It's not a tax. It's a fee, required to pay by law to fund independent channels of opinion free from government and/or private funded influence.
200 eur a year is quite cheap for what you get.
200 eur a year is quite cheap for what you get.
Whether this works in practise is up for debate and subject to opinion, but I do think that the general idea is commendable.
Instead you get a media-station which is entirely dependent on continued blessing from the government. So much better.
That severely limits how impartial it gets to be, and the similar system we have in Norway has consistently proven to provide media-coverage leaning further to the left than the general population does.
It's not a disaster by any means, but I wouldn't argue it's "impartial" either. And I can definitely see why some people would chose not to fund it if given the option.
Both public and private media are in my opinion necessary parts of an overall functioning and thus independent media system. This system, like every complex system, is only able to achieve "impartiality" from a certain point of observation, in this case that of the comparing listener/reader/viewer basing judgement on multiple outlets.
This means that I can't trust SVT to deliver "independent" news more than I can trust any other media source in the country. It does not matter at all to me that they are financed by force instead of ads.
Just because the given media outlet's political views do not coincide with yours does not negate its cultural function.
I certainly disagree with the BBC regarding a number of political issues, yet I am still glad it exists.
Does it not make a difference that it's set up as an hypothecated tax, where revenue from the Yle tax is dedicated to go to Yleisradio?
I have a small software business, which I run out of my home. Sometimes I pull down multi-GB data sets. So it's not like I easily downgrade my network to sub-TV speeds. I wonder if I can just block svt.se at the router level, so that way I have no devices which can contact these shows I'll never watch.
Now, I do realize the logic of having news which is independent of the advertisers. But I would rather just pay for it through (unavoidable) taxes rather than through a licensing system and all of its attendant overhead of license inspectors, forms to fill out, etc.
When the construction was done, the bill landed at €670 million. That's your TV license money at work right there.
For some of the content, it will be difficult to make the case that traditional media cost structures have to be maintained.
How can you say that public broadcasting is "free from government", when this is the very entity that chooses whether to uphold the laws that provide funding for these stations? For public broadcasting, offending the government is quite literally biting the hands that feeds you.
Distinction without a difference. Would I be wrong if I tried to argue that an income tax is not a tax, but rather, a fee required by law to fund public schools, bureaucrats, and roads?