For those of you not very familiar with the BBC, every Briton who owns and uses a television is required to pay a licensing fee, much of which goes to funding the operations of the Beeb. The BBC and the British Council are enormously influential the world over, and the Beeb is also notoriously anti-Semitic, though they’d make the mitigating distinction of being anti-Zionist. In this wonderful post, Peter Glover excoriates the Beeb (with a wealth of links) over their resistance to making the results of an internal audit regarding anti-Semitism available for public viewing. The Balen Report was, of course, paid for with public funds, and the BBC has now opted to engage in expensive litigation, with public funds, to keep the results out of view of the public. Because, obviously, the function of a state-funded news organization is to bury the news when it’s critical of said organization.
I’d also like to remind you of Ahem’s post regarding ”libel tourism,” which unfortunately we’ve let languish.
There’s an impressive omnigatherum of articles at Rachel Ehrenfeld’s American Center for Democracy site. The most recent is Brendan O’Neill’s article here, which gives readers another reason to loathe Britney Spears, if another is required. It’s too bad Constitutional Law expert Glenn Greenwald’s been too busy with important things to devote any time to it.
I actually started a stub article on Libel Tourism at Wikipedia. If any knowledgeable types are interested, they can go there and help flesh it out.
– So does this mean the Limeys don’t want our kike tourist bucks anymore? Because you know, I don’t have to go all the fucking way to Piccadilly to see slums. there’s lots of them all over the world.
It means that because of the role of state broadcasting in their society, their broadcast news is more monopole than ours.
I personally enjoy lots of Beeb programs and Masterpiece Theatry movies, and all, but I’m beginning to think that I’m going to have to give up buying them, even if it’s only an indirect way of swiping at the news divisions.
Dan – I guess that would be a real vote for supporting PBS and NRO then.
I might be a couple of beers beyond understanding that, BBh. Help me out, here.
– Understand ole bud. the first was a snark-o-rama, the second a bit of similitude, alluding to our own brand of sneak-progg-media a go go…Just to make it crystal clear, all those sock puppets look alike. Skoll….
Gotcha. Thanks.
Still, I think NRO could put out some good programs.
NRO?
Do you mean NPR?