Outside the Beltway

THE BEEB

James Joyner · Saturday, August 16, 2003 · 2 comments

Josh Chafetz of OxBlog has a piece in the current Weekly Standard on what he terms “The Disgrace of the BBC.” He catalogs in a single location the biased coverage that Christopher Hitchens and others have been pointing out for months. What’s particularly interesting is

EVERY YEAR, every household in Britain with a color television set has to pay a licensing fee of approximately $187. The resulting $4.3 billion constitutes 90 percent of the annual $4.8 billion domestic broadcasting budget of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Inspectors from the TV Licensing Agency patrol neighborhoods using wireless detectors to attempt to pick up the “local oscillator” signal from a television in use. Anyone caught using a TV without a license is subject to a fine of up to $1,600. It doesn’t matter if you watch TV once a month; it doesn’t matter if you heartily disapprove of the BBC’s editorial direction (or, indeed, its existence); it doesn’t matter if you think the Beeb hasn’t produced anything worth watching since “Fawlty Towers” went off the air in 1979: You still have to pay.

Very odd indeed.