From Wikipedia:
That is certainly a comforting belief, and like all beliefs does not bear close scrutiny. The BBC is an arm of the government because the government pays its bills via taxes collected on TV sets. The British Government is pleased to allow a certain amount of loyal opposition, unlike (say) the North Korean government and its state media, but it is absolutely obvious that the BBC’s editorial board exercises prior restraint based on the fact it wishes to remain an editorial board next week, month, and year.
Interesting example of how the British Government controlls the BBC:
Yes, the Guardian actually said ‘official news management’ of the BBC. Independent? Well, Pravda certainly claimed that, IIRC.
Wow! I didn’t even know Al Quaida had a “brand”! Do they do baseball caps?
But oh yes, it does.
Note that I qualified it by saying “as one could wish for”. There is no objective journalism. One can only hope that what one sees has as little distortion as possible.
Of course, there’s going to be bias. Of course people in power are going to try to shut up the disident voice. That’s par for the course. I feel confident, however, that the people in the newsroom at the Beeb fell less pressure from the private sector, politicians, owners or whoever outside trying to influence the content, than any reporter in a newsroom in the U.S. including PBS.
No, not any more. Advertisers are increasingly concentrating on the web, not TV, and the commercial TV channels are having trouble attracting sufficient advertising revenue. It’s particularly noticeable on ITV which has scaled back its news and current affairs programming drastically in recent years in favour of more “popular” programming. As a result the commercial channels are desperate for the BBC *not *to be forced to take advertising, as this would spread the already-sparse advertising revenue even thinner.
Charlie Tan: Did you read my post directly after that one?
At one time you had to have a wireless licence as well. They gave up on this in the 1960s, probably because the advent of cheap portable transistor sets would have made it impossible to enforce anyway.
Any house which has a postcode (trans: ZIP code equivalent, sort of) and which hasn’t taken out a TV licence will get the attention of the TV licence people. Our clubhouse is on a private sporting estate and hasn’t got a postcode, which is probably why they’ve never heard of us. As it happens we threw the TV out the door some years ago - go there to get away from the Idiot’s Lantern, not to watch it.
Stores which sell a new set are required to get the purchaser’s name and address and supply it to the aforementioned licensing people. Of course you could purchase a second-hand one from the paper…
The TV licence is a hangover from the age when there was only one channel. After 1955 there were two, and one of them was funded by advertising. As the years go by and the number of cable & satellite channels multiply and different ways of pay-to-view became technically possible to collect it’s probably going to get harder to justify its continuing existence. There is still general acceptance of it but it’s declining.
Anyone who’s visited America even briefly and seen the ghastly apparition which is American network TV would agree that’s certainly not the path we want to go down.
Tell me that PBS is worse than ITV. Go on and try.
Yes.
The point is not that the Beeb sometimes gives in, it’s that they give in less.
Or, to turn it around, can you explain why things are better in the U.S.? Or, if you don’t, can you point me to another system/model that works better? And I’m not talking about the extraordinary Pulitzer winning, Watergate scandal, mud raking story, I’m talking about every day average news work.
It’s not that I see flaws in the license fee system, it’s that I see fewer flaws. But I’m willing to be educated on the subject.
I don’t know for the UK, but as someone who didn’t own a TV set until some years ago, and was TV-free for 20 years, I can tell you how they do in France : scare tactic.
Shops selling TV set ask you what household is going to use the TV when you buy one. That’s the primary mean of determining who owns a TV but of course it’s not fool-proof at all. Let’s assume 97.5% of the households own a TV and and 92.5% declared it at some point when buying a set. They want money from those missing 5%. That’s when scare tactics come into play.
First you’re going to receive from time to time threatening letters stating “Declare your TV set by filling this form or else…!” (Not asking if you own a TV set). They target all households without a declared TV set with those letters, apparently.
Second, there are inspectors who will come at your place to check. Note that I never seen one of those in twenty years. However, I know for a fact they actually exist. So, they’re going to knock at your door to check. They’re relying on people assuming they’ve the right to enter their house (while of course they don’t have such a right) and admitting they own a TV.
Third : supposedly, they can detect from the outside who has a TV on. Well… maybe they can passing by suburban houses. I don’t buy for an instant, though, that they could be able to pinpoint a working TV set in my Paris apartment amongst some hundreds of other TV sets in the street. Here too, I suspect that the idea is having people believe they won’t get away with not paying the fee.
Note that when I actually got a TV (given to me rather than bought, hence not declared), actually declaring it was a difficult process. First I had to figure out where the service in charge of Paris area was situated (not in Paris, but in a small town in western France), an information that, as far as I could tell, was probably classified or something. Then call them and discover that there wasn’t a menu including “If you want to declare your TV press two” and that you almost never can get in touch with a living human (“We’re sorry, all our operators are busy, please call back later”). After several days trying, I finally was told I had to send them a letter, letter which was promptly ignored.
Nowadays, it would be much easier since the tax service has been in charge of collecting the fee for some years, and you have to check a box on your tax form if you don’t own a TV.
I don’t know the exact technologies involved, but as a rule of thumb, you can use electromagnetic waves to localize something to a precision about equal to the wavelength of the waves. TV is in the vicinity of a gigahertz frequency, so they’d be able to localize sets to within a meter or less.
In principle, at least. It’s quite plausible that they might not go to that much effort, and just rely on people’s general honesty and succeptibility to scare tactics.
… than what? The North Korean state media?
We have PBS/NPR and the Huffington Post and, yes, CNN and Fox News and the Washington Post and the NY Times and so on. We have a multiplicity of options, no two controlled precisely the same way and no to telling precisely the same story. You seem to idolize a single source, which is the way to not really knowing anything about the world.
But there is no “single source” in the UK. The satellite Channel Sky has a news channel, and ITV also runs its own news service.
In the context of the discussion, Charlie Tan was really talking up the BBC as being this wonderful news source not controlled by the government at all. I was deflating that assessment a bit (with cites, no less, which I haven’t seen the pro-BBC side producing).
That is not what that report says. It just says “official news management”, not management of the BBC or of any media organisation. It repeatedly refers to “the BBC and other media”. They are talking about a propaganda operation, not controlling some state broadcaster. You may claim that the government secretly influences the BBC’s output, but that is not what the report is about.
I don’t think the UK has detector vans any more but back in the early days I think they used to listen for harmonics of the line oscillator. That’s the noise you can hear at regular intervals across the AM band with a radio near a TV with a CRT screen. The old TVs radiated quite a strong signal. I imagine it was easy to detect TV use in individual houses down a suburban street just by the strength of the signal as they drive past. I’m not sure how well they did in high density areas. Everything is different today with LCD screens etc.
You folks are all too serious. When I read the post, the first thing that came to mind was the song of The Stonecutters from “The Simpsons” singing, “We do, we do”. 
What if you’re like really poor? Can you get a break? I mean what if I’m on the dole and my brother gives me his old set? Can I get a reduced rate or something?
The government in the UK also frequently complains about the BBC criticising them. In terms of impartiality, I do think it’s about as good as we can get (which is not perfect, of course), and the licence fee is one of those reasons. The government really have very little say indeed over the BBC.
Nope.
From the TV licensing website:
The only objection I have against the TV licence is that it’s per household, not per TV, which means that the Queen at Buck House and Richard Branson in his mansion, with lots of TVs watched by lots of people, pay the same as one person with an old portable in a council flat.
It will end sooner or later, of course, because of the way TV watching is changing. Loyts of people now have a TV set that’s never used to watch TV, just for DVDs and gaming, and lots of people now watch TV online, either by streaming or torrenting or with a TV card which they never think of buying a TV licence for.
The Beeb do seem to be adapting to that fairly well - their website is one of the best and most used online - but they’ll still suffer from the loss of funding once the licence fee is either axed or (what seems more likely) just dies out from fewer people buying it.
To answer someone else: how it’s enforced is pretty much as clairobscur says - by scare tactics. Some of these are barely legal, such as the suggestion that they can enter your home without permission to check if you have a TV (they can’t). It’s also enforced by mutual consent, and that’s what’s decreasing.
You can be sent to prison for not having a TV licence - or, rather, for admitting that you have a TV and don’t have a licence, getting fined for such, and not being able to pay the fine. This year, 30% of people sent to prison in Northern Irelandwere there due to TV licence defaults, and I recall reading that the statistics were higher than that elsewhere, especially for female prisoners, but I can’t find it online right now.