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No employee at any news organization can say 'whatever they want', they're subject to standards of relevance and professionalism. It isn't a good illustration of how the British Government influences the BBC to say that writers/pundits can't call the queen a cunt, because neither could writers at almost all small time American newspapers. Not because the British Government secretly controls them, but because they have voluntarily adopted professional standards that preclude it.
It’s not that each individual employee couldn’t do it. It’s that nobody at all could do it, not even in principle. Jeff Bezos could call Obama the N-word on the front page of the Washington Post tomorrow. Who could do that at the BBC? What group of people could do that? I suspect the only group that could is parliament.
If your point is that all media, even privately funded outlets, are like this in the UK, then I concede. In fact all UK outlets should have “government censored media” labels which link to an outline of the relevant laws and regulations.
I'm not trying to make a statement about the current state of British media, just calling out a poor argument. That the BBC doesn't do something (call the queen a cunt) that almost every media organization, even those not in the UK, voluntarily refrains from doing, does not provide much evidence of the level of editorial control that parliament exercises.
Any publicly traded media company would also have no individual who could call the queen a cunt without being punished by the board. If the entire board decided to call the queen a cunt on the front page they could probably be sued by share holders for damaging the company. Theoretically you could coordinate all the shareholders to approve, but that's implausible and I'm not sure why that should be a meaningful distinction between company's.
The point is 'ability to say whatever you want' doesn't practically exist at most major news companies and if you want to say the BBC as 'state owned media' is categorically different from a publicly traded American news company in a significant way you need a better example.
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