But it struck me how few serious, general, global news outlets there are left in the world that aren't tied to some major interest. Fox News, CNN, WSJ... So much stuff is owned by Murdoch or by some other mogul. The Guardian is pretty good IMO but does not even pretend not to have a lefty skew.
I was thinking about the spiral of death that happens to so many media outlets where serious news doesn't pay the bills anymore, so they either have to rent themselves out to some deep pocket, or chase clicks for ads, losing veracity in the process.
BBC is one of the few organisations left that's somewhat immune to that. I won't claim all their stuff is unbiased, but they're just as likely to publish something left- as right-biased. So now I'm rooting for them and hope they make it. Apparently it is the second most trusted news source in the US, right after the Weather Channel. So truly a global phenomenon: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52272-trust-in-media-2025-...
Put it behind a subscription and give me a choice whether the BBC deserves its revenue, my current opinion falls firmly on no.
Some private companies make it so hard these days (Adobe & NYT being the kings of subcription dark patterns), I am curious how the process goes with a govt entity like the BBC ?
Currently, by not using a television.
I don't pay for a license because the programming is crap now though.
Can you add some specifics to this claim? I'm unaware of the BBC having reported "Hamas-sourced" substantial misinformation as fact. I'm sure some errors and retractions have been done - especially given that BBC like all Western media continues to be forbidden to operate freely in Gaza.
This lead to two of my female Jewish friends getting spat on and having their hair pulled on the tube and called murdering zionists.
This happens a lot with the BBC in the rush to publish. It is not an excusable situation. There are real consequences. The decline is parallel to the rise in social media and moving the news teams out of London and attention dynamics.
You can find a list of problems in the corrections and clarifications here - work through 2023 to 2025: https://www.bbc.co.uk/helpandfeedback/corrections_clarificat...
Do you think this is specifically and only due to that specific, single story, or do you think it might be a cumulative effect due to all the rest of what's been happening? Not that this excuses or justifies random attacks on other people simply because they happen to be Jewish, that's how the cycle of reprisal happens.
You know the stupid shit thing though? My friendship group has an Iranian, a Palestinian, a Saudi, two Jews and a bunch of English people in it, a German and I'm literally descended from a nazi and everyone is quite happy and gets on fine.
Divisive narratives hurt everyone.
See my other post in the thread for some further extrapolation of the side effects, but this was quoted over and over again by social media using the BBC's reputation to legitimise it.
A few things here:
1) I'm not seeing the "over and over again" part at all, can you help me there?
2) The more scrutiny we give to this claim, the more the strength of it seems to fade. We went from BBC critically misinforming the British public by uncritically reporting Hamas statements, to the BBC misattributing an attack in a war full of misattributed attacks on both sides, which was corrected within hours.
3) Do you think there are similar examples of BBC reporting or publication that could be used to make the opposite case - that BBC holds a pro-Israel bias?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/06/read-devastating...
Direct link to Israel/Hamas section:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/06/read-devastating...
Here's a Guardian (left) report about the Director General resigning over reports of bias across multiple issues including Israel/Hamas:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/nov/09/tim-davie-expe...
And Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/britains-bbc-...
And an anti-Hamas/pro-Israel critique:
https://honestreporting.com/exposed-leaked-report-reveals-th...
Beyond that, what you're presenting appears to be much more generalized than the original claim that I asked for examples of. For example, the Reuters story is about a BBC editor resigning over an edit to a Trump documentary - not relevant at all to what we're discussing!
I'm specifically looking for cases of BBC reporting disinformational Hamas statements as fact, in a fashion that did or was likely to have critically misled the British public. That's what was supposed to have been happening, so I'd like to review the examples myself.
Sure. https://archive.is/tFzfZ
> > the Director General resigning over reports of bias across multiple issues including Israel/Hamas:
> a BBC editor resigning over an edit to a Trump documentary
Yes, as mentioned systemic bias is across multiple issues, including Israel/Hamas but not limited to that issue.
> I'm specifically looking for cases of BBC reporting disinformational Hamas statements as fact
Yes, the HonenestReporting critique mentioned does that.
I'm a US-ian and have no particular dog in this hunt, but could you relate any instances where this led to the British public being significantly misinformed about a major event?
Everything I've seen, including recent statements from the Israeli government, indicate that the Gaza Health Ministry (often referred to by Israel-sympathetic press as part of Hamas, rather than part of the government of Gaza which Hamas currently dominates) death toll statistics from the Gaza war were largely accurate.
Is there a case of BBC reporting "Hamas-sourced" information in a way that was notably harmful to the British public's truthful understanding of the conflict?
While it's less about Hamas, another incident that stands out was their documentary with "sanitized" translations, like replacing "jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces".
But isn't this a fair editorial change? "Jihad" just means "fighting for a noble cause", and most Palestinians don't like to refer to the proper name "Israel" since they feel it validates the existence of that country. Thus, they tend to refer to "Israelis" by the ethnic designation that they came to be known as during the colonial era - "the Jews".
If the editor hadn't made that correction, Jewish people living in London or New York City might believe that Palestinian resistance groups intend to fight them, while the correction makes the true context much more clear?
Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud". There's the widely used Arabized transliteration of Israel, or "occupation forces", "enemy forces", etc. When someone says "Yahud", it's because they're referring to Jews, not because some limitation in their language forced them to say it.
But even if (hypothetically) language limitations plausibly forced a certain "unintended" choice of words, it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say. If they were worried that a literal translation would led to confusion, they could have just omitted the quote.
FWIW though, if there was some other group called "The Great Satan" that wasn't the US, and you were a journalist reporting on what someone had said about the US while terming then "The Great Satan", yes, you would still want to clarify that, I think?
>Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud".
Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.? And wasn't that what most Palestinians, including Jewish ones, called the Jewish colonial population of Palestine prior to Israel's formation in 1948?
>it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say.
But it isn't fundamentally different, when understood in the likely intended context. Jihad just means "fighting for a noble cause", and "the Jews" to anyone in the region clearly refers to Israelis, so there's no change in meaning, just the opposite - the chance of a drastic misunderstanding is reduced by the translation.
Israel has existed for 78 years now, and it didn't take long for us to update language, like replacing "Jewish militias" with "Israeli forces" to reflect the present reality. Such updates happened universally, across nations and languages (Arabic included).
Even political leaders who don't recognize Israel as a state still mostly refer to it by name. The few holdouts who refuse to say "Israel" are doing so out of hatred, not because 78 years wasn't enough time to work out the proper linguistic updates.
> you would still want to clarify that
Yes, but not by changing the statement and sanitizing its meaning. The usual method is to add bracketed context, like "The Great Satan [reference to the US]".
> Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.?
Both are in fact references to the Jews, not to Israel. The latter is just a weird metaphorical statement.
I have a lot of love for the BBC and its history, but the license fee is very difficult to justify.
Now of course, you can disagree about the value proposition, and you can disagree about the choice on how to fund it. But that's the justification, and it's not hard.
The license fee was established because of fundamental beliefs about issues like free riding, externalities and more. You might prefer a subscription based model - I'm sort of on the fence myself, but it's not obviously wrong - but the BBC license fee was set up out of an explicit disbelief that such systems would work. Granted, some of the issues were technological - you couldn't actually stop people watching OTA broadcasts at the time. But even though those have changed, the beliefs about the funding structure have not.
> watch or record programmes as they're being shown live on any TV channel
> The rules apply to any device on which a programme is viewed, including a TV, desktop or laptop computer, mobile phone, tablet, games console or set-top box.
Their behaviour is largely what led to me siding with the Palestinians plight some years ago, the use of words on Israel's side VS Palestinians was enough to lead me down a rabbit hole and I have never seen the BBC the same since.
It is literally state news with amazing bits of other content.
They do everything in their power to distract from the real issue - that the landscape of television has changed beyond recognition since the tax was brought in.
It's completely clear to everybody that the TV licence is an outdated model that makes no sense in today's world of competing commercial streaming services, but they're desperate to control the narrative to avoid losing their income stream. Which is understandable I suppose, from their narrow point of view. But for the country's point of view, we need a politician with balls, to step up and reform the system. But I'm not sure those even exist anymore.
It also isn't clear to me that the TV license is an outdated model in entirety. The notion that a country would levy a fee on more or less any instance of an activity in order to fund a non-commercial institution related to that activity doesn't seem strange to me at all. What is true is that the nature of the activity and the enforceability of the fee have both changed, and that therefore something probably does need to be done.
That's a pretty good ratio no? Plenty of services survive with lower ratios than that. Do they really expect every household to pay? Or is the issue they have much bigger spending plans than they make from it.
(what that stat actually means is that the missing 14% are pensioners who are exempt)
You can argue that this conception has to change, and that's fine. But the BBC was established by the UK government, with stated intentions and goals, and it currently isn't and never has been seen as a "pay-to-watch" sort of thing.
This does mean Doctor Who getting split in half, but that's not the worst that's happened to him/her.
I could say that I don't watch Swiss tv but then the tv series Tschugger came out and made a few years of payments worth it. Otherwise it's just watching endless Jass (Swiss card game) tournaments.
They spend a lot of money (billions) on making and delivering content, but that's still not much compared to other large for-profit media companies[2].
The TV License has been the model since World War II[3], and the entire mass media landscape has completely changed since then.
The proposals to replace the TV License with ads or subscriptions are enshittification. The BBC is not a for-profit media company and should not be treated like one. It is a soft-power organization (cynically: propaganda arm) for the British government. There isn't anything inherently wrong with spreading your government's/culture's messages, especially when it's as obvious as the BBC, but it should not be expected to make money. How much is it worth that Britain stays relevant throughout the Anglosphere and beyond? Or that British points of view are available everywhere with a shortwave radio or VPN?
So fund it like it's defense spending. Maybe if the next leader of a foreign country has a fondness for Del Boy or Red Dwarf, negotiations will go a little more smoothly.
As an American, I think I'd prefer having an official propaganda arm like the BBC instead of whatever quiet public-private partnerships (cynically: backroom deals) we have instead. I'd hate it, but it'd be good to have something concrete to direct my criticism at, instead of constantly wondering if NPR is really presenting unbiased facts or the movie about our Navy jet fighters being the best, most freedom-loving planes flown by handsome rascals is just a good time.
1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/bbc-annual-plan-...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Fox#
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
Its not required to "look at a screen". its required to watch broadcast TV and use the BBc's online TV services. You can watch as much as you like on Youtube or Netflix or whatever without paying it.
it was very good value for money when half of all TV output (and the better half) was from the BBC and ad free.
Careful here because there is live TV on Youtube and a valid licence is required to watch that. There are also live shows on Netflix, which may count as "live TV programmes" so requiring a licence.
https://www.gov.uk/find-licences/tv-licence https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ33
The example given by TV licensing is Sky News. it has to be part of a "television programme"
"Services include YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Now, Sky Go, BBC iPlayer, ITVX and more. Live TV or events can include:
Champions League matches or live channels on Amazon Prime Video
WWE or NFL events on Netflix
News or sports channels on YouTube"
It's a bit of a mess...
[1] https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/w...
Watching non-live BBC programmes in the UK legally requires a license fee. The same is not true of Netflix.
Agreed but this is not what I commented on (no goalpost moved...)
For streaming it's easy to manage.
The creation of ITV was supposed to provide an alternative, but was all too cosy and even today ITV pushes much the same programming as the BBC in outlook and news etc. The first real threat was pirate radio, which proved more popular than the BBC, and forced them to introduce Radio 1 for pop music.
Channel 4 was supposed to provide further competition, but in fact it was VCRs and video hire that really undermined the BBC's monopoly in the 80s. By the 90s, they were outclassed by satellite broadcasting (particularly sports and films). By the late 1990s, internet was breaking the state stranglehold on news and information... Leading to a crackdown in the 2010s with whatever scarestories they could come up with like cyberbullying, terrorism, pro-ana, porn etc.
Now the BBC are saying they want a fee for mobile phone and internet usage, although they haven't succeeded in that yet. Both of which are pretty much mandatory now.
In Turkey and Israel you need a licence for radios as well.