People complain about the BBC's bias. And since everyone has a different idea of what "unbiased" looks like, it's almost impossible to please everyone.
But it struck me how few serious, general, global news outlets there are left in the world that aren't tied to some major interest. Fox News, CNN, WSJ... So much stuff is owned by Murdoch or by some other mogul. The Guardian is pretty good IMO but does not even pretend not to have a lefty skew.
I was thinking about the spiral of death that happens to so many media outlets where serious news doesn't pay the bills anymore, so they either have to rent themselves out to some deep pocket, or chase clicks for ads, losing veracity in the process.
BBC is one of the few organisations left that's somewhat immune to that. I won't claim all their stuff is unbiased, but they're just as likely to publish something left- as right-biased. So now I'm rooting for them and hope they make it. Apparently it is the second most trusted news source in the US, right after the Weather Channel. So truly a global phenomenon: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52272-trust-in-media-2025-...
The news coverage is in general OK compared to commercial news, and especially to US propaganda outfits, but Channel 4 (also public sector) are also pretty good. The UK politics coverage is abysmal. They have become cautious stenographers and promoters of whichever party Farage is heading at the time. Not surprising when you see what happens to reporting that genuinely challenges power.
Agree that Channel 4 is also pretty good, perhaps better even than the BBC for politics now. But so much UK politics coverage these days has moved to podcasts – some of them staffed by ex-BBC people.
I refuse to pay the license fee and watch BBC content simply because how TV licensing is enforced is grotesque and the cover ups of child molesters committed by the BBC.
Put it behind a subscription and give me a choice whether the BBC deserves its revenue, my current opinion falls firmly on no.
How, dare I ask, does one "opt out" of a govt subscription service ?
Some private companies make it so hard these days (Adobe & NYT being the kings of subcription dark patterns), I am curious how the process goes with a govt entity like the BBC ?
I refuse to because they have very consistently relayed communication from Hamas as news without attributing the source is Hamas. As a result a significant quantity of my left leaning friends in the UK have extreme takes on the war in Gaza.
100% this. They published straight up misinformation as fact first, announced it as breaking news, pushed it to BBC app, then corrected it all later then pretended nothing happened.
I don't pay for a license because the programming is crap now though.
>They published straight up misinformation as fact first
Can you add some specifics to this claim? I'm unaware of the BBC having reported "Hamas-sourced" substantial misinformation as fact. I'm sure some errors and retractions have been done - especially given that BBC like all Western media continues to be forbidden to operate freely in Gaza.
During the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital incident they posted an entirely unverified and unattributed story stating that the cause was an Israeli air strike, pushed this as breaking news and 43 minutes later changed the attribution to Hamas and PIJ sources confirmed.
This lead to two of my female Jewish friends getting spat on and having their hair pulled on the tube and called murdering zionists.
This happens a lot with the BBC in the rush to publish. It is not an excusable situation. There are real consequences. The decline is parallel to the rise in social media and moving the news teams out of London and attention dynamics.
> This lead to two of my female Jewish friends getting spat on and having their hair pulled on the tube and called murdering zionists
Do you think this is specifically and only due to that specific, single story, or do you think it might be a cumulative effect due to all the rest of what's been happening? Not that this excuses or justifies random attacks on other people simply because they happen to be Jewish, that's how the cycle of reprisal happens.
There was a major uptick after that. The BBC were quoted over and over by social media influencers which lead to further blanket demonisation of Israelis and Jews. It simply legitimised violence. Hence my point about there needing to be editorial considerations made as there are consequences.
You know the stupid shit thing though? My friendship group has an Iranian, a Palestinian, a Saudi, two Jews and a bunch of English people in it, a German and I'm literally descended from a nazi and everyone is quite happy and gets on fine.
I'm not going to dispute what you're saying, but the causal relation (between BBC and the attack, or especially their faith and the attack) and the overall context seem murky and very ambiguous.
I'm not saying it was entirely intentional or there was an agenda, it's just unprofessionalism over and over and over again. At some point it becomes institutionalised at which point you become a propaganda outfit for a foreign entity publishing their statements verbatim.
See my other post in the thread for some further extrapolation of the side effects, but this was quoted over and over again by social media using the BBC's reputation to legitimise it.
>I'm not saying it was entirely intentional or there was an agenda, it's just unprofessionalism over and over and over again.
A few things here:
1) I'm not seeing the "over and over again" part at all, can you help me there?
2) The more scrutiny we give to this claim, the more the strength of it seems to fade. We went from BBC critically misinforming the British public by uncritically reporting Hamas statements, to the BBC misattributing an attack in a war full of misattributed attacks on both sides, which was corrected within hours.
3) Do you think there are similar examples of BBC reporting or publication that could be used to make the opposite case - that BBC holds a pro-Israel bias?
Telegraph is paywalled, got a source I can read without forking out?
Beyond that, what you're presenting appears to be much more generalized than the original claim that I asked for examples of. For example, the Reuters story is about a BBC editor resigning over an edit to a Trump documentary - not relevant at all to what we're discussing!
I'm specifically looking for cases of BBC reporting disinformational Hamas statements as fact, in a fashion that did or was likely to have critically misled the British public. That's what was supposed to have been happening, so I'd like to review the examples myself.
>I refuse to because they have very consistently relayed communication from Hamas as news without attributing the source is Hamas.
I'm a US-ian and have no particular dog in this hunt, but could you relate any instances where this led to the British public being significantly misinformed about a major event?
Everything I've seen, including recent statements from the Israeli government, indicate that the Gaza Health Ministry (often referred to by Israel-sympathetic press as part of Hamas, rather than part of the government of Gaza which Hamas currently dominates) death toll statistics from the Gaza war were largely accurate.
Is there a case of BBC reporting "Hamas-sourced" information in a way that was notably harmful to the British public's truthful understanding of the conflict?
For example, BBC tweeted "Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli air strike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say", which turned out to be disinformation from Hamas (although they did attribute the claim, but still).
While it's less about Hamas, another incident that stands out was their documentary with "sanitized" translations, like replacing "jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces".
>"jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces"
But isn't this a fair editorial change? "Jihad" just means "fighting for a noble cause", and most Palestinians don't like to refer to the proper name "Israel" since they feel it validates the existence of that country. Thus, they tend to refer to "Israelis" by the ethnic designation that they came to be known as during the colonial era - "the Jews".
If the editor hadn't made that correction, Jewish people living in London or New York City might believe that Palestinian resistance groups intend to fight them, while the correction makes the true context much more clear?
If I didn't like to refer to the US by name because of my personal hatred for it, so I called it the Great Satan instead, would it be fair game to edit that back to "the US" in subtitles?
Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud". There's the widely used Arabized transliteration of Israel, or "occupation forces", "enemy forces", etc. When someone says "Yahud", it's because they're referring to Jews, not because some limitation in their language forced them to say it.
But even if (hypothetically) language limitations plausibly forced a certain "unintended" choice of words, it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say. If they were worried that a literal translation would led to confusion, they could have just omitted the quote.
It's apples and oranges to compare an externally-imposed nickname like "The Great Satan" with an ethnic designation that was the group's primary identity within the lifetimes of still-living people. There were no Israelis during the colonization of Palestine, recall. There were "the Jews", however, which is when the term entered the region's popular lexicon.
FWIW though, if there was some other group called "The Great Satan" that wasn't the US, and you were a journalist reporting on what someone had said about the US while terming then "The Great Satan", yes, you would still want to clarify that, I think?
>Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud".
Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.? And wasn't that what most Palestinians, including Jewish ones, called the Jewish colonial population of Palestine prior to Israel's formation in 1948?
>it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say.
But it isn't fundamentally different, when understood in the likely intended context. Jihad just means "fighting for a noble cause", and "the Jews" to anyone in the region clearly refers to Israelis, so there's no change in meaning, just the opposite - the chance of a drastic misunderstanding is reduced by the translation.
Israel has existed for 78 years now, and it didn't take long for us to update language, like replacing "Jewish militias" with "Israeli forces" to reflect the present reality. Such updates happened universally, across nations and languages (Arabic included).
Even political leaders who don't recognize Israel as a state still mostly refer to it by name. The few holdouts who refuse to say "Israel" are doing so out of hatred, not because 78 years wasn't enough time to work out the proper linguistic updates.
> you would still want to clarify that
Yes, but not by changing the statement and sanitizing its meaning. The usual method is to add bracketed context, like "The Great Satan [reference to the US]".
> Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.?
Both are in fact references to the Jews, not to Israel. The latter is just a weird metaphorical statement.
The justification is pretty simple, even if you disagree with it. It goes something like this: we, the people of the UK, believe that a non-commercial broadcaster and news and production company are of significant value to us, and that in order to fund these social goods we will levy a license fee on the use of any television within the UK.
Now of course, you can disagree about the value proposition, and you can disagree about the choice on how to fund it. But that's the justification, and it's not hard.
If that justification held up, the BBC would have no trouble staying afloat through voluntary subscription fees, pay to watch content and advertising revenue. Instead, they harass anyone who doesn't pony up the license fee and put the onus on them to prove they aren't in violation.
The BBC was set up to be advertising free, so that option is not a part of the current structure.
The license fee was established because of fundamental beliefs about issues like free riding, externalities and more. You might prefer a subscription based model - I'm sort of on the fence myself, but it's not obviously wrong - but the BBC license fee was set up out of an explicit disbelief that such systems would work. Granted, some of the issues were technological - you couldn't actually stop people watching OTA broadcasts at the time. But even though those have changed, the beliefs about the funding structure have not.
You aren't required to pay the licence fee simply for owning a television. It's required if you're using it to watch OTA channels and/or iPlayer, as I understand it?
> By law, each household in the UK - with some exceptions - has to pay if they:
> watch or record programmes as they're being shown live on any TV channel
> The rules apply to any device on which a programme is viewed, including a TV, desktop or laptop computer, mobile phone, tablet, games console or set-top box.
The BBC also behaved indefensibly when covering Israel's genocide of Palestinians.
Their behaviour is largely what led to me siding with the Palestinians plight some years ago, the use of words on Israel's side VS Palestinians was enough to lead me down a rabbit hole and I have never seen the BBC the same since.
It is literally state news with amazing bits of other content.
The BBC continually tries to convince the government that their problems are due to illegal action that must be stopped.
They do everything in their power to distract from the real issue - that the landscape of television has changed beyond recognition since the tax was brought in.
It's completely clear to everybody that the TV licence is an outdated model that makes no sense in today's world of competing commercial streaming services, but they're desperate to control the narrative to avoid losing their income stream. Which is understandable I suppose, from their narrow point of view. But for the country's point of view, we need a politician with balls, to step up and reform the system. But I'm not sure those even exist anymore.
The BBC obviously wants to avoid losing their income stream, and the current UK government has made clear verbal statements that they not only want the BBC to avoid losing their income stream but that they also want a change to a more sustainable and enforceable model for this. The BBC has not argued that the current license fee is the only model, but they have argued that if this is the model that is going to be used, something about it needs to change if they are to have the income stream that they need.
It also isn't clear to me that the TV license is an outdated model in entirety. The notion that a country would levy a fee on more or less any instance of an activity in order to fund a non-commercial institution related to that activity doesn't seem strange to me at all. What is true is that the nature of the activity and the enforceability of the fee have both changed, and that therefore something probably does need to be done.
> the corporation said 94% of people in the UK continued to use the BBC each month, but fewer than 80% of households contributed to the licence fee.
That's a pretty good ratio no? Plenty of services survive with lower ratios than that. Do they really expect every household to pay? Or is the issue they have much bigger spending plans than they make from it.
That is not part of the conception of the BBC as a social good, a non-commercial institution that provides value to the UK (and the world).
You can argue that this conception has to change, and that's fine. But the BBC was established by the UK government, with stated intentions and goals, and it currently isn't and never has been seen as a "pay-to-watch" sort of thing.
Personally I'd choose an arbitrary point like the year 2000, and split the BBC into "heritage" (nationalized body that holds all the archives, like the British Library or the British Museum), BBC Radio (taxpayer funded by DCMS, this is not very expensive) and "continuity TV" (commercial body that has to fund itself like any other).
This does mean Doctor Who getting split in half, but that's not the worst that's happened to him/her.
I didn't pay the license fee here in Switzerland for a long time because I didn't have a tv or radio (I guess they didn't know about my car). In 2019 (I think) they just said 'fuck it, everyone pays' and changed it so you pay whether you have a tv or radio.
I could say that I don't watch Swiss tv but then the tv series Tschugger came out and made a few years of payments worth it. Otherwise it's just watching endless Jass (Swiss card game) tournaments.
Serafe is completely crazy. For business it's based on turnover, so every financial company gets screwed. And for students 300 CHF is half your semester cost if my memory serves me right.
The BBC's Annual Plan for 2025/2026[1] is an interesting read.
They spend a lot of money (billions) on making and delivering content, but that's still not much compared to other large for-profit media companies[2].
The TV License has been the model since World War II[3], and the entire mass media landscape has completely changed since then.
The proposals to replace the TV License with ads or subscriptions are enshittification. The BBC is not a for-profit media company and should not be treated like one. It is a soft-power organization (cynically: propaganda arm) for the British government. There isn't anything inherently wrong with spreading your government's/culture's messages, especially when it's as obvious as the BBC, but it should not be expected to make money. How much is it worth that Britain stays relevant throughout the Anglosphere and beyond? Or that British points of view are available everywhere with a shortwave radio or VPN?
So fund it like it's defense spending. Maybe if the next leader of a foreign country has a fondness for Del Boy or Red Dwarf, negotiations will go a little more smoothly.
As an American, I think I'd prefer having an official propaganda arm like the BBC instead of whatever quiet public-private partnerships (cynically: backroom deals) we have instead. I'd hate it, but it'd be good to have something concrete to direct my criticism at, instead of constantly wondering if NPR is really presenting unbiased facts or the movie about our Navy jet fighters being the best, most freedom-loving planes flown by handsome rascals is just a good time.
This thread is quite eye opening. A lot of comments bemoaning the lack of agreement on what constitutes bias, mixed with claims the BBC is right wing and even a Nigel Farage fluffer (that's a howler).
I didn't see anyone mention that, just a couple months back, two very high profile BBCers were forced to resign over the doctoring of Trump's Jan. 6 speech to completely alter its meaning. That simply doesn't happen unless it's a very serious scandal.
Its not required to "look at a screen". its required to watch broadcast TV and use the BBc's online TV services. You can watch as much as you like on Youtube or Netflix or whatever without paying it.
it was very good value for money when half of all TV output (and the better half) was from the BBC and ad free.
> You can watch as much as you like on Youtube or Netflix or whatever without paying it.
Careful here because there is live TV on Youtube and a valid licence is required to watch that. There are also live shows on Netflix, which may count as "live TV programmes" so requiring a licence.
Yes, you highlight that a TV livence may be required for some content on Youtube. It is apparently also required for some content (live) on Netflix [1]. For example it seems that WWE Raw, which is live and on Netflix is deemed "live TV" [1]:
"Services include YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Now, Sky Go, BBC iPlayer, ITVX and more. Live TV or events can include:
Champions League matches or live channels on Amazon Prime Video
It's a historical accident. At first there was no TV, so when the BBC started broadcasting I suppose it made sense. Moving away from that seems to be difficult without them introducing advertising for live TV, which would be a quick fix, but that seems to be a diminishing market.
It's not an accident. Funding state media with a licence fee instead of from the taxes/state budget, makes it harder to exert political control over said state media.
People complain about the BBC's bias. And since everyone has a different idea of what "unbiased" looks like, it's almost impossible to please everyone.
But it struck me how few serious, general, global news outlets there are left in the world that aren't tied to some major interest. Fox News, CNN, WSJ... So much stuff is owned by Murdoch or by some other mogul. The Guardian is pretty good IMO but does not even pretend not to have a lefty skew.
I was thinking about the spiral of death that happens to so many media outlets where serious news doesn't pay the bills anymore, so they either have to rent themselves out to some deep pocket, or chase clicks for ads, losing veracity in the process.
BBC is one of the few organisations left that's somewhat immune to that. I won't claim all their stuff is unbiased, but they're just as likely to publish something left- as right-biased. So now I'm rooting for them and hope they make it. Apparently it is the second most trusted news source in the US, right after the Weather Channel. So truly a global phenomenon: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52272-trust-in-media-2025-...
The news coverage is in general OK compared to commercial news, and especially to US propaganda outfits, but Channel 4 (also public sector) are also pretty good. The UK politics coverage is abysmal. They have become cautious stenographers and promoters of whichever party Farage is heading at the time. Not surprising when you see what happens to reporting that genuinely challenges power.
Agree that Channel 4 is also pretty good, perhaps better even than the BBC for politics now. But so much UK politics coverage these days has moved to podcasts – some of them staffed by ex-BBC people.
I refuse to pay the license fee and watch BBC content simply because how TV licensing is enforced is grotesque and the cover ups of child molesters committed by the BBC.
Put it behind a subscription and give me a choice whether the BBC deserves its revenue, my current opinion falls firmly on no.
How, dare I ask, does one "opt out" of a govt subscription service ?
Some private companies make it so hard these days (Adobe & NYT being the kings of subcription dark patterns), I am curious how the process goes with a govt entity like the BBC ?
One tells them to fuck off when they turn up at the door. And off they fuck.
> How, dare I ask, does one "opt out" of a govt subscription service ?
Currently, by not using a television.
Here
https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/t...
I refuse to because they have very consistently relayed communication from Hamas as news without attributing the source is Hamas. As a result a significant quantity of my left leaning friends in the UK have extreme takes on the war in Gaza.
100% this. They published straight up misinformation as fact first, announced it as breaking news, pushed it to BBC app, then corrected it all later then pretended nothing happened.
I don't pay for a license because the programming is crap now though.
>They published straight up misinformation as fact first
Can you add some specifics to this claim? I'm unaware of the BBC having reported "Hamas-sourced" substantial misinformation as fact. I'm sure some errors and retractions have been done - especially given that BBC like all Western media continues to be forbidden to operate freely in Gaza.
During the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital incident they posted an entirely unverified and unattributed story stating that the cause was an Israeli air strike, pushed this as breaking news and 43 minutes later changed the attribution to Hamas and PIJ sources confirmed.
This lead to two of my female Jewish friends getting spat on and having their hair pulled on the tube and called murdering zionists.
This happens a lot with the BBC in the rush to publish. It is not an excusable situation. There are real consequences. The decline is parallel to the rise in social media and moving the news teams out of London and attention dynamics.
You can find a list of problems in the corrections and clarifications here - work through 2023 to 2025: https://www.bbc.co.uk/helpandfeedback/corrections_clarificat...
> This lead to two of my female Jewish friends getting spat on and having their hair pulled on the tube and called murdering zionists
Do you think this is specifically and only due to that specific, single story, or do you think it might be a cumulative effect due to all the rest of what's been happening? Not that this excuses or justifies random attacks on other people simply because they happen to be Jewish, that's how the cycle of reprisal happens.
There was a major uptick after that. The BBC were quoted over and over by social media influencers which lead to further blanket demonisation of Israelis and Jews. It simply legitimised violence. Hence my point about there needing to be editorial considerations made as there are consequences.
You know the stupid shit thing though? My friendship group has an Iranian, a Palestinian, a Saudi, two Jews and a bunch of English people in it, a German and I'm literally descended from a nazi and everyone is quite happy and gets on fine.
Divisive narratives hurt everyone.
I'm not going to dispute what you're saying, but the causal relation (between BBC and the attack, or especially their faith and the attack) and the overall context seem murky and very ambiguous.
I'm not saying it was entirely intentional or there was an agenda, it's just unprofessionalism over and over and over again. At some point it becomes institutionalised at which point you become a propaganda outfit for a foreign entity publishing their statements verbatim.
See my other post in the thread for some further extrapolation of the side effects, but this was quoted over and over again by social media using the BBC's reputation to legitimise it.
>I'm not saying it was entirely intentional or there was an agenda, it's just unprofessionalism over and over and over again.
A few things here:
1) I'm not seeing the "over and over again" part at all, can you help me there?
2) The more scrutiny we give to this claim, the more the strength of it seems to fade. We went from BBC critically misinforming the British public by uncritically reporting Hamas statements, to the BBC misattributing an attack in a war full of misattributed attacks on both sides, which was corrected within hours.
3) Do you think there are similar examples of BBC reporting or publication that could be used to make the opposite case - that BBC holds a pro-Israel bias?
1. Not the OP, but check out the BBC's own internal memo.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/06/read-devastating...
Direct link to Israel/Hamas section:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/06/read-devastating...
Here's a Guardian (left) report about the Director General resigning over reports of bias across multiple issues including Israel/Hamas:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/nov/09/tim-davie-expe...
And Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/britains-bbc-...
And an anti-Hamas/pro-Israel critique:
https://honestreporting.com/exposed-leaked-report-reveals-th...
Telegraph is paywalled, got a source I can read without forking out?
Beyond that, what you're presenting appears to be much more generalized than the original claim that I asked for examples of. For example, the Reuters story is about a BBC editor resigning over an edit to a Trump documentary - not relevant at all to what we're discussing!
I'm specifically looking for cases of BBC reporting disinformational Hamas statements as fact, in a fashion that did or was likely to have critically misled the British public. That's what was supposed to have been happening, so I'd like to review the examples myself.
Got a source I can read without forking out? https://archive.is/tFzfZ
> > the Director General resigning over reports of bias across multiple issues including Israel/Hamas:
> a BBC editor resigning over an edit to a Trump documentary
Yes, as mentioned systemic bias is across multiple issues, including Israel/Hamas but not limited to that issue.
> I'm specifically looking for cases of BBC reporting disinformational Hamas statements as fact
Yes, the HonenestReporting critique mentioned does that.
>I refuse to because they have very consistently relayed communication from Hamas as news without attributing the source is Hamas.
I'm a US-ian and have no particular dog in this hunt, but could you relate any instances where this led to the British public being significantly misinformed about a major event?
Everything I've seen, including recent statements from the Israeli government, indicate that the Gaza Health Ministry (often referred to by Israel-sympathetic press as part of Hamas, rather than part of the government of Gaza which Hamas currently dominates) death toll statistics from the Gaza war were largely accurate.
Is there a case of BBC reporting "Hamas-sourced" information in a way that was notably harmful to the British public's truthful understanding of the conflict?
For example, BBC tweeted "Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli air strike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say", which turned out to be disinformation from Hamas (although they did attribute the claim, but still).
While it's less about Hamas, another incident that stands out was their documentary with "sanitized" translations, like replacing "jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces".
>"jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces"
But isn't this a fair editorial change? "Jihad" just means "fighting for a noble cause", and most Palestinians don't like to refer to the proper name "Israel" since they feel it validates the existence of that country. Thus, they tend to refer to "Israelis" by the ethnic designation that they came to be known as during the colonial era - "the Jews".
If the editor hadn't made that correction, Jewish people living in London or New York City might believe that Palestinian resistance groups intend to fight them, while the correction makes the true context much more clear?
If I didn't like to refer to the US by name because of my personal hatred for it, so I called it the Great Satan instead, would it be fair game to edit that back to "the US" in subtitles?
Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud". There's the widely used Arabized transliteration of Israel, or "occupation forces", "enemy forces", etc. When someone says "Yahud", it's because they're referring to Jews, not because some limitation in their language forced them to say it.
But even if (hypothetically) language limitations plausibly forced a certain "unintended" choice of words, it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say. If they were worried that a literal translation would led to confusion, they could have just omitted the quote.
It's apples and oranges to compare an externally-imposed nickname like "The Great Satan" with an ethnic designation that was the group's primary identity within the lifetimes of still-living people. There were no Israelis during the colonization of Palestine, recall. There were "the Jews", however, which is when the term entered the region's popular lexicon.
FWIW though, if there was some other group called "The Great Satan" that wasn't the US, and you were a journalist reporting on what someone had said about the US while terming then "The Great Satan", yes, you would still want to clarify that, I think?
>Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud".
Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.? And wasn't that what most Palestinians, including Jewish ones, called the Jewish colonial population of Palestine prior to Israel's formation in 1948?
>it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say.
But it isn't fundamentally different, when understood in the likely intended context. Jihad just means "fighting for a noble cause", and "the Jews" to anyone in the region clearly refers to Israelis, so there's no change in meaning, just the opposite - the chance of a drastic misunderstanding is reduced by the translation.
> There were no Israelis [...]
Israel has existed for 78 years now, and it didn't take long for us to update language, like replacing "Jewish militias" with "Israeli forces" to reflect the present reality. Such updates happened universally, across nations and languages (Arabic included).
Even political leaders who don't recognize Israel as a state still mostly refer to it by name. The few holdouts who refuse to say "Israel" are doing so out of hatred, not because 78 years wasn't enough time to work out the proper linguistic updates.
> you would still want to clarify that
Yes, but not by changing the statement and sanitizing its meaning. The usual method is to add bracketed context, like "The Great Satan [reference to the US]".
> Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.?
Both are in fact references to the Jews, not to Israel. The latter is just a weird metaphorical statement.
I'm sure you feel the same way about Sky News and the tabloids, right?
You're not legally required to pay for either of those simply because you own a television.
I have a lot of love for the BBC and its history, but the license fee is very difficult to justify.
The justification is pretty simple, even if you disagree with it. It goes something like this: we, the people of the UK, believe that a non-commercial broadcaster and news and production company are of significant value to us, and that in order to fund these social goods we will levy a license fee on the use of any television within the UK.
Now of course, you can disagree about the value proposition, and you can disagree about the choice on how to fund it. But that's the justification, and it's not hard.
If that justification held up, the BBC would have no trouble staying afloat through voluntary subscription fees, pay to watch content and advertising revenue. Instead, they harass anyone who doesn't pony up the license fee and put the onus on them to prove they aren't in violation.
The BBC was set up to be advertising free, so that option is not a part of the current structure.
The license fee was established because of fundamental beliefs about issues like free riding, externalities and more. You might prefer a subscription based model - I'm sort of on the fence myself, but it's not obviously wrong - but the BBC license fee was set up out of an explicit disbelief that such systems would work. Granted, some of the issues were technological - you couldn't actually stop people watching OTA broadcasts at the time. But even though those have changed, the beliefs about the funding structure have not.
You aren't required to pay the licence fee simply for owning a television. It's required if you're using it to watch OTA channels and/or iPlayer, as I understand it?
> By law, each household in the UK - with some exceptions - has to pay if they:
> watch or record programmes as they're being shown live on any TV channel
> The rules apply to any device on which a programme is viewed, including a TV, desktop or laptop computer, mobile phone, tablet, games console or set-top box.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9k27yy839o
The BBC also behaved indefensibly when covering Israel's genocide of Palestinians.
Their behaviour is largely what led to me siding with the Palestinians plight some years ago, the use of words on Israel's side VS Palestinians was enough to lead me down a rabbit hole and I have never seen the BBC the same since.
It is literally state news with amazing bits of other content.
The BBC continually tries to convince the government that their problems are due to illegal action that must be stopped.
They do everything in their power to distract from the real issue - that the landscape of television has changed beyond recognition since the tax was brought in.
It's completely clear to everybody that the TV licence is an outdated model that makes no sense in today's world of competing commercial streaming services, but they're desperate to control the narrative to avoid losing their income stream. Which is understandable I suppose, from their narrow point of view. But for the country's point of view, we need a politician with balls, to step up and reform the system. But I'm not sure those even exist anymore.
The BBC obviously wants to avoid losing their income stream, and the current UK government has made clear verbal statements that they not only want the BBC to avoid losing their income stream but that they also want a change to a more sustainable and enforceable model for this. The BBC has not argued that the current license fee is the only model, but they have argued that if this is the model that is going to be used, something about it needs to change if they are to have the income stream that they need.
It also isn't clear to me that the TV license is an outdated model in entirety. The notion that a country would levy a fee on more or less any instance of an activity in order to fund a non-commercial institution related to that activity doesn't seem strange to me at all. What is true is that the nature of the activity and the enforceability of the fee have both changed, and that therefore something probably does need to be done.
> the corporation said 94% of people in the UK continued to use the BBC each month, but fewer than 80% of households contributed to the licence fee.
That's a pretty good ratio no? Plenty of services survive with lower ratios than that. Do they really expect every household to pay? Or is the issue they have much bigger spending plans than they make from it.
They're legally require to do so! People are sent to jail for not paying the tax! https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/29/tv-licence-fee...
(what that stat actually means is that the missing 14% are pensioners who are exempt)
Easy fix: make the BBC a paid subscription and let people choose.
That is not part of the conception of the BBC as a social good, a non-commercial institution that provides value to the UK (and the world).
You can argue that this conception has to change, and that's fine. But the BBC was established by the UK government, with stated intentions and goals, and it currently isn't and never has been seen as a "pay-to-watch" sort of thing.
Personally I'd choose an arbitrary point like the year 2000, and split the BBC into "heritage" (nationalized body that holds all the archives, like the British Library or the British Museum), BBC Radio (taxpayer funded by DCMS, this is not very expensive) and "continuity TV" (commercial body that has to fund itself like any other).
This does mean Doctor Who getting split in half, but that's not the worst that's happened to him/her.
BBC News?
I didn't pay the license fee here in Switzerland for a long time because I didn't have a tv or radio (I guess they didn't know about my car). In 2019 (I think) they just said 'fuck it, everyone pays' and changed it so you pay whether you have a tv or radio.
I could say that I don't watch Swiss tv but then the tv series Tschugger came out and made a few years of payments worth it. Otherwise it's just watching endless Jass (Swiss card game) tournaments.
Serafe is completely crazy. For business it's based on turnover, so every financial company gets screwed. And for students 300 CHF is half your semester cost if my memory serves me right.
I am happy to pay for the BBC licence fee if they stop harassing old grannies.
How about the young grannies?
The BBC's Annual Plan for 2025/2026[1] is an interesting read.
They spend a lot of money (billions) on making and delivering content, but that's still not much compared to other large for-profit media companies[2].
The TV License has been the model since World War II[3], and the entire mass media landscape has completely changed since then.
The proposals to replace the TV License with ads or subscriptions are enshittification. The BBC is not a for-profit media company and should not be treated like one. It is a soft-power organization (cynically: propaganda arm) for the British government. There isn't anything inherently wrong with spreading your government's/culture's messages, especially when it's as obvious as the BBC, but it should not be expected to make money. How much is it worth that Britain stays relevant throughout the Anglosphere and beyond? Or that British points of view are available everywhere with a shortwave radio or VPN?
So fund it like it's defense spending. Maybe if the next leader of a foreign country has a fondness for Del Boy or Red Dwarf, negotiations will go a little more smoothly.
As an American, I think I'd prefer having an official propaganda arm like the BBC instead of whatever quiet public-private partnerships (cynically: backroom deals) we have instead. I'd hate it, but it'd be good to have something concrete to direct my criticism at, instead of constantly wondering if NPR is really presenting unbiased facts or the movie about our Navy jet fighters being the best, most freedom-loving planes flown by handsome rascals is just a good time.
1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/bbc-annual-plan-...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Fox#
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
This thread is quite eye opening. A lot of comments bemoaning the lack of agreement on what constitutes bias, mixed with claims the BBC is right wing and even a Nigel Farage fluffer (that's a howler). I didn't see anyone mention that, just a couple months back, two very high profile BBCers were forced to resign over the doctoring of Trump's Jan. 6 speech to completely alter its meaning. That simply doesn't happen unless it's a very serious scandal.
Imagine needing a government licence to look at a screen.
Its a hypothocated tax.
Its not required to "look at a screen". its required to watch broadcast TV and use the BBc's online TV services. You can watch as much as you like on Youtube or Netflix or whatever without paying it.
it was very good value for money when half of all TV output (and the better half) was from the BBC and ad free.
> You can watch as much as you like on Youtube or Netflix or whatever without paying it.
Careful here because there is live TV on Youtube and a valid licence is required to watch that. There are also live shows on Netflix, which may count as "live TV programmes" so requiring a licence.
It has to be television. So i think it depends on the particular live stream you watch - e.g. one that is also on a TV channel at the same time.
https://www.gov.uk/find-licences/tv-licence https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ33
The example given by TV licensing is Sky News. it has to be part of a "television programme"
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/part/4
Yes, you highlight that a TV livence may be required for some content on Youtube. It is apparently also required for some content (live) on Netflix [1]. For example it seems that WWE Raw, which is live and on Netflix is deemed "live TV" [1]:
"Services include YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Now, Sky Go, BBC iPlayer, ITVX and more. Live TV or events can include:
Champions League matches or live channels on Amazon Prime Video
WWE or NFL events on Netflix
News or sports channels on YouTube"
It's a bit of a mess...
[1] https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/w...
You're moving the goalposts.
Watching non-live BBC programmes in the UK legally requires a license fee. The same is not true of Netflix.
> Watching non-live BBC programmes in the UK legally requires a license fee. The same is not true of Netflix.
Agreed but this is not what I commented on (no goalpost moved...)
The way it’s worded it is that any thing that could be deemed “live TV” is liable for the tax regardless of who produced the content.
Are you suggesting that there's significant ambiguity about what "live TV" means?
It's a historical accident. At first there was no TV, so when the BBC started broadcasting I suppose it made sense. Moving away from that seems to be difficult without them introducing advertising for live TV, which would be a quick fix, but that seems to be a diminishing market.
For streaming it's easy to manage.
It's not an accident. Funding state media with a licence fee instead of from the taxes/state budget, makes it harder to exert political control over said state media.
Yes, good point.
You mean like digital ID? Don't worry, we'll all need it to watch screens soon.
In Turkey and Israel you need a licence for radios as well.
[dead]
Sounds like cope.
I have not paid for the TV licence in over twenty years. I refuse to pay for state propaganda and repeats from forty or fifty years ago.