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TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

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Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#281

Post by _ph_ »

joking wrote: post #257
hef19898 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A ssome else pinted out, by funding public braodcasting directly they can afford to be critical. Were the fundid by a tax, collected by the gevernment, and handed out by the government this independance goes right out of the window. One of the lessons Germany learned from the Nazi regime with government controlled media.

there is no difference if is in the government power to increase or decrease that tax.

In Germany, the government has no direct control about the TV fees. There is a complex mechanism for deciding about increases, which involves independent entities. Especially, the government can't just cut the fees to influence the media.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#282

Post by _ph_ »

lultimouomo wrote: post #158
_ph_ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I firmly believe this, especially in recent times. Those mandatory fees finance the "public" radio and TV stations, which have a set budget and can freely operate within the budget. They are not depending on advertisement revenue (they have a limited amount of that too) and are not working to create a profit. As a consequence, they do have a certain degree of independence and overall can afford into a lot of good qua…

If a state wants to fund public radio and TV stations, it doesn't need to do it through a mandatory, regardless of use flat fee. I would argue that that is the worse possible way to do it: * Increased bureaucracy (why not add a 0.1% to an existing tax?) * Regressive taxation (you pay the same amount regardless of your income; if you used the income tax, you would distribute it more fairly) * No market shaping (you co…

The point of having a fee vs. a tax is, that the government has no direct control of it. So they can't just adjust it at will. The fee is set for several years in advance and increased from time to time to adjust for inflation etc. But it is an independant entitiy deciding about this.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#283

Post by hef19898 »

joking wrote: post #257
hef19898 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A ssome else pinted out, by funding public braodcasting directly they can afford to be critical. Were the fundid by a tax, collected by the gevernment, and handed out by the government this independance goes right out of the window. One of the lessons Germany learned from the Nazi regime with government controlled media.

there is no difference if is in the government power to increase or decrease that tax.

In order to increase the fee for public braodcasters, not a tax (small bt crucial difference), both chambers of parliament have to agree. The bundestag is directly elected, the bundesrat represents the indivdual states. This means, in order to change the fee, every state and the bundestag have to agree. For the states, that means one single state not voting for a fee change prevent any fee change. Just happened, one state government feared backlash from the AfD and the right wing from the CDU (Merkels party) and voted against an increase.

So in order to change the fee, it is not just one govnment that can do something, but a grand total of 17 (federal plus 16 states). Usually they all agreed, but with different ruling coalitions in each state, this mix of left and right having to agree in itself prevents the public bradcasters from becoming a tool for government propaganda. They do represent the establishment, so. Populists hate this.

EDIT: To be really accurate, the legislative branch sets the fees, not the executive on. The legislative consists of two houses, Bundestag and Bundesrat. The Bundesrat is controlled by the state governments, which are composed of local arms of the parties present in the Bundestag (kind of like congress) and regional parties, mostly those state and federal governments are coalitions of multiple parties. It is the party line thing where it gets blurred between executive and legislative bodies.

EDIT: I fell for a common misconception, as an other user pointed out. It s not the Bundestag and Bundesrat deciding these fees, but rather a compact of the 16 states. The same states make up the Bundesrat, the compact is not the same body, so. Which further decreases the influence the federal executive, and even legaslative, branches have o public broadcasting.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#284

Post by vidarh »

smcl wrote: post #114
4ggr0 wrote: post #93

A bit off-topic maybe, sorry. I am not from the UK, but quite a large chunk of things I watch on YouTube are british panel shows. I'm just in love with them. Which seems funny to me, because as a non-uk twenty year old, I don't think that I'm the target demographic for these shows. "8 out of 9 cats does countdown", "Would I lie to you?" and of course my favourite, "Taskmaster". Thanks for all of these great shows. "B…

I think you're more the target demographic than you think. Taskmaster didn't exist when I was still in the UK but the first two were popular enough with my age group at the time (20-30 year old students). You might also like "Have I Got News For You" - it's supposed to have gone a bit downhill recently, but at its peak it was stupendous.

I have a freesat box for the sole purpose of "Dave" which in the evening mostly broadcasts things like Taskmaster and re-runs of HIGNFY, Mock the Week and various other very British shows (best marketing ever for that channel was to do this so consistently that it's now a standing joke on several panel shows that it will be seen forever on Dave).

It's nice to just put on if I want something funny in the background while doing something else without the annoyance of being interrupted by things stopping and having to pick.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#285

Post by WolfRazu »

andybak wrote: post #251
mrsuprawsm wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately BBC news really isn't that good any more. It's been on a long slow decline since about 2005 or so, and now the majority of their news programming (with a few small but notable exceptions) are primarily cheering on the Tory government + ministers of the day.

It sometimes seems like each side of the UK political spectrum is convinced that the BBC is irrevocably biased in favour of their opponents. The Tory right want to hamstring the BBC ("Bunch of Bloody Communists" used to be the witty cry) and jump on it at any opportunity.

I agree with this sentiment considerably. The BBC seems to get equal bashing from both sides of the political spectrum. I think therefore it's likely it's doing quite well in terms of impartiality.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#286

Post by audunw »

philwelch wrote: post #153
sleavey wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Germany, the situation changed a few years ago, every household has to pay now, even if they don't own a television or radio. This was literally the first piece of mail I got when I moved to Germany: a letter demanding I pay for the TV networks I don't watch. I didn't even own a TV by that point, nor would have understood much of what was being said! A German explained to me once that the forced payment by non-w…

At that point, why don’t they just have the government fund the television networks from tax revenue rather than effectively levying a poll tax earmarked for broadcasters?

It's not good for the government to have too much direct control over state media. They executive branch should not be able to change the budget from year to year on their own, since they can "punish" state media if they don't say things the government likes. Using tax revenue would generally give the executive branch power to set or at least propose the budget.

When Norway recently moved to tax funding state media, I think they solved this by making it a completely separate dedicated tax. At least that's what was discussed, not sure about the details of the final implementation. So it can only be changed by a vote in parliament, which is more visible to the public, can take more time, and requires a majority of parties to agree on that specific change.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#287

Post by captainbland »

andybak wrote: post #251
mrsuprawsm wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately BBC news really isn't that good any more. It's been on a long slow decline since about 2005 or so, and now the majority of their news programming (with a few small but notable exceptions) are primarily cheering on the Tory government + ministers of the day.

It sometimes seems like each side of the UK political spectrum is convinced that the BBC is irrevocably biased in favour of their opponents. The Tory right want to hamstring the BBC ("Bunch of Bloody Communists" used to be the witty cry) and jump on it at any opportunity.

It seems impossible to imagine the BBC being truly unbiased when the government occassionally likes to show it has power over the organisation by sabre-rattling over continuing to allow the TV license fee. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/09/boris-johns...

Honestly I think it has a general pro-government-of-the-day-bias - as you say, 'used to be the witty cry', indeed! Under New Labour it was still broadly speaking pro-government (generally, it's never totally uncritical, just tending towards friendliness relative to the opposition of the day), it was just a different government with different values.

But people don't notice when something stops being biased against them if they've already stopped paying attention to it because they were previously put off by their perception of its bias, so many of these older perceptions of its bias still exist. This creates the illusion that there's bias both ways, based on people's claims, and that it therefore must be 'balanced'.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#288

Post by vidarh »

saberdancer wrote: post #267
mhh__ wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is to make it harder to fiddle with the BBC budget

I'm sure that is part of it, but I would love to see the breakdown of the costs. When it was first introduced it made sense to have a fee, not many people had a TV so by collecting the fee, you didn't tax the people without it. But today everyone has it, so this no longer applies. Independence argument has some merit, but I would expect that there can be different methods that would provide the same level of independ…

It's ironically gone from being a pretty progressive tax (only relatively well off people had TV's) to being a very regressive tax ("everyone" has TV's but you pay the same amount no matter how much you earn).

The independence argument has largely been destroyed by the government itself - the last few governments have tightened their control of the management of the BBC considerably to a point where budget control matters much less.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#289

Post by audunw »

gyulai wrote: post #165

Many people here are commenting on the fact that public broadcasters tend to do documentaries and educational programming which wouldn't be able to survive at that level of quality under a free market system, which seems to be a cause that almost everyone can get behind and an argument frequently being used for defending this system. What riles me up personally: the ludicrous sums of money that these broadcasters pay…

> I really don't understand why I should be forced to give money to corrupt organizations like FIFA and the IOC to hold sports events that I don't watch and otherwise don't have a stake in,

State media has to broadcast some content that's actually popular, that most people want to watch, otherwise they'd soon lose political support. I hate it too, but fact is that these events are extremely popular, especially among people watching a lot of live TV. So I think it's a necessary evil unfortunately.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#290

Post by vidarh »

admg wrote: post #205
gehsty wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All kids tv is made on drugs. In the night garden is even more trippy than teletubbies.

The night garden is definitely trippy. For the occasions that I lose the battle and let my son have some tv before bed, cbeebies actually goes a great wind down job with the night garden.

If you think that's trippy, you should try turning on "Baby TV" around ~3am-5am or so. At least that was absolutely crazy when my son was a toddler and waking up at 4am. Soothing, but very, very trippy.
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