Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 09:43:05 AM

Login with username, password and session length

TV licences to be scrapped for many over-75s

Started by Fambo Number Mive, June 11, 2019, 11:20:00 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Zetetic

"This hospital is horribly understaffed, and besides some people need hip replacement surgery and other people need antibiotics prescriptions."

"Therefore, we cannot have a national health service."

Zetetic

(English healthcare policy for several decades.)

chveik

some things are redeemable, some aren't. we can't live without healthcare, but it's quite easy to imagine a world without journalists.

Buelligan

Honestly, you're a ruddy tit at times chveik, I'm just glad you're still virtually a baby-child and there's time to redeem you before the great immolation.

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: chveik on June 11, 2019, 05:00:26 PM
some things are redeemable, some aren't. we can't live without healthcare, but it's quite easy to imagine a world without journalists.

By Rutger Bregman's measure (How long would it take us to notice if they went on strike? (Okay, possibly a bad measure as they are in a position to tell us)), I can see how you could come to that conclusion. However, in the long term, are you seriously suggesting that we don't need anyone, backed with proper resources, to hold power to account? Most of us have other jobs that preclude us from being able to commit to doing it ourselves.

Are you sure you don't mean columnists?

chveik

Quote from: Johnny Yesno on June 11, 2019, 05:55:04 PM
By Rutger Bregman's measure (How long would it take us to notice if they went on strike? (Okay, possibly a bad measure as they are in a position to tell us)), I can see how you could come to that conclusion. However, in the long term, are you seriously suggesting that we don't need anyone, backed with proper resources, to hold power to account? Most of us have other jobs that preclude us from being able to commit to doing it ourselves.

Are you sure you don't mean columnists?

I admire the work of a few investigative journalists, but sometimes I wonder if what they do makes any difference. some politicians and businessmen can have a dozen of trials against them, and yet they still walk freely (Sarkozy for instance). there are other ways people can hold power to account, because anyone can witness malfunctions by themselves. they media is rarely an ally when it comes to this. they always end up by welcoming with open arms any new neoliberal overlord.

I'm obviously not totally serious, and yes, columnists are probably the first to blame, but it goes far beyond them. it's just that any strategies the radical left have tried to use with the mainstream time sadly failed. if you ignore them, you're demonized (black blocs), if you criticize them violently, even the far left  sympathizing media will stab you in the back (Mélenchon), if you try to compromise with them, they'll always ask for more (Corbyn). this state of affair really saddens me.

honeychile

If we take the MSM to be the corporate media (of which the BBC is absolutely a part), then it's definitely the case that the corporate structure of the media needs to be completely destroyed. The MSM as it stands is seldom good at either context or source-checking, nor indeed much else beyond the continuation of corporate dominance. Good journalists are great, the problem is the media only rewards good journalism if it's not too dangerous.

Just focusing on the BBC, what do people think are the best ways of democratising it?

I completely agree about the point earlier regarding abolishing the licence fee and funding it through general taxation. The question is keeping that funding independent from the whims of the government. Maybe allow an elected board/director general to set the budget; implement a wide-reaching constitution for what the BBC needs to achieve in terms of content, reach, and new technologies; and allow Ofcom to reject a budget if the current level of funding is proving inadequate to meet its constitutional needs?

In terms of representation, what about if the director general and the board were all elected from the nations and regions? And have board seats reserved for employees' representatives. Or how about a lottery of (or additional board seats for) demographically representative members of the public.

It's a widely-forgotten point, but the BBC needs to be made ad-free. It is not a non-commercial organisation - it carries advertising for via its website when accessed from abroad, as well as from the BBC World News channel, which could prejudice its coverage.

alan nagsworth

Quote from: biggytitbo on June 11, 2019, 12:13:00 PM
I still like the idea of biggytitbo, just not the reality - which is fucking dog turd. The news and small bears divisions need to totally fuck off.

HAHA ROASTED

Sony Walkman Prophecies

Ideology before function? The BBC isn't well. It hasn't been for a long time. But it's amusing to see "nationalise everything" ideologues treat it with the same rhmey-eyed regard as equally unthinking royalists. These are strange times indeed. First liberals put the economy before sovereignty, now they want to save out of touch patrician institutions which exist to give upper middle class programmers a sense of purpose. The transvaluation of the political poles is now almost complete.

The SWP workaround: keep BBC news/BBC Four documentaries, let Dementia Choir and all the other monkey tennis productions spend out their remaining days as high concept TV in North Korea.

Twed

Imagine saying all those words but getting "liberals" wrong.

They shouldn't be watching telly anyway should be digging their own graves and meditating on the next life like a Tibetan old bastard. We live too long and too detached in our culture. Get in touch with the soil again. Get in touch with grave.

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: Twed on June 11, 2019, 09:17:07 PM
Imagine saying all those words but getting "liberals" wrong.

I don't know how many times he's been corrected on here regarding his use of the word, but it just doesn't sink in. He doesn't seem to realise he's not in the US.

Saying that, what he says doesn't make any sense either way.

Sony Walkman Prophecies

Any idea what these two are on about? No. Me neither. This place grows more and more bizarre by the day.

I'll take my correct spelling elsewhere.

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: Sony Walkman Prophecies on June 11, 2019, 11:33:46 PM
Any idea what these two are on about? No. Me neither. This place grows more and more bizarre by the day.

I'll take my correct spelling elsewhere.

Sigh.

Firstly, by definition, economic liberals would put the economy before sovereignty. I don't even know why social liberals (which is what you, in common with the American right, usually mean when you bang on about liberals) would have a dog in that fight.

Buelligan

Also, the idea that people, in order to truly have their own ideas, must have them and keep them within the bounds of narrow predetermined political identities.  It's so pre-2016.

It's that same "Lexiter" argument again. That if we let the right sweep away the liberals, socialism will naturally fill the void and the demagogues will simply step aside, their work done.

Fambo Number Mive

Quote...Mr Whittingdale told MPs: "When the decision was taken it was understood that this would be a possible outcome, not least because to maintain the existing concession would cost the BBC nearly £1billion by the end of the charter period, which would mean either huge programme cuts or increasing the licence fee for the under-75s to nearly £200."

Yet just two years later, the Conservatives' 2017 election manifesto pledged to maintain the benefit for the rest of this Parliament – due to run until 2022...

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/top-tory-knew-free-tv-16501764

I assume most of the media won't report this as it doesn't fit in with their anti-BBC agenda.