Just make sure Nadine Dorries goes nowhere near it. How stupid can she be to claim it is funded by the public when part of her job is to know these things?
11 years of conservative government.
40 years of Thatcherite free market logic.
The notion that campaigners ‘demanding’ anything will get them anywhere. It’s laughable.
They’ve clearly not understood that to make demands and have them met you need to first tip your PM heavily… for £XX in wallpaper your demands will be rapidly acquiesced to.
[deleted]
Obviously this is a left-wing article, so limits its own scope. But as a genuine question… what societal benefit does a publicly owned TV channel have? This isn’t the national broadcaster, so the main example already doesn’t apply. Principle alone is not valuable, not at least without some tangible sociological benefit. The Met police is public, yet left-wingers don’t often believe in its value. So public ownership isn’t valuable in and of itself, it’s the nature of the service. Public/private ownership both include vested interests. There’s one paragraph I find interesting:
‘Channel 4 was launched in 1982 as an editorially independent broadcaster. It is aimed at providing a “culturally challenging alternative” to BBC One, BBC Two and ITV. Hence the broadcaster is vital to independent television producers up and down the country.’
What I didn’t find in the rest of the article, is how the nature of TV and media has changed in 40 years, and the impact thereof, and whether or not it still plays it’s role as the ‘culturally challenging alternative’, when there are literally hundreds of such alternatives out there. That particular paragraph is a hideously weak argument, at least in that form. I’m open to the argument of keeping it publicly owned but the article itself has done an awful job of trying. Can anyone else help?
Why is channel 4 separate from the BBC? Surely it would make sense for the two public owned businesses to merge?
What a shame, like watching channel 4 for the repeats of cheers and everybody loves Raymond.
6 comments
Just make sure Nadine Dorries goes nowhere near it. How stupid can she be to claim it is funded by the public when part of her job is to know these things?
11 years of conservative government.
40 years of Thatcherite free market logic.
The notion that campaigners ‘demanding’ anything will get them anywhere. It’s laughable.
They’ve clearly not understood that to make demands and have them met you need to first tip your PM heavily… for £XX in wallpaper your demands will be rapidly acquiesced to.
[deleted]
Obviously this is a left-wing article, so limits its own scope. But as a genuine question… what societal benefit does a publicly owned TV channel have? This isn’t the national broadcaster, so the main example already doesn’t apply. Principle alone is not valuable, not at least without some tangible sociological benefit. The Met police is public, yet left-wingers don’t often believe in its value. So public ownership isn’t valuable in and of itself, it’s the nature of the service. Public/private ownership both include vested interests. There’s one paragraph I find interesting:
‘Channel 4 was launched in 1982 as an editorially independent broadcaster. It is aimed at providing a “culturally challenging alternative” to BBC One, BBC Two and ITV. Hence the broadcaster is vital to independent television producers up and down the country.’
What I didn’t find in the rest of the article, is how the nature of TV and media has changed in 40 years, and the impact thereof, and whether or not it still plays it’s role as the ‘culturally challenging alternative’, when there are literally hundreds of such alternatives out there. That particular paragraph is a hideously weak argument, at least in that form. I’m open to the argument of keeping it publicly owned but the article itself has done an awful job of trying. Can anyone else help?
Why is channel 4 separate from the BBC? Surely it would make sense for the two public owned businesses to merge?
What a shame, like watching channel 4 for the repeats of cheers and everybody loves Raymond.