The head of the BBC has taken a pot-shot at andrewsullivan.com. Woohoo. He claims in a letter to the Washington Post today that
The BBC is not state-funded. We are publicly funded through a license fee paid by every household in the United Kingdom. The British public, not the government of the day, owns the BBC, and it is to the British public we are accountable.
Get the difference? That’s like the old canard that government-owned industries are actually owned not by the government but by the ‘people.’ The fact is the BBC is funded through a mandatory, repeat mandatory, license fee. If you have a television, you have to pay the BBC tax. Whom do you pay that tax, sorry, “license fee,” to? The government. How this can be spun as not state-funded is beyond me. The head of the BBC, Mr Dyke, is appointed by the prime minister. Government-run? Compared to any truly independent media service, I’d say so. That’s why the non-government-run alternative – Independent Television News – is called “independent.” No, the government doesn’t dictate coverage. But it pays for it through a mandatory tax, appoints the people who run the BBC, and decisions on future funding are made in parliament not at shareholder meetings. Yes, the BBC sometimes tries to proclaim its independence. For the first couple of years of BBC coverage under Blair, it was so supportive of the government, it was dubbed the Blair Broadcasting Corporation. Now it is expressing its editorial independence by attacking Blair from the left. But it’s all funded by those poor British tax-payers. Dyke is full of it. But then we knew that already, didn’t we?
CORRECTION: The director-general of the BBC is not directly appointed by the government. He’s appointed by the board of management. The non-executive chairman of the BBC is appointed by the government.
The Dish 