Nov 14, 2025 01:21 AM
https://nation.cymru/opinion/the-bbc-row...has-become
EXCERPTS: Whatever our views on the BBC’s honesty and competence, it is a national institution – one of the dwindling number of our assets that hasn’t been sold from under us over the last few decades.
Like any large organisation, it has rogue employees, makes collective errors, and is prone to ideological fads. For all those drawbacks, however, its public status means that its editorial line can’t be bought for money.
Many of the attacks that have taken place this week have come from people who think that it should.
[...] Only the public service media model requires producers to make content that balances off the needs of the entire viewing and listening public. The BBC frequently, too frequently, fails to achieve that balance. The broadcaster is routinely targeted by disgruntled politicians from Nigel Farage to Jeremy Corbyn and all points in between. Barely a month goes by when it doesn’t have to apologise for a misstep.
That, however, is not proof of the BBC’s unique bias, but of the ongoing and constant accountability that our democracy rightly demands of it. The licence fee buys us democratic levers to keep the BBC in check. No such levers exist for any other source of information we have.
[...] The Labour government’s acquiescence to Trump’s wishes shows us all how vulnerable the UK has become on the world stage. The government’s weakness has been seized upon by Trump’s supporters in the UK to suggest the BBC should be dismantled altogether.
Self-styled ‘patriots’, festooned in flags and poppies, cannot wait to euthanise a public British institution in favour of private news organisations funded from who knows where, and by God knows whom.
The BBC is meant to annoy you. Its mission to serve us all means that it will often stray from what you, or I, think is acceptable. When we allow our discontent to be weaponised against it to the point of hostility, however, we are being used.
If the BBC falls to foreign interference, the same arguments will be employed against our universities, the NHS, and even the judiciary. Our Senedd is next on their list and for the same reason: it belongs to us, not those who seek to own us... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: Whatever our views on the BBC’s honesty and competence, it is a national institution – one of the dwindling number of our assets that hasn’t been sold from under us over the last few decades.
Like any large organisation, it has rogue employees, makes collective errors, and is prone to ideological fads. For all those drawbacks, however, its public status means that its editorial line can’t be bought for money.
Many of the attacks that have taken place this week have come from people who think that it should.
[...] Only the public service media model requires producers to make content that balances off the needs of the entire viewing and listening public. The BBC frequently, too frequently, fails to achieve that balance. The broadcaster is routinely targeted by disgruntled politicians from Nigel Farage to Jeremy Corbyn and all points in between. Barely a month goes by when it doesn’t have to apologise for a misstep.
That, however, is not proof of the BBC’s unique bias, but of the ongoing and constant accountability that our democracy rightly demands of it. The licence fee buys us democratic levers to keep the BBC in check. No such levers exist for any other source of information we have.
[...] The Labour government’s acquiescence to Trump’s wishes shows us all how vulnerable the UK has become on the world stage. The government’s weakness has been seized upon by Trump’s supporters in the UK to suggest the BBC should be dismantled altogether.
Self-styled ‘patriots’, festooned in flags and poppies, cannot wait to euthanise a public British institution in favour of private news organisations funded from who knows where, and by God knows whom.
The BBC is meant to annoy you. Its mission to serve us all means that it will often stray from what you, or I, think is acceptable. When we allow our discontent to be weaponised against it to the point of hostility, however, we are being used.
If the BBC falls to foreign interference, the same arguments will be employed against our universities, the NHS, and even the judiciary. Our Senedd is next on their list and for the same reason: it belongs to us, not those who seek to own us... (MORE - missing details)