Talk:BBC
Sorry to ask a stoopid question, but--are there private television and radio stations in the U.K.? --AnonymousCoward
Yes, there are both national and local commercial radio stations, offering a wide variety of news and music genres. The number of national commercial stations is likely to get a lot higher with Digital Audio Broadcasting being phased in.
With television, the market is even more fragmented. There are 3 commercial 'analogue' channels, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, while on digital services (eg Digital Terrestrial or Digital Satellite), the range is much greater. We have hundreds of (mostly low quality) commercial television services on digital satellite within the UK, mostly showing re-runs of 1970s sitcoms! --Dweir
From article:
Claims of BBC bias
During the middle of the night July 2001 attack by Italian security forces on the independent media centre in Genoa, the BBC allegedly refused to broadcast live footage of the police violence streaming through the internet on the basis that "there were no independent confirmations".
The BBC is generally considered to have given very little coverage to the 2001/2002 silent genocide in Afghanistan, in which some fraction (initially expected to be about 50%) of 7.5 million people were killed by actions (bordure closures and bombings) expected to be lethal by terminating food supply lines. In preference, the BBC and ITN chose, for example, stories such as forest fires in Australia which killed noone.[1]
The BBC is also considered to represented corporate and government interests, and not those of ordinary citizens' groups.[2]
216, this is interesting and potentially valuable stuff. Would you please review our policy on neutral point of view, rewrite it, and put it back in when it conforms to the NPOV? --Ed Poor
I'm going to put the reference to the American Supreme Court back in. At the moment the article says that the BBC is independent of the government and this isn't strictly true. Just as the American President can pack the Supreme Court with people sympathetic to his political views, it's possible for the Prime Minister to pack the BBC's board of Governors with sympathisers, as Mrs Thatcher proved. If anyone has a better metaphor, by all means replace the Supreme Court with it but don't just remove the Supreme Court reference and bluntly state that the BBC is independent of government because the situation is not that simple. And it's not particularly Americocentric. I'm not American and I understood what it meant. -- Derek Ross
- Derek, I changed the reference from the Supreme Court to the United States Postal Service. It seems more reasonable an analogy to me. If you disagree, go ahead and change it back. -- Zoe
- Now it's even MORE Americocentric. Why does there need to be an analogy! I don't think the Supreme Court article needs to make an analogy to the BBC or the Post Office.62.64.250.162
- I don't know what the comparison with the USPO means either. I thought that the USPO was a government department which the BBC isn't. The Supreme Court reference was better. However we do need to make some analogy because many people abroad think either that the BBC is a Government department -- an assumption which *this* article originally made -- or they don't know what its status is. Now a lot of people worldwide know what the relation of the US Supreme Court to the US Executive is so it's a useful comparison to make since its fairly exact. If you can come up with a better one which will be more easily understood globally and doesn't refer to the US, be my guest and use it. -- Derek Ross