James Murdoch Hates The BBC.

It looks like the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, because this
Murdoch is as Howling Mad as his dad!

...what?

James Murdoch says the scope of the BBC's ambition is "chilling". So?
It's a corporation created by Royal Charter at a time when Great Britain owned two thirds of the gorram planet.

James says it's impossible to compete with the BBC because it gives things away free.

James is wrong.

The license fee pays for the BBC and everyone with a TV pays the licence fee. So it ain't free. If you want to build up a case against the BBC having the licence fee, be a better public service
broadcaster than they are. Make your content better and drain away their audience. Spend some money on the things that your network shows. You know, compete.

James says that the BBC is a state broadcaster. Except that the State doesn't really like the BBC. James works in the News Corporation, which also owns Fox, so his relationship with current events is going to be shaky at best. James may have missed the Government of the UK punishing the anti-government BBC by threatening its funding. James may have missed that
a DG got sacked for telling the truth about the UK's entry into Gulf War 2. James may regularly miss that, while the BBC is the Crown's deal, it's the Exchequer that collects the License Fee.

He's also missed that the BBC is generally known for a mild bias against the sitting Government of the day and always has been. The BBC has perennially been a thorn in the side of whoever's residing at 10 Downing Street and has developed a generation or two of political interviewers and
commentators who simply aren't all that impressed by the title "Minister".

This is hardly the behavior of a "state" broadcaster, but it's an unsurprising comment from the people that brought you Fox News, which famously won a court case in which it claimed it didn't need actual facts to broadcast news. Instead of making Fox News broadcast under the banner of "current events entertainment" or "current events opinion", it's still allowed to be a news channel. Baffling.

James Murdoch is wrong about practically everything, which is just one of the reasons that the News Corporation's profits are down and there's going to be an awful lot of scrambling to make people pay for things that were previously free. Long term, that's going to make his position worse, not better, and it's probably time that the UK took a long, hard look at the BBC and decided once and for all whether they want it.

My opinion is that it would be foolish in the extreme to allow it to disappear, and that the Government in particular needs to be aware that punishing the BBC makes them look like totalitarians and twats.