Is my Television dangerous? I
don’t mean ideologically, that’s debateable, I mean in what way can it hurt
people physically?
You need to have a license if
you have a gun. Guns can kill and they should not be easy to get so I
understand why a license is required. Likewise a license is needed for a dog
because it can be trained to attack and in addition it is a way of helping to
minimize the amount of unsuitable owners who mistreat animals. The same can be
said for exotic pets, if they are dangerous then ownership should be licensed.
In the UK a license is required to fish, this prevents fishing in the breeding
season and thus maintains the stock of fish in rivers, lakes and reservoirs.
This is all common sense but I
can’t see why I need a license to watch TV. We are supposed to be in a free
market economy – that’s a joke, I know, because the U.S. and UK govt’s now own
banks thanks to the rescue packages a couple of years ago. That aside, don’t
the BBC have an unfair advantage over others because viewers are forced to buy
a license to fund it? Not only that, but the public pay for it and have no say
in the programming. The BBC is supposed to be apolitical and unbiased, but it
has come to light in recent years that they are receiving money from the EU to
promote EU policies. In addition to this the BBC has also borrowed heavily from
The European Investment Bank. link
here The loans have been done with favorable terms that are not available
commercially. As this older post shows Scotland Yard have been asked to
investigate BBC funding. here
People who claim that the
license fee provides money to create programming of quality not only miss the
fact that this is unfair on the rest who have to find their own funding for
their content, it is a purely a matter of taste. I find I very rarely watch BBC
programs, and although I’m no big fan of Sky because it is trying to
monopolize the industry and is run by a three way schizophrenic who doesn’t
know if he is Australian, British or American, and if the land of Amazon women
existed he would probably chop off his gonads and change his name to “Ruperta”
in order to gain control of the media there, too, I have to admit that all the
TV I like is on the sky network, which I pay for through choice. Why should I
be made to buy a license for a set of channels I rarely watch? The definition
of “quality” as applied to program making is not really about quality, it is
about what is perceived as high culture: Opera, The Proms, Jane Austin and so
on. These are not to my taste so why should I pay for them to be produced. Why
do the rest of us have to buy a license to fund crap that snobs want to watch?
There is a petition running to
get the BBC to account for its funding. The link is at the end of this blog.
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