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Ed Webb

The vandals break the Channel - by Mic Wright - 0 views

brokenbottleboy.substack.com/...the-vandals-break-the-channel

UK Britain television TV conservatives privatization public_broadcasting analysis opinion politics

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Apr 22 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 05 Apr 22
     
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Ed Webb

Burning down a burgled house - by Mic Wright - 0 views

brokenbottleboy.substack.com/...burning-down-a-burgled-house

media politics UK Britain opinion analysis BBC public_broadcasting

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jan 22 - Cached
  • The BBC was a toddler — not yet 4 years old — when it first fell over in the face of government pressure, during the General Strike of 1926. In fact, it was still the British Broadcasting Company, in the middle of negotiations to become a public corporation, gain its first Royal Charter, and wriggle free from the direct control of the Postmaster-General.
  • The BBC has remained in that state ever since: Neither commandeered nor free; at the mercy of the government in funding negotiations. There was never a golden age, the tarnish was there from the start.
  • Orwell — Eric Blair in his personnel file — ‘toiled’ composing propaganda at the BBC between 1941 and 1943. He wrote in his diary that the atmosphere was “something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum,” and penned a critique for Tribune in January 1944 that could be from 2022: People are broadly aware that they don’t like the BBC programmes, that along with some good stuff a lot of muck is broadcast, that the talks are mostly ballyhoo and that no subject of importance ever gets the honesty of discussion that it would get in even the most reactionary newspaper.
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  • the latest in a long line of right-wingers raging about BBC bias that stretches back to the halcyon days of bombing, rationing, and government censorship for which she yearns
  • Priestley made his last Postscripts appearance on 20th October 1940. His dissection of his Conservative critics’ complaints could, like Orwell’s criticisms, come from 2022. In a letter to Harold Laski in December 1940, he wrote:[The Tories are] pretending that everything on their side is non-political and not tendentious, but anything on our side must be barred because it is political and tendentious.
  • The farcical idea that BBC is a nest of Marxist revolutionaries is one the Tory Party and its media outriders push whenever an “enemy within” is required. And the response from liberals, especially extraordinarily well-paid BBC stars, plays into their hands every time. Dan Walker — a presenter on £295,000 a year — tweeting that the BBC costs 43p a day is factual but it’s also easily framed as arrogant and out-of-touch.
  • Pretending not to understand the concepts of mutual benefit and cross-subsidisation is a common affliction among right-wing commentators.
  • Seeing the league of extraordinary arseholes ranged against the BBC makes it easy to take the simple centrist line of rushing to its defence unequivocally. But while the corporation does do many things well — children’s programmes, local news, niche music programming — BBC News has big problems and has had them for many years. Big names have let their viewers, listeners, and colleagues down, time and time again.
  • What centrists and the right have in common is a desire for a public broadcaster that looks and sounds like them. The BBC is a creature of the establishment and the licence fee structure means it is also beholden to the establishment. Its natural state is arguing for the status quo and that’s precisely the tendency that leaves it bureaucratic, slow-moving, and prone to shots from both sides.
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