Weinstein on the BBC

In poll after poll, the BBC comes out as one of the most trusted sources of news. This is denied by those who want the BBC licence to go; however, show me someone who wants the BBC licence fee to go and I'll bet a pound to a pinch of poo that such person will in all probability be a staunch Brexiteer (and, in all likelihood, an anthropomorphic climate change sceptic too). They simply can't abide factual reporting and are furious that the BBC doesn't give full-throated support to the idiocy that is Brexit. When all is said and done, Boris is rather keep to neutralise anything that could hold him to account - and that includes an independent BBC.

When it comes to philosophy - aka religion and political ideology bereft of evidential support - people become irrational, suffer cognitive dissonance and find themselves having to defend logically untenable and indefensible positions, tying themselves in logical knots. You simply have to keep asking them questions and they end up hanging themselves. It is the hallmark of deep bias and dogma. (An example is them not wanting foreign judges meddling with British laws. Question them further and they don't even want British judges meddling in British laws, unless they're ideologically pure Brexiteers.)

The BBC conducted a poll in 2015 about the TV licence and over 2/3rds thought it should be retained. The interesting fact was that when those who wanted to get rid of the licence fee were asked a few days later, after they'd had time to consider their answer and discuss it with friends and family, a third of those changed their minds.

Determined to have something harder, the BBC selected a representative cohort of this third and asked them to participate in an experiment and do without any access to the BBC whatsoever for 9 days. Two thirds of that cohort then subsequently changed their minds. The BBC reimbursed the cost of the licence for the 9 days of the experiment, and the recipients were surprised at how little they received. But, naturally, this was a BBC experiment and thus biased....

Commercial TV is engaged in a race to the bottom in terms of quality. Direct funding by the government makes the BBC a mouthpiece for the government of the day. The argument that you shouldn't pay for a licence if you don't watch the BBC is the same facile argument that you shouldn't have to fund public transport or the NHS if you don't use it.

A digital-only subscription to the newspaper reporting that the government is planing to abolish the licence fee is, at £312, more than double the annual cost of the licence fee. That's one newspaper for £312-a-year versus everything the BBC provides for £154.50.

Just as an aside, and totally unrelated to the above, imagine the jury in the Weinstein trial saying they didn't want to hear or see any evidence or testimony. What kind of uproar would that cause? Would the public accept that as justice being seen to be done? Obviously not, but that is exactly what the Republicans did at the Trump impeachment.