Hacker News Reader

Comment by flower-giraffe | Hacker News Reader

I think the funding and governance (by Royal Charter) of the BBC have historically provided a huge benefit to society in the UK.

Advertising free children’s TV (and radio) may have delayed the onset or rampant consumerism fuelled by commercial TV elsewhere.

The BBC microcomputer project is arguably the origin of ARM CPU’s.

Initially the license fee was for radios, I can’t find a reference but I remember being told as a child that politicians saw the risks of radio propaganda and legislated to mandate broadcast media to be politically unbiased .

It’s interesting seeing suggestions on the recent threads about EU funding for a WhatsApp alternative - perhaps the license fee could also fund the infrastructure for something like signal.

What is absolutely clear from history is commercial media outlets fuel political bias, and it seems to be increasingly damaging to society.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_...

View on HN

Strongly agreed. Having lived in the US for a good number of years now I can see how the idea of vans roaming looking for TV viewers is baffling, but the public TV offering by the BBC, while definitely not perfect, is miles ahead of both the public and network offerings on US TV (though credit to the likes of PBS and NPR for doing miraculous work with a fraction of the budget!). I even got my start in computing from the BBC Micro machines at school.

Then pay for it with taxes on sales of television sets themselves.

This.

Pay for a recurring service via a one-off payment? What could go wrong?!

Aside from that, a TV license is £157 a year. Let's say a TV lasts three years (which feels conservative, pretty sure I had my last TV for eight), you'd need to get the buyer to pay an extra £471 when they purchase their TV. How is front-loading such a payment in the interests of the viewer? Not to mention you don't have to pay the fee if you're only watching streaming services like Netflix.

You can set the rate of the tax to account for the time value of money, charging less up front than you would for the sum total of the subscription over the life of the device.

You could argue that increasing the up front cost is a regressive tax, but you should be able to more than make up for that by not needing to pay fleets of trucks to drive around all day looking to find TV tax scofflaws.

I suppose phones and laptops qualify as television sets.

While I think that having some publicly funded radio/TV is a really good thing, the idea of the UK TV license and the subsequent enforcement is not. My friends elderly mother does not have or want a TV. She is constantly harassed and threatened by UK license enforcement. Her son has invited them into her home on numerous occasions, hoping that the legal threats and visits would cease, but to this day they have not. I object to having my license fee money spent on such abuse of vulnerable people.

Yeah. My father in law had the same experience. He once took an enforcement person into his house and insisted they go through the house together and conduct an exhaustive search of all the places a TV could be. "Perhaps it's in the cistern of the toilet? Let's look!...Not there? Perhaps it's in the bread bin..." etc etc

It is really bad the way they do this, and having seen the threatening letters they send out they could be very frightening. The letters were on the lines of "Our detectors have found that you have a TV and you have to pay the license fee or we'll send bailiffs around, take you to court etc", and the one I received once (when i too didn't have a TV) was printed on red paper.

Can you imagine having someone harassing an elderly person to get in house without a warrant here in America?

And that person to be paid and hired as a civil servant, in a completely unionized job with a pension fund?

If that's not the definition of a job program and how the welfare state has gone wrong I don't know what is.

I suspect the issue is partly caused by outsourcing the enforcement to private contractors and setting targets!

So they aren't even government employee. It's just some random person trespassing on your property.

I assume, of course, that the burden of proving you don't have a TV falls on the citizen and not these government-paid contractors.

I wonder if people will ever notice how socially and psychologically toxic is advertisement business and regulate it stringently.

People have clearly noticed the social and political issues with advertising for a very long time now. The issue is that it's hard to rally against one of the most lucrative businesses ever to exist that inherently has an extreme amount of messaging power to defend itself.

I think the issue is people really like watching TV and movies, and continuing to watch the content shows they are OK with all the ads. Never have people had more access to other content, or other ways of entertaining themselves.

I have no idea how people put up with the NFL in the US.

During the early days of sports streaming (sometimes still) you'd find a stream with a live feed of the stadium broadcast without the ads. During the commercial breaks you'd be able to watch what was on the megatron (camera panning crowd, in-stadium entertainment).

I would pay a massive premium to have access to that feed for every sports broadcast. Gabe Newell said it best about piracy offering the best experience.

It's also worth noting that advertising is nearly a necessity in an industrialized society. Production of goods has high capital upfront costs and marginal costs that become negligible at scale. You can't get that scale without advertising or a government-mandated monopoly. Or, at least, you can't get that scale quickly enough.

For me economy is like a forest.

Trees (companies) compete for sunlight (purchases) and adverisements are their trunks.

They 'waste' enormous amount of energy on trunks not because longer trunks increase the amount of sunlight. They just lower the probability of being overshadowed by the others.

If somehow trees could agree on how high the trunk should be at most they could limit this waste.

Instead they literally grow trunks as long as the physical laws allow.

Instead of tons of in your face advertising everywhere you could have just one goverment manager directory of stuff and services. Where companies could register their products, services, pricing.

Of coure there would be law breakers and positive publications about brands paid for under the table but I think overt ban would lead to economy wasting much less money on advertising to outcompete itself.

I don't think such a drastic change will ever happen. Large percentage of our culture is created directly for the purposes of advertising. So advert free society would be different in so many ways. But I would bet it wouldn't be worse. And if it was, we could just lift the ban and see trunks grow back.

Instead they literally grow trunks as long as the physical laws allow.

In some cases this was literally true, as fast food franchises would keep raising their logo signs higher and higher until municipalities set height limits.

Have they defended themselves by appealing to public?

People mostly hate advertisements. I think they rather fight using money not public.

Less toxic than law enforcement knocking on my door to see if I have a damn television. I'd rather reign in authoritarianism.

They're not law enforcement

So one can just tell them to f--- off and go away?

Yes, you can. Please do. It would be a net benefit to humanity if everyone did that. Capita only use the bullying tactics because they think that it will get them an increased return. However, they are technically nothing more than very pushy sales agents trying to sell you something. If everyone told them to get stuffed, there's an extremely slim chance that they might choose a more pleasant tactic. I wouldn't hold one's breath though.

You can also write to Capita and tell them that they are not welcome on your property, and then they can't even walk up to your front door. If you have a sticker on your front door rejecting cold callers and door-to-door sales, then they are trespassing as soon as they knock. Call the police if they don't leave. I have heard enough stories of Capita agents doing misdeeds once inside that you should not trust them, regardless of how many threats they make. The only circumstances under which you should ever let them in is if they are accompanied by police with a search warrant.

You can also write to them and tell them that you view their threatening letters as harassment, and that they must stop sending them. You don't need to tell them your name - just your address.

Good to know, and you're right. Glad to know it's not as dystopian as it sounds.

Unless they come with an actual search warrant (which is rare, but can happen [0] as I wrote in a cousin thread, sometimes with the police assist), yes, you can. Capital/TVL have no inherent power to enter your premises unless invited - but you can't just throw them out after inviting them in.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25835140

“reign in authoritarianism”?!?

It’s not dissimilar to a tax audit. Heaven forbid we could all be a little less hysterical.

Driving door to door is insane for me. They'd be much better off if they funded BBC from tax directly. People should pay for it to exist whether they have TV or not becuse everybody benefits(?) from culture creatd by BBC.

I've been wondering this myself. Related to this; I was wondering the other day why the seemingly sudden rise of people who buy into conspiracy theories like Q-Anon? One possible answer could be that people are feeling like they are "less-than", purposeless, or not wanted. So then my next question was, why is that?

It occurred to me that with the rise of consumerism (apparently skyrocketing starting in the 90's) we've had more and more advertising telling us, "If you just buy this product or service you will [be loved | get more sex | be prettier | get more sex]"

When it was just TV and billboards advertising to you it was bad enough but at least you could look away and/or turn off the TV. With the rise of the Internet there was obviously another increasingly pervasive channel through which advertisers could reach you. But then came the smartphone and now it's like we're carrying a TV with us 24x7, flooding us with messages convincing us we're not good enough. Couple that with ad-supported apps that purposely try to be addictive and we are bombarded even more because we can't just be still anymore. Our constant need to be stimulated has become piggy-backed with messages telling us how inferior we are.

The BBC also essentially invented online TV streaming services. Netflix credits BBC iPlayer as being their inspiration to move online like they did

On advertising and consumerism: we may be seeing that come back around. My kids have only watched Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. and have barely ever seen an ad. We've banned YouTube for multiple reasons.

The ads just moved directly into the shows and storylines for Amazon Prime and Netflix (and most everyone else).

Has anything really changed? There have always been kids programming that was primarily about selling toys. I'm thinking of Care Bears, GI Joe, Transforms, Voltron, etc...

When shows like that move to Netflix or Amazon Prime the native ads remain, but the interstitials are gone.

That’s true. I guess as an adult, I feel like I notice it more when the writing / photography blatantly and inorganically bring logos and certain products to the forefront.

A family member’s kids were watching a Christmas movie on Netflix, and while I wasn’t watching it, something jarring hit my ears. In the middle of the movie, Santa names the brand and model of a car, and then starts listing its specs as he gets into a car chase and praises its features. A literal car ad built right into the movie.

Pay for placement is common in the USA and in films also why you don't often see baddies using apple products.

There’s placement, and then there’s altering the storyline and photography of a scene to achieve the goal of advertising a product.

For example, there’s a difference in someone drinking a can of Coke, versus someone spending 30 seconds talking about how they love Coke, and adjusting the camera angles so that the Coke logo is always front and center.

It’s possible to do product placement that doesn’t take you out of the story. But recent stuff beats you over the head with it in ways that are inconsistent with normal behavior and it’s jarring, takes you out of the moment, and I have no idea how people tolerate it.

I always laugh when lots of the US cop shows we get here in the UK have the good guys prominently using Microsoft equipment... to GOSUB their subroutine, or some similarly authentic "tech speak". With the new AI powered by Product Placement Of The Week, they can enhance the image and miraculously read the plate on the bad guys' vehicle!

> Has anything really changed? There have always been kids programming that was primarily about selling toys

Not on the BBC, that’s my point.

I’m sure there are plenty of people here that remember Blue Peter and sticky-back plastic (unobtanium in my childhood) along with empty washing up liquid bottles with logo redacted (presumably with stick-back plastic)

> Advertising free children’s TV (and radio) may have delayed the onset or rampant consumerism fuelled by commercial TV elsewhere.

I find this statement hard to square with the make up of the economy of this country and the rampant consumerism that seems to exist.

We seem to have taken the biggest hit to the economy by covid because our economy depends so much on rampant consumerism (I'm obviously simplifying)

This is not to say that I think ad free TV is bad, quite the opposite.

> perhaps the license fee could also fund the infrastructure for something like signal

Why like signal? Signal has no protections to avoid the same abuse as WhatsApp.

While I would agree with the sentiment, I think that if EU funds anything it will just as likely be much worse than WhatsApp than better than it given their track record (e.g. stupid popups on every damn website that makes life just that extra bit worse).

But there is some hope in that both the french and German governments have adopted Matrix. The benefit of this manner of funding (through adoption and payment for actual services) is that there is actually a customer/provider relationship - and the potential for more direct feedback. That way if it totally sucks you don't end up with a situation where the people authorizing payment/funding are not affected by how badly it sucks.

> Why like signal? Signal has no protections to avoid the same abuse as WhatsApp.

I think something like signal could reasonably have sufficient protections from both a technical and legislative perspective. And for that matter matrix too.

I was not intending to highlight signal as the only possibility, by like signal I guess I meant a small a capable organisation with a clear non profit agenda.

Signal is centralized by design. If they redesign it sure, it can be something that is not centralized by design, but the problem is then it is hardly an open standard, because it is entirely up to whoever is running Signal.

The BBC is a propaganda arm of the state, IMO they should be defunded significantly.

Would you say that about all state funded news or is the BBC uniquely worse?

> What is absolutely clear from history is commercial media outlets fuel political bias, and it seems to be increasingly damaging to society.

Public broadcasting fuels political division a lot. The most worrying is that you don’t notice it.

It is increasingly worrying because when people are exposed to the other side, they immediately « catch fire », wonder why they have been lied to, and never trust public broadcasting anymore. With luck, they may smoothen their beliefs a bit later in life, for the most centrist ones.

To me, public TV, especially BBC, shouldn’t be one-sided as it is now.

>It is increasingly worrying because when people are exposed to the other side, they immediately « catch fire », wonder why they have been lied to, and never trust public broadcasting anymore.

Compare this to people who watch commercial TV, see an opposing view, and immediately wonder why they're currently being lied to, and go back to trusting their single source of commercial programming.

The thing with the BBC is that people on both sides of the political spectrum claim it's biased towards the other guys. That at least suggests that its overall balance is relatively neutral, even if specific individual programmes it broadcasts may not be.

I do feel that in recent times, the BBC's big name current affairs programmes have often given politicians of all parties an easy time in interviews, which I think is more worrying as a trend. I think the BBC should still challenge government representatives to explain and if necessary defend their policies, and should also still challenge the Opposition and smaller parties when their own representatives make dubious claims even if they're not currently in power to implement them.

I think BBC is biased towards the establishment, not left or right.

Correct answer.

I regularly see the BBC criticised by both sides for being one sided. I’m not saying that’s a get out of jail free card but from your comment I genuinely don’t know which side you come down on, which surely says something.

I don't mean to dismiss the complaint. Public media news is weird: it's funded by the government, but it should criticise the government. There's a tension there. But looking at the US news landscape I see that for-profit news is just as if not more compromised.

I have read across the spectrum for years in the UK, the BBC is not especially biased, maybe a little liberal and it ignores poorer people, but almost all media does that in the UK. But the histrionics frim the Tories and Momentum about the BBC is wildly misplaced.

In comparison I never really watched the US "news" until the recent US election, occasionally watching a bit of CNN/ABC/Fox News. But I've been watching it these last few months, a mix of CNN, Fox and CNBC.

I was shocked at how CNN and Fox both present their often extremely partisan and biased opinions as news. They "report" on a story, but just constantly throwing in their own slant, not reporting the facts, but spinning it. CNN is not quite as bad as Fox, but it's still really, really bad.

That's not news to me.

The BBC does not do that. They don't have reporters sit their and rant about stuff, or label huge swathes of the population as X, Y or Z.

While there is bias by omission, or by the order in which they present the news, it's nothing like the 'news' I see coming from America.

I agree that CNN and Fox are both disgustingly biased.

I appreciate BBC's journalistic standards, but I think they are the exception rather than the norm. I think Poland's case is more typical:

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/04/951063118/polands-government-...

Whether privately or publicly owned, the mitigation of media bias requires constant effort, education, and integrity.

We see CNN over here for ages too but they really clipped during the trumps presidency. Probably so much attention by that clown made them think they shall be the messiah who bring him down now matter what and how they report. They really weren't that bad before imo.

> To me, public TV, especially BBC, shouldn’t be one-sided as it is now.

I don’t think it is, and it’s certainly not meant to be. The law in the UK is quite clear and there is a framework and regulatory body to enforce it.

From https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/broadcast-co...

“To ensure that news, in whatever form, is reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality.”

Personally I occasionally find that the BBC news website misses the mark, more often on quality than bias but they have a very transparent and available complaints process online that I suggest you use if you have noticed specific instances of bias.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com