No indeed. The two together amount to argument A: ”if you had to pay for this the market would ensure that you got a better product”.

You say the argument that the BBC is worse is not persuasive.

No. I said that argument A – and the associated belief that opening broadcasting up to free-market competition would produce superior broadcasting – is not persuasive. Why not? Because it’s been tried and it hasn’t worked. Competition for advertising, and hence for audiences, has produced a race to the bottom. Most of what used to be BBC 2 is now on BBC 4, and most of what used to be Channel Four isn’t there any more.

We many not have dedicated opera channels, but the private sector already offers channels dedicated to high culture. If they were not being crowded out by the tax-funded BBC, it’s entirely plausible that dedicated opera and ballet channels would be set up.

Good grief. How ill does the patient need to get before you change the medicine?

And then you raise up a truly awesome straw man by portraying the argument as:”you should have to pay for this, even if you got a worse product as a result, because, well, you just should”

I honestly don’t know how else to paraphrase argument B: the argument that the BBC should stop doing things it does well so as to allow competition. What is that argument, other than you should be paying for this because, well, you just should?

What a warped and totally inaccurate picture of the world one would absorb were one to rely on the BBC as a news source.I find myself spending good money years after the event on books about Vietnam, Ruanda,Bosnia,Chechnya trying to find out what actually happened in those places.Why did so many people get killed?
And do you know the accounts I find bear absolutely no resemblance to what the BBC was reporting at the time.We are left utterly

short-changed from our licence fee by the poor quality of BBC reporting.Auntie has ditched its Charter commitment to inform and educate in favour of a vocation to be the cipher for a peculiar elite view on the world.
Anyone who thinks that the likes of Paul Dacre have the right to lead a debate on the media need certifying!It’s not a debate at all its taking the piss! FREEBORN

I must say, I don’t think my argument is half as peculiar as yours but I suppose that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. ;-) You don’t say why my argument is peculiar; just that it is.

I’m not sure that it is possible to sustain an argument that the fact of nothing having been done about a problem somehow means it’s not a problem.

Governments are, at best, elected on a basket of policy positions. At worst, they’re elected because they’re different to the current incumbents. The licence fee is such a small issue compared to, say, health and education, you can’t seriously say that it’s existence represents the will of the people.

I agree with you though that the democratic will is irrelevant to whether the licence fee should exist or not. As I’ve pointed out, that’s a question of morality, and by arguing this, I hope I’m doing my bit to persuade people that it should change.

Peculiar argument this. The BBC is paid for because democratically-elected governments allow it to exist. There is an element of circularity to this argument, I admit, and it is oversimplified, but … we live in a democracy, the establishment and maintenance of the BBC is an expression of the people of Britain’s will. If it were not then it would not exist.

This does not preclude debates about whether it should exist but those people that get angry about its very existence should bear in mind that, implicitly, this is something that we the people have wanted to exist for eight decades now.

Therefore the onus is on those people that don’t want the BBC to exist to persuade everyone else why the status quo should change.

I think the Beeb produces a lot of TV so far in advance of anything that ITV or Sky have, and that the quality of British TV would suffer if the entire corporation was subsidized. (And yes, I’m aware this is an entirely subjective view.) But I think there is an argument for privatizing the news arm.

Agreed.

But I think people leap far too quickly and eagerly these days to ignore what someone is saying just because they don’t agree with something else they are saying. In this instance I believe the licence fee is pretty indefensible, partly for the arguments listed (better than I could) by others, but also because of what Dacre is saying. I was shocked to find out that the BBC has more journalists than all the other news outlets put together (although I must admit I am taking this claim at face value and not substantiating it). Is there any need for this? Of course not – many others (notably IMHO C4 provide excellent news coverage on a fraction of the budget (apparently).

So simply using the news as an example – we see that the BBC are using far more money than necessary to provide a service that, again IMHO, is not superior to many other organisations. And they then have the timerity to bleat about the rise in the fee! Which is quite frankly exhorbitant enough as it is.

I also want to make myself clear here. I would pay for the BBC if it were pay per view, but possibly not at the current licence fee price (which I think I’ve illustrated I feel excessive). In the same way I would pay for Sky, if I wanted to. But I don’t, so I don’t. I think we all should have this choice over the licence fee. Otherwise a tax by any other name…

I’ve often wondered whether right wing hacks really believe the stuff they clutter the papers up with.

In what sense is the BBC’s product worse than the competition’s? Compare the performance of the BBC vs ITV in recent years: ITV are doing badly because their programming is crap. There is perhaps some argument that Radio 1 is little better than the competition, but the same cannot be said of the other radio stations. Sport coverage on the BBC is awful, of course, but that’s caused be deregulation!

Firstly the arguments against the licence fee are that the BBC is able to get away with offering a product which is worse than its private sector counterparts because it is able to give away its product. This is because it is tax-funded. It is able to crowd out the competition. The two arguments (worse product, forcing out competition)are in no way mutually exclusive.

You say the argument that the BBC is worse is not persuasive. This doesn’t amount to an argument. Why not? We many not have dedicated opera channels, but the private sector already offers channels dedicated to high culture. If they were not being crowded out by the tax-funded BBC, it’s entirely plausible that dedicated opera and ballet channels would be set up.

And then you raise up a truly awesome straw man by portraying the argument as:”you should have to pay for this, even if you got a worse product as a result, because, well, you just should”

I challenge you to find anyone who has ever put the argument in anything like those terms.

If you read my earlier comment, you will see me make the argument that you should be paying for this, even if you think it’s worse, because it’s immoral to take money from the poor to pay for a service which is primarily appreciated by the middle classes. Those who are in favour of the licence fee need to explain why the BBC is so important as to justify such a blatant bit of immorality.