Why I love the BBC

For those of you that don't live in the UK, let me explain a bit about the BBC and why I think it raises the bar for journalism here in the UK. For those of you familiar with the BBC and how it works, I hope you find this an interesting perspective.

Each year I receive a bill in the mail for a television license. What, you may ask, is a television license? It is a license that allows me to own a television and watch it. This yearly fee (£126.50 - equal today based on Yahoo's currency exchange converter, $228.55) is payable by anyone that owns a television in the UK (the fee I quoted is for a colour tv) and is used to fund the BBC. Now, some may say this is outragious, our commercials pay for television. First thing you must be aware of is that the BBC does not show a single commercial message - no advertisements except for other BBC programmes (and uninterrupted movies). The benefit to this isn't just not having to sit through douche, tampon and viagra commercials with your family, or candy bar commercials while your children watch their programmes (and then harangue you to buy M&Ms so they can get that fucking candy buzz and then annoy the fuck out of you and the rest of the world). No, the benefit to this is MUCH bigger...

What this means for the UK is that they set the bar for journalism. And by that I mean since they are not beholden to any single corporation for revenues, they are free to report EVERYTHING newsworthy. They get to decide what is newsworthy and what isn't, not Pespico, not Saudi Arabia (listen to Randi Rhodes about this one), no one. That's not to say they always choose appropriately (e.g. the Abigail stabbing recently has led the top of the news - trivial information about a stabbing where no one died, in a country of 60M people!), but they aren't forced to remove news items because it might upset a certain corporation (oh dear!).

Because of this other news stations are forced to report with (roughly) the same integrity in their news - they can't skim over or ignore news that doesn't please big corporations. If they do, since their licenses aren't paid by citizens but corporations, they will NOT last - they, therefore, are held to the same quality of news (in general) that the BBC is held to.

This is why I love the BBC, and why the US needs to stop those bastard rubblecans from gutting the CPB and fund it more heavily (but then the rubblecans would suffer because the integrity of news in the US would rise and the rubblecans would be widely shown to be the deceitful, power hungry, lying, conniving, backstabbing bastards that they are).