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?
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