by Georgia L Gilholy, Conservative Home
More than two decades ago, the BBC commissioned one of its senior journalists, Malcolm Balen, to prepare a report.
Its purpose was to investigate allegations that the national broadcaster’s coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict was biased against the Jewish State. Not only has Balen’s 20,000-word paper never been published, but the BBC shelled out over 300,000 pounds of public money on court cases to keep it that way.
It is not hard to imagine why.
On so many issues, from its marginalisation of the working classes, sidelining of gender critical feminists, to its obsession with celebrities, the BBC’s track record is egregious. Its maligning of Israel and Jews is hardly its only offence, although it is certainly among its most frequent.
Despite my frustration, for years I quietly backed the licence fee: the mandatory annual payment by British households that wish to legally watch or record any live TV, which is used to fund the Beeb’s work. After all, our public broadcaster has fostered talent in journalism and media for over a century. Its radio output in particular can still be surprisingly worthwhile. Factual programming, such as Radio 4’s In Our Time, offers important historical items the rigorous and deserved attention that long ago disappeared as a mainstay of television. The World Service in particular was once regarded as a stalwart of transparent information amidst attacks on freedom of the press by the dictators, theocrats and warlords ruling over most of the world’s population.
Sadly, the BBC has now become something of a tinpot regime itself, and no gun-yielding insurgents ever forced it to do so. Any serious party platform must include scrapping the hypothecated tax that helps to fund it. Women, many of whom are struggling single mothers, are disproportionately affected by licence fee laws. Courts can issue fines of up to £1,000 for non-payment of the licence and the overwhelming bulk (76 per cent in 2020) of those prosecuted for TV licence evasion are women. The BBC wastes our money on its own cover-ups, it is comfortable with callously criminalise those its progressive dogmas claim to empathise with.