If that justification held up, the BBC would have no trouble staying afloat through voluntary subscription fees, pay to watch content and advertising revenue. Instead, they harass anyone who doesn't pony up the license fee and put the onus on them to prove they aren't in violation.
The BBC was set up to be advertising free, so that option is not a part of the current structure.
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.
The BBC does have some advertising on it, if you can call it that. Most of it tends to be inhouse. So in addition to TV programmes, in the past I have seen them advertising "Radio Times" (a magazine they used to own giving TV listings), tie-in books, TV licences, DVDs/VHS, and their other channels and digital services. They also cross-promote their material. When David Tennant was playing Doctor Who, you would frequently see BBC News 24 being featured in the programme.
Nowhere near as bad as other channels in that sense, but still there.
Historically, there have been also been substantial numbers of people who watched the BBC without licences in the Republic of Ireland and the Netherlands, but they couldn't do a thing about it. The BBC tended to be watched in the east of the Republic of Ireland and near the border with Northern Ireland. (Not so much in France from what I can tell.) Many of the houses in Dublin used to have massive tall TV aerials to receive it. Most have been removed now. (Within the Republic of Ireland, RTÉ is funded by their own licence system, but also has proper advertising on it, unlike the BBC. It has had similar questions about it.)
Well, I can. I'm old enough to remember "Radio Times", and other magazines, being advertised quite openly on BBC1 and 2 as well as their radio stations. I think they had to sell their share in "Radio Times", after government pressure, but they still do many tie-in books. (Especially true of their science fiction franchises such as "Doctor Who", which has dozens of official books based on it.)
The other advertising includes heavy promotion of BBC linked charities such as Comic Relief, Children in Need and so on. These charities make big money and there have been some questions about how that money is used and where.
BBC advertising is less obnoxious than commercial channels, but it is still there. In addition, the BBC owns BBC America (which carries commercial breaks), as well as having shares in services accessible in the UK including the "BritBox" streaming service, and the digital channels "Dave" and "UK Gold" which all have normal commercial breaks.
1) I suspect that I am older than you, but either way, probably the same cohort.
2) I have a very hard time considering a media organization mentioning its own products and activities in its content as "advertising". If you want to use the word that way, be my guest, but my understanding (and I think most people's understanding) of the term implies a 3rd party paying a media organization to include marketing content in their output.
3) Fair point about BBC America, but I don't think it really invalidates the point.
The BBC does not carry advertising in the same way as ITV, but a certain amount of content qualifies. I don't include trailers, but I do include promotion of their own non-TV products, the TV licence, promotion of the corporation as a whole (the BBC has done a number of nostalgia reels and songs — their cover of "Perfect Day" years ago would qualify.) and so on.
The BBC has a perpetual Catch 22 around self-advertising, much like the NHS.
This thread is quite eye opening. A lot of comments bemoaning the lack of agreement on what constitutes bias, mixed with claims the BBC is right wing and even a Nigel Farage fluffer (that's a howler).
I didn't see anyone mention that, just a couple months back, two very high profile BBCers were forced to resign over the doctoring of Trump's Jan. 6 speech to completely alter its meaning. That simply doesn't happen unless it's a very serious scandal.
It doesn't help that the background of most Ars' writers was some variant of "former IT pro", which is almost guaranteed to mean they're unqualified to write with nuance and depth about serious technical topics. So you have guys like Jon Brodkin pumping out total nonsense about the latest wireless communications breakthroughs (just one example I remember) while 99% of the audience has no clue and won't check them on it.
I wonder if it has something to do with an incident years ago in which one of Ars' senior reporters (Peter Bright) was arrested and convicted for child enticement. Ars eventually allowed one of their readers to write a forum article about it, but they didn't write one themselves at the time. Some people defended this course of non-action by saying it was the sensible thing to do because his colleagues could become witnesses in the trial.
It seems people have a rather short memory when it comes to twitter. When it was still run by Jack Dorsey, CP was abundant on twitter and there was little effort to tamp down on it. After Musk bought the platform, he and Dorsey had a public argument in which Dorsey denied the scale of the problem or that old twitter was aware of it and had shown indifference. But Musk actually did take tangible steps to clean it up and many accounts were banned. It's curious that there wasn't nearly the same level of outrage from the morally righteous HN crowd towards Mr. Dorsey back then as there is in this thread.
Having an issue with users uploading CSAM (a problem for every platform) is very different from giving them a tool to quickly and easily generate CSAM, with apparently little-to-no effort to prevent this from happening.
Well, its worth noting that with the nonconsensual porn, child and otherwise, it was generating X would often rapidly punish the user that posted the prompt, but leave the grok-generated content up. It wasn't an issue of not having control, it was an issue of how the control was used.
Didn't Reddit have the same problem until they got negative publicity and were basically forced to clean it up? What is with these big tech companies and CP?
Not exactly. Reddit always took down CSAM (how effectively I don't know, but I've been using the site consistently since 2011 and I've never come across it).
What Reddit did get a lot of negative public publicity for were subreddits focused on sharing non-explicit photos of minors, but with loads of sexually charged comments. The images themselves, nobody would really object to in isolation, but the discussions surrounding the images were all lewd. So not CSAM, but still creepy and something Reddit tightly decided it didn't want on the site.
"As of June 2023, an investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory at Stanford University reported "a lapse in basic enforcement" against child porn by Twitter within "recent months". The number of staff on Twitter's trust and safety teams were reduced, for example, leaving one full-time staffer to handle all child sexual abuse material in the Asia-Pacific region in November 2022."
"In 2024, the company unsuccessfully attempted to avoid the imposition of fines in Australia regarding the government's inquiries about child safety enforcement; X Corp reportedly said they had no obligation to respond to the inquiries since they were addressed to "Twitter Inc", which X Corp argued had "ceased to exist"."
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