I find some people far too quick to dismiss all lobbyists as being disingenuous corporate shills. Is that a problem in lobbying - absolutely! Are all lobbyists driven by corporate greed instead of civic duty? Nope…
BBC won't broadcast Attenborough episode on destruction of wildlife over fear of right-wing backlash
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To be fair, if these senior sources at the BBC are just stirring the pot because they’re pissed off about Gary Lineker, then the Guardian article itself is still entirely truthful.
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And then there is their pro-TERF standpoint too. Aunty Beeb is getting more reactionary in their old age.
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BBC was turned over to the conservatives by the government. This is not “fear of right-wing backlash”. It’s the right-wing exercising control. BBC will soon (if not already) be a plain old state-run TV like any of the others.
Thanks, Rupert!
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It already is a state-run operation, and has been since it’s founding… the problem here is political intervention by a political party…
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That is a fundamental flaw in the licence fee model, if the government has the power to scrap the licence fee, then it can always exercise control. Nonetheless, the BBC is and has always been part of the establishment. It may seem all the more overt right now, because we have a government teetering on the brink of all out fascism, but it’s always been an insidious instrument of state propaganda to some degree.
Anyone remember the first Gulf war, when Massive Attack were referred to just as “Massive”, because the BBC didn’t want people’s feelings about the war being affected by words like “attack”. Bomb the Bass didn’t get any airplay at all…
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And the current government has indeed been threatening to scrap the license fee so of course the BBC is going to toe the line even more.
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Only if the Tories manage to engineer permanent one-party (effectively fascist) rule in the UK. Then it becomes a counterpart to Russian state TV.
Otherwise, it can remain a statutory corporation like British Railways or the post office (ETA: used to be) that’s owned by the state but run by people who (ideally) believe in the mission for which it was chartered.
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Well, the current chairman of the BBC donated tens of thousands to groups who want to privatise the BBC, so I would say it’s already not run by people who believe in the mission for which it was chartered.
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For the moment. That seat is granted for a four-year term. That’s not to say he can’t do a lot of damage during that time or that he can’t be re-appointed if the Tories are in power when the term is up, but he’s not necessarily there permanently.
Appointing board members and executives who want to destroy the public institutions they’re put in charge of is SOP for so-called conservatives in the West. This arsehole is the current poster child in the U.S.
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Umm - BR was privatised years ago (don’t get me started on the shenanigans since then which mean that taxpayers now , via the govt, simply shovel millions to companies to incompetently run the network and fill their foreign owners’ pockets with dividends), and Royal Mail (the mail delivery arm of the Post Office) was privatised some time later. Post Office Counters survives as not having private ownership.
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Thanks. Fixed above.
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… though they may be coming home to roost
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… so it’s “fake news” because “maybe,” in your personal opinion, the concept of a “right-wing backlash” is implausible 
and we’re supposed to assume you are a more reliable source for such analysis than the Guardian
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Their TERFism shows their true right wing roots. Blairite is not left of centre.
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The right is silencing dissent all across the world. Look at what they do when they have power. In America, they make laws to silence LGBT speech, silence political dissent, block laws preventing child marriage, and put kids in danger by relaxing child labor laws
They must be stopped
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But if anyone says something nasty about Hitler, the Tories are up in arms over it.
They need to be voted out HARD at the next election.
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TV viewers need to unionize…
It’s halfway a joke, but halfway I think it could work; a cohesive block of ten million or so viewers cancelling subscriptions as one would certainly make TV companies take notice.
The television license is not a subscription to the BBC, it is effectively a tax to fund the BBC that you have to pay if you watch live video. If 10m households in the UK stopped paying then either the BBC will be axed (not desirable even with how fucked up the BBC currently is) or the Tories start prosecuting people for non-payment. (And considering how fucked up the Tories are right now, I can see them bringing in laws to enable them to do that).
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Saying nasty things about Hitler is OK for the Tories, he was a nasty European foreigner type. Legitimately comparing the Tories to Hitler isn’t OK though, it’s too close to the truth.
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