A massive struggle session has appeared in the UK left with arguments over defending the BBC or not now that it has been announced that the tv license might be gone by 2027.
The factions seem to be:
A "But it makes good entertainment and documentaries and music and puts lgbt people in shows"
B "Yeah but none of that has anything to do with the extreme political harm it clearly does".
I am in faction B and have no idea how to get through to the first faction. Libs obviously also support the first faction.
I assume Hexbear being anti-treats lately would also be in faction B but could be wrong.
What are your thoughts on the topic overall?
I’m not going to defend the BBC specifically, they’re obviously completely terrible. But I don’t see how the UK losing public broadcasting and having their entire media space chopped up and privatized to their horrible media conglomerates doesn’t make everything much, much worse, so I’m guessing it’s bad on balance. But I don’t live in the UK so ultimately I don’t know.
My take is that it's massively easier to fight right wing media owned by billionaires than it is to fight a public institution with respectability and history afforded to it.
What I believe will occur is a polarisation. More people will radicalise both left and right. The BBC is providing the liberal "middle".
idk that's the situation in the US and that fight is so utterly and totally lost in the broadcasting space. what passes for news here -- especially local news -- is horrifying. you know the situation there better than I do but my 2c are that the media situation here is nothing to envy. the private institutions rapidly give themselves respectability and the authoritative voice.
to put this in perspective, a lot of anti-vaxx sentiment in the US is being driven by our local news stations, both to help sell people scams and to convince them that they ought to go back to work. private media has the blood of its own consumer base on its hands and it will never face consequences for it.
Over here there is basically no such thing as local news. Different places have their own local papers but they have very little material impact. The national picture is where the political battle occurs.
I'm not saying that the same set up will replicate. the conditions there are different. but the main difference between a public institution that can't ever broadcast anything radical because it would offend the oligarchs and private institutions that serve directly as their voices is the immediacy of the control they offer to those oligarchs. "local news" is something of misnomer here -- it's not that we have thousands of independent news organizations. they're all owned by a single broadcasting company -- a business that directly profits on selling scams to people by lending them their voice of authority. and people are utterly blind to this -- if you point it out to them, you get swept up in their narratives about their commitment to fighting you in the "culture war", a narrative constructed and sold by the same entities that want eyeballs to sell them scams.
our media has helped polarize people, sure. but I'm not sure it's had much impact on radicalization -- polarization here refers to the growing divide between camps of liberals that mostly agree with each other but that hate each other because of said manufactured culture war.
What about local cable news channels? I know Sinclair owns all of them, but they do have an impact, albeit an awful one.
We need union rags again
Is it though? Their treatment of the Corbyn movement and now their attacks on LGBTQ+ people has completely destroyed any sense I had that they are better than the former
My take is that it’s massively easier to fight right wing media owned by billionaires than it is to fight a public institution with respectability and history afforded to it.
Well, I don’t really have a frame of reference to know if it’s easier, but I do know that it’s extremely hard to counter media narratives when the media is almost entirely privatized, and everyone is polarized. Be careful what you wish for.
I know my experience is colored by living in the US, where Republicans always get a bug up their ass about PBS every few years. Again, my position isn’t exactly that the BBC is a good thing in itself, but more that public broadcasting is a net good for society overall.
it’s massively easier to fight right wing media owned by billionaires
no because control of the media is essentially control of the narrative, it's the main way that UK elections are fixed in favour of capital
The issue is...who's providing the mass left wing media anchor there for radicalisation?
The Guardian? The Morning Star? Philosophy Tube?
Don't get me wrong, loving the BBC being in the finding out stage. But even though it was always at best the Civil Service's way of fucking over any government it didn't like, Murdoch has essentially chosen every PM for the last 4 decades, and giving his system even more power isn't a good situation
What part of this situation doesn't aid the tories?
The BBC is the primary propaganda venue for the UK. That said, whatever replaces it will also be propaganda for the uk. I don't think there's a win for the left here.
:elmofire: THE BBC MUST DIE :elmofire:
also lmfao 'puts lgbt people in shows' while being a mouthpiece for the loudest TERFs in the world thats fukin rich
I wish I'd thought that when I argued with this lib.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GreenAndPleasant/comments/s5cym5/the_bbc_is_getting_exactly_what_it_deserves/hsz717e/
I was so dumbfounded I guess I blanked. I don't know. I'm struggling. I ended up removing half the thread because of all the upvoted lib shit. We even had monarchists sticking their 2 cents in.
We don't have a strong enough core of posters to fight these topics and are losing them.
"Dinosaur documentaries will never again be this large."
:deeper-sadness:
Just sad that capitalism has ensured there will never be a dino mockumentary anywhere near as grand as WWD.
I think some leftists defend bbc because its public and therefore better than private alternatives, but bbc in its current state, even while being public, is completely captured by the interests of the capitalists, so unless the british left can get in power (which it cant considering the state of the labour party) and completely purge the bbc staff, the bbc is serving the interests opposite to ours and therefore we shouldnt expend resources defending it
Exactly! It's the state media of a bourgeois state
as a problem that's an order of magnitude less difficult than every other problem the british left has. thatcher purged the bbc and rebuilt it on neoliberal grounds in the space of a year during her second term. there is absolutely no reason it couldn't be done in another direction.
a public broadcaster is much much more easily moveable than private, especially from the left.
if the argument is 'the left will never have any power so there no point fighting these small battles' then it's just boring defeatism
More like realism, there is no way the british left can come to power in short term
so what though? should i give up fighting the privatisation of the nhs too? that's just going to keep happening as well
i believe a reconstituted bbc is possible and a reconstituted bbc is a useful and necessary thing for any left adjacent party in this country to have at its disposal. so i support its continuation, despite its many many flaws
Yes i agree that reconstituted bbc would be very useful but that is not happening unless left is in power, otherwise bbc is just another rightwing media organisation, and also the situation is not comparable to nhs, nhs actually provides a useful thing, where as the not reconstituted bbc would be actively detrimental
stopping the privatisation of the nhs isn't happening unless the left is in power either. that's what the comparison was. they're both things that would take power to implement
i don't think theres any way to say whether the bbc is actively detrimental right now, comparable countries with almost entirely private media don't seem to have any better media space, and the mechanisms to change that media space seem much less realistic
also i know people are talking about the uk becoming more polarised as though it's a good thing in this thread, but I think there is great utility in having a somewhat consensus reality shared by the majority of a population, and state broadcasting is the only way i see that happening
I see no real reason to fight for the survival of the BBC as a leftist, like yeah it might have some negative effects that it dies but what are you gonna do? Fight to get it back from the brink of death only for it to slander you as deeply as is respectably possible?
Public Television is for boomers anyway. All the cool kids are cord cutters.
"Public services are for boomers, all the cool kids like privatization."
So, who will make another 6 episodes a year of Doctor who?
I don’t think you could find a single hexbear user that would defend bbc
I guess you could make the argument that the bbc's audience will largely exodus into even worse commercial news. Maybe at best a handful of libs will radicalize if you take away their topgear and doctor who treats.
Ya I know but how do I make them not-libs?
It physically hurts to engage them.
I actually don’t care for an organisation that protects paedophiles and platforms nazis and TERFS. They’ve had 75 years to sort out their funding situation, so they clearly enjoy their incestuous relationship with the government of the day.
The threat of fee restructuring has been used as a stick by virtually every conservative government and acts as a convenient distraction to whatever fuck up the government is trying to downplay, and every time there’s a last minute renewal. They already have de-facto editorial control of the BBC thanks to David Cameron so the idea of a ‘public broadcaster’ is laughable.
The real loss would be Channel 4 getting privatised (which they are trying to do and needs to be discussed more), as they regularly question and expose government incompetence and give a voice to minorities, the disabled, and LGBT+. I mean yeah there’s trash on there too like Hollyoaks but taste is subjective.
It’s rough that the educational content is effectively being held for ransom though. A lot of people rely on that, and their documentaries are some of the best in the world. Maybe shutting down BBC News and its adjacent political shows would be enough to cut costs and would serve to keep it as impartial as possible. Unfortunately the alternative is a lot worse, and it’s the threat of exactly that which keeps people in check.
The BBC should be destroyed, but preferably in a way that takes all of England out with it
