There are a number of problems with the BBC, and almost none of them get discussed honestly, because the outlets doing the discussing are owned by the BBC’s commercial rivals.
1. It operates within an Overton window set by the capture of almost all of our media by billionaire owners.
2. BBC executives are afraid that parties acting as clients of the billionaire press will abolish it in government, and so kowtow far more than they should.
3. Fourteen years of government appointments to the top of the BBC have left its senior leadership shaped by one political tradition — and that tradition is itself now a client of the billionaire-owned media.
4. BBC producers and researchers, looking each morning for stories to cover, usually start with what is in the billionaire-owned papers. So the media billionaires set and frame much of the day’s agenda on the BBC, on ITV and across the rest of our broadcast ecosystem.
5. Because almost all the rest of our media is billionaire-captured, anyone the BBC recruits is likely to have worked in, and absorbed the ethos of, a billionaire-owned newsroom. Andrew Neil, for years the BBC’s leading politics presenter, was Murdoch’s appointed editor of the Sunday Times. Jeremy Clarkson presented Top Gear for the BBC while writing a column for Murdoch’s Sun.
6. The billionaire media have run a decades-long campaign to abolish the BBC entirely — despite how much of its agenda they already control — so that only their voices remain.
So how do we free the BBC?
The obvious answer is to end the billionaire media capture of our democracy.
You cannot fix the BBC by reforming the BBC, because the BBC is not where the problem is generated. It is downstream of it. Every morning it wakes up inside a news agenda written by a handful of proprietors, most of whom do not live here.
Change who owns the microphones and the BBC’s incentives change with them.
Passing the Media Sovereignty Act would be a huge step towards freeing the BBC for the 99%.
Our petition closes at the end of today, Friday 18 September.
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Please sign and share our petition to ban foreign media ownership: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/760061
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