Posted on 04/25/2003 1:56:17 AM PDT by David Hunter
I hope you and your husband are well.
In their minds Government Monopoly is good while private enterprise is bad.
I suspect this statement is more for domestic consumption in their effort to stave off competition and to prevent the abolition of the compulsory TV licence.
5.56mm
One young man indicated that he would welcome being killed in an American attack against Iraq during Haj because he would die a martyr. How an American attack againts Iraq would kill him in Saudi Arabia is hard to fathom.
Perhaps his logic is that if America attacked Iraq, Iraq would then attack Saudi Arabia, and he could be killed in that attack, and he would go down in the martyr records as dying defending Islam from western infidels.
Frankly, this wasn't particularly sympathetic, so they also had a young woman lucky enough to go on Haj. She sounded very sweet and non-threatening, and the gist of the story was that it would be really heartless for the mean old Americans to ruin Haj for her.
All this time, Uday and the rest of Saddam's thugs and family were raping women and children, putting people in iron maidens and other instruments of torture, and using money from oil sales to buy palaces and weapons. All the time they made sure that there were plenty of starving Iraqi children to show off to reporters in their campaign to end the UN sanctions and blame the US for suffering in Iraq.
We should have given the Baathists more time to kill and rape and torture and develop nuclear weapons. That's what the BBC would have had us do.
How many times do these leftists have to be utterly wrong before everyone just stops listening to them at all.
"I was gobsmacked to hear, in a set of headlines today, that the coalition was suffering 'significant casualties'," he wrote. "This is simply NOT TRUE. Nor is it true to say (as the same intro stated) that coalition forces are fighting 'guerrillas'. It may be guerrilla warfare but they are not guerrillas.
"And who dreamt up the line that the Coalition are achieving 'small victories at a very high price'? The truth is exactly the opposite. The gains are huge and the costs still relatively low. This is real warfare, however one-sided, and losses are to be expected," he wrote.
Then you have the episode where the crew of the Ark Royal insisted that BBC News 24 be switched off and replaced with Sky News: One senior rating said: "The BBC always takes the Iraqis' side. It reports what they say as gospel but when it comes to us it questions and doubts everything the British and Americans are reporting. A lot of people on board are very unhappy." Article.
Of course, everyone knows the BBC is biased against the Eurosceptic cause, the UK conservative party, the US republican party, the libertarian movement, firearm ownership by civilians and Israel.
But remember that the BBC is funded by a compulsory “license fee” on TVs, Video recorders, set-top digital decoders, and computers fitted with TV Cards (they are eyeing up broadband enabled computers too). Failure to pay is punishable a £1,000 fine per offence, or a prison sentence. Hence it has no right to use its publicly funded power base to forward the political and cultural engineering crusades of its elite staff.
The people they prosecute for license fee non-payment tend to be the most vulnerable too:
“Shockingly, 80 per cent of the people they do prosecute are single mothers on benefits. I've contacted 30 people being prosecuted in the North-West and the Midlands and am working with them to provide a legal challenge. We have a good case."Article.
The BBC is an inefficient, overstaffed and decadent organisation. Here is what an ex-employee had to say about it: “I worked for the BBC for 5 years. In that time they spent £5 MILLION on changing the old italic red green and blue logo to the upright white one and a further £7 MILLION changing the BBC stationary. If a department moved offices they were treated to a case of Champagne and unlimited sandwiches and snacks if they didn’t complain. We had taxi’s to take us between building as near as 500 yards apart. The waste was incredible. They had an expensive security check and found that in 5 years, 19 (yes, nineteen) baby grand pianos went ‘missing’ from various BBC premises. Every building has a subsided Bistro and staff restaurant and every office has multiple televisions and radios displaying every conceivable channel, even the adult variety. So that’s why I bitterly resent paying my licence fee.” Source.
The BBC is an institution out of control. They were created to provide two (initially one) TV channels, and local/national radio stations. Now, the USA can receive BBC World especially produced for America (paid for by the British license fee payer), the same in Australia and programs especially designed for Asia Pacific. On satellite TV, there is BBC knowledge, BBC Choice, BBC Four, BBC News 24, BBC Parliament, CBBC, plus a host of strange BBC radio stations. Who gave them authority to expand to such an extent? How much does it cost us to provide free satellite TV (without adverts) to the US and Asia Pacific?
As for FOX news, at least their political sensibilities and loyalties are overt, so you can choose not to subscribe and watch something else, if your husband will let you! The British TV owning public are forced to pay for the BBC whether they watch it or not.
At least the BBC viewers know how bad it really was.
Of course not.....the BBC is too busy mixing journalism and self-hatred.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/top100/story/0,10430,512789,00.html
Monday July 16, 2001 Greg Dyke
Greg Dyke: ready to lead fight for licence fee
Job: director general, BBC
Industry: broadcasting
Company income: £3bn (from licence fee, World Service direct grant, plus commercial income from BBC Worldwide and BBC Resources)
Staff: 23,640
Age: 54
Salary: £347,000. Total package including perks: £454,000. Worth: at least £6m - from sale of Granada shares
Star in: ascendant
Not only does Greg Dyke head up one of Britain's best known institutions and biggest employers, he is also custodian of arguably its most important cultural body in a rapidly changing broadcast climate.
The BBC still commands nearly a 40% share of UK TV viewing, more than 50% of radio listening, and BBC Online is one of the top 10 most visited UK websites.
Moreover, Mr Dyke controls an annual licence fee income of £2.3bn and rising that is guaranteed until the end of the current BBC charter in 2006.
It is now over a year since "citizen" Greg took over from Lord Birt. For the man on the street, the most noticeable aspect of his leadership is the radical changes to the BBC1 schedule and the loss of Match of the Day Premiership football highlights this summer.
The speed at which he managed to shift the evening news to 10pm and free up the evening slot for more drama and entertainment attests to his grip on the corporation.
However, it has also led to serious criticism that he will dumb down the schedule, ultimately moving serious documentaries and current affairs such as Panorama to BBC2 and changing the nature of BBC1 forever.
Less visibly, Mr Dyke is involved in a root and branch transformation of the corporation to prepare it for an increasingly competitive and digital broadcasting environment.
He has embarked on a ruthless cost-cutting drive designed to channel an extra £500m from administration into programme-making by 2003.
Headlines have been created by Mr Dyke's clampdown on chauffeur-driven cars and hotel bills, his £2m payoff for senior executives whose faces no longer fit and his determination to shake off the BBC's white, male, middle-class culture.
More significant are his plans to evolve the corporation's output from two-channel Auntie to "a coherent portfolio of channels" geared to different demographic audiences.
An unashamed Labour supporter, Mr Dyke used to chair the government's NHS advisory group. He still has the ear of senior politicians from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown.
People who move home regularly often don't update their TV license and get away with it. If you have a portable TV and a good place to hide it you're unlikely to be caught, but most people who have the money don't both with all the hassle and just pay.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.