BBC licence fee to be abolished in 2027 and funding frozen

> In places like Spain

Spain? Spain pales in comparison with Poland. Where they collect the license fee, too.

That's obviously pissing off the government right now, but honestly it's the least of the problems with their Covid-19 news coverage. They kept on pushing both false and misleading claims about the UK doing worse at stuff than other countries, in at least one case that I know of for a month in an article linked from the BBC news front page after they became aware it was false. (The government made a big deal about reaching 100,000 Covid tests in a day and the BBC wrongly claimed Germany had done this a month earlier. In reality they'd mistaken Germany's stat for their lab capacity to process Covid tests - which was basically irrelevant because everything else, from the ability to swap people to the availiabily of consumables to even just returning test results, was more of a bottleneck there - for actual Covid testing done, and Germany wouldn't hit this until like a month later. Then when people complained they took it down for a day, supposedly discussed the complaints with senior staff, and then decided to reinstate it and kept it for a month whilst using Covid as an excuse to not respond to complaints. They then quietly memory-holed it from the article and used that as an excuse for not publishing a correction. A previous version of the article also did a similar thing by wrongly comparing the UK's daily stat to France's weekly one - that did get a correction, which was quietly memory-holed too after a few days. Obviously this played right into all the usual narratives about our lying Brexit-supporting leaders.)

There's also obviously a lot of decisions during the pandemic where all options had downsides, and the BBC News coverage was very biased towards the downsides of whatever the government did - this became particularly clear when the government changed their mind and suddenly they flipped to going after the thing they were cheerleading before. One that HN is likely familiar with is the NHS contact tracing app using Bluetooth on mobile phones. Initially that didn't use Google and Apple's framework and the BBC coverage pushed the downsides of that heavily, making it sound like there was no good reason to do it and the claim that Google and Apple's framework made results less accurate was just something the government was pushing. Literally the day the new app using that framework launched, they started downplaying the downsides of the old app and found a experts to claim the new app was less accurate and excluded a bunch of people on earlier Android versions - again, these were inherent downsides of choosing that option. Everything was like this, from lockdowns to vaccinations. Even when the government picked some kind of middle ground option, the Beeb ran articles with some groups attacking the government for not doing less, then with others attacking them for not doing more, and both were always set against the government rather than against each others' demands. Often they'd even rewrite an article on their website and flip it from pushing heavily for one to pushing hard for the other after it'd been published, which is just weird.

There was also the incident where one of their high-up reporters retweeted a particularly partisan tweet pushing the idea Boris was literally a criminal murderer who should go to jail over the UK's handling of Covid, which rather hinted at why their coverage was like this.

I’m not sure how much cut through this has had outside of the UK, but the government are currently in serious trouble because of constant leaks about parties in Number 10 Downing Street during the pandemic - including a particularly poorly timed one the day before the Queen was photographed at her husband’s funeral alone.

The leaks are ongoing, so we know that this particular plan is part of “Operation Red Meat”, which might be familiar if you’ve heard “red meat for the base”. That’s what this is. It’s going to cause serious problems for the BBC while this government remains in power, but this isn’t a serious proposal for the future of that organisation. It’s an effort to get furious Conservative supporters back on side and secure Boris Johnson’s position.

Other aspects of Operation Red Meat are reported to be military involvement at the Channel Crossing, and a ban on alcohol in Number 10. There’s another set of plans called Operation Save Big Dog too, which mostly seem to involve firing a bunch of other senior figures.

Some more info: https://www.politics.co.uk/news-in-brief/pm-working-on-serie...

> unless the government is a de facto dictatorship

This is a highly naïve view that can only be said somebody who has always lived in a country with free press. Look at Poland, not a dictatorship but increasingly hostile to government critical journalists.

> I'm against all forms of taxation

How do you propose to fund schools, streets, police, military, and fire services? Paying for them individually will not work unless you mean insurances which then are basically a tax.

They are pro-government, pro-union - but the point is BBC news should be non-partisan