Hacker News Reader

Comment by SillyUsername | Hacker News Reader

Note that the BBC won't switch to a subscriber model and now needs to include other providers' channels in the tax classification, which should be evidence enough that its content can't compete with modern competition.

As an institution I feel the BBC is no longer needed to educate the UK's citizens as we have other high quality providers for that, and obviously the internet.

View on HN

The publicly funded channel acts as a quality baseline below which commercial providers won't usually go (since they would lose viewers). It can also be unbiased, where commercial channels are almost always biased in some way, usually towards whichever billionaire runs them. How far the BBC fulfils these needs can definitely be argued (especially on bias), but you should worry about not having the BBC around.

True in some contexts but right now the BBC CEO is concerned that they can't afford expensive dramas like Netflix or Prime can. Regarding bias, commentators on both left and right claim bias in the other direction. This does not imply the BBC is neutral - to (dis)prove that would require study.

The BBC does vastly more than just some Netflix-style dramas. They have news, many radio channels, local journalism, national events ...

Well you're right about quality baseline, low quality. The likes of Dr Who funded by Disney, and as another commenter mentioned it's unequivocally biased in its news. On the other hand you have Discovery and History channels, which caters for the education-entertainment niche. Why should I worry about not having the BBC around? If I'm not watching it already I'm not losing anything (my wife might lose her EastEnders though).

Have you seen any non-Nazis or non-Aliens related show on NatGeo or Discovery? It's almost reality shows back-to-back now.

> The publicly funded channel

It's not "publicly funded". It's funded by licence-payers. And it's hardly one channel.

> It can also be unbiased

Nonsense. E.g. Any mention of "HAMAS" on the BBC is routinely accompanied by the reminder that HAMAS is a proscribed organisation in the UK and many other places. I used to rely on BBC news, not because it was unbiased, but because their reporting was better (they used to have a large network of international correspondents). But their news staff has been cut to the bone, and job-title inflation means that all their correspondents are now referred to as "editor".

I now get my TV news from ITV/CH4. The notion that the BBC forces up standards for the "independent" channels is manifestly untrue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com