentence of seven years. It is inconceivable, given that he committed no criminal offense, but that’s not the point. The threat now hovers in the British polity.

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=11785

Problem is that the BBC's removal of Kilroy hadn't actually got too much to do with what he said. It was that he "said" anything.

The BBC has had some problems with its talent fronting up in newspaper articles and offering forth on various subjects and then starting to cloud the BBC's own output.

So, recently, the BBC re-structured its contracts with more exclusivity for the BBC so that people like, say, John Humphries, couldn't write articles for newspapers that then effectively became the news agenda for the Today programme on Radio 4. That is they continued to report the news, not make it.

Tom Paulin's comments were made prior to this (2002). As were Kilroy's. However the problem for Kilroy,and thus the BBC, is that Kilroy-Silk's article was republished after the change in the contract.

It doesn't actually have anything to do with what was said, nor how the BBC is funded. Sadly for clarity, what he said had racial overtones. Which makes the whole thing seem to have a racial background.