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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36366 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Twitter: BBC objects to 'government funded media' label

"The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee," it said.

When BBC News highlighted to the Twitter boss that the corporation was licence fee-funded, Mr Musk responded in an email, asking: "Is the Twitter label accurate?"

The level of the £159 ($197) annual licence fee - which is required by law to watch live TV broadcasts or live streaming in the UK - is set by the government, but paid for by individual UK households.

Collection of the the licence fee and enforcement of non-payment is carried out by private companies contracted by the corporation, not the UK government.

TV licence evasion itself is not an imprisonable offence. However, non-payment of a fine, following a criminal conviction, could lead to a risk of imprisonment - "a last resort" after other methods of enforcement have failed.

I'm sorry, I don't really see the point of the complaints. Or rather: I see a point, but it's not interesting or flattering.

The BBC license it's mandated by the government.

The fact that artists and defenders of the BBC itself argue attempts to remove the 'fee' will harm programming or is a deliberate attempt to cow the BBC also militates towards the conclusion that the worries implied by "state-affiliated" or "state-funded" apply - though I grant that it is a more refined arrangement than direct payment.

Shadow Culture Secretary Lucy Powell said: “The cat is out of the bag. The Prime Minister thinks those reporting on his rule breaking should pay consequences, whilst he gets off free.

"The Prime Minister and the Culture Secretary seem hell-bent on attacking this great British institution because they don’t like its journalism.”

So...the government not imposing a "fee" is an attack on an institution's functioning but we're supposed to act like it isn't a tax or the BBC isn't government funded?

So what reason does anyone (not benefiting from media branding) have to take any of this seriously? It seems to me that the real basis for complaint here is that BBC doesn't want to even theoretically be in the same bucket as Al Jazeera and RT. But it is precisely the media's fault that terms like "state media" are so badly received. Just as it is the media that marks certain dictators as "reformers" and others "strongmen" with "regimes" to aid its attempts to manufacture consent. They constructed this complex of Words That Hint At Things But Can't Be Called Out Cause They're Technically Correct.

So, because the media doesn't want to be marked by its own taboo-words and bad branding everyone is supposed to pretend that an entity funded by a government mandated license, whose supporters claim would fail without aforementioned government mandate everyone is supposed to ignore the correct labeling?

I think the BBC is being a bit silly. However, why does Twitter only single out the governments? Why not say "Murdoch-funded" or "Bezos-funded" or "Roberts-funded"?

Because Bezos isn’t trying to manufacture consent for any wars he is waging.

Unless it's the war against the unionization of Amazon?

Is Bezos killing the families of people trying to unionize? Blowing up their homes? Maybe razing the towns they live in?

No.

This is the First World, one needs only to socially murder one's opponents as opposed to taking the drastic option of offering helicopter rides.

This is to say that I don't think there's really that much difference other than the continued existence of the biological entities in question. I imagine even the Soviet Union had more sophisticated ways of applying bootheels to human faces than Stalin's mass murdering.

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