Also know as “The British Broadcasting Corporation” model, a television, radio and web-based news and public service channel, with non-profit and political neutrality as it’s cornerstones.
A virtually alien concept to the Americans across the pond, completely normal to us Europeans, who often have more than one operating inside our countries, because we are dirty filthy socialist hippie scum.
Or perhaps it’s because most of the organizations in question, are useful, and mostly not full of retarded scaremongering Fox News bullshit, designed to appeal to the absolute lowest denomination of a country’s demography.
I’ll present you an example, by using one of the lesser know nation states, the Danish Broadcasting Company (DR: Denmark’s Radio), which is a sort of smaller version of the BBC, just on Danish, it’s funded entirely by a multimedia license, a defacto tax, on any multimedia device that can use TV signals or the Internet.
Why the Internet? Because you can watch the DR channels on the Internet and hear all of their radio stations, both the FM and the DAB stations, so it was a common way of dodging the license.
Which still required you not having a TV or a Radio at all. There’s a separate Radio license, which operates differently, but only if you just have a radio, and it’s a general license, not a per unit license.
And what do we get in return? Two Free channels, around 20 radio stations, four on FM, around 15 or so on DAB and I think there’s even more who are entirely web-based.
And a large and extensive easy to read website, not covered in ugly as fuck advertisement or using a layout designed by a man who hates all of mankind.
The downside? The stations are usually politically neutral, in as much as they give all sides in the never-ending Danish political games, an opportunity to talk freely about their raging nationalist bullshit or their concrete crypto-fascist communism.
If course, the most extreme on the two sides of the common political spectrum, the Danish People’s Party and the Red-Green Alliance will often cry up about “how DR shows right/left-wing bias”.
And on those cases, the Danish People’s Party is usually the loudest,because that’s what right-wing populists do, the scream and scream and scream about how society is falling appart, and how Denmark needs to streengthen their resolve.
The usual neo-Nazi bullshit covered in political correctness and then sprinkled with more money for the old farts and harsher penalties for the young/foreigners/Socialists. The usual for parties like that, it’s the BNP, just competent, dangerously competent.
Even the BBC get’s the shaft of “Bias” all the time:
BBC News forms a major department of the BBC, and regularly receives complaints of bias. Some groups accuse them of being overly left-wing, while others say they are too right-wing. The Centre for Policy Studies says that, “Since at least the mid-1980s, the BBC has often been criticised for a perceived bias against those on the centre-right of politics.”[56] Similar allegations have been made by past and present employees such as Antony Jay,[57] former political editor Andrew Marr, North American editor Justin Webb,[58] former editor of the Today Programme Rod Liddle[59] and former correspondent Robin Aitken.[60] BBC executives would later submit to claims of systematic bias and “that the BBC is guilty of promoting Left-wing views”.[61]
Accusations of a left-wing bias were often made against the BBC by members of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s. Norman Tebbit called the BBC the “Stateless Person’s Broadcasting Corporation†because of what he regarded as its unpatriotic and neutral coverage of the Falklands War and Peter Bruinvels called it the “Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporationâ€. Thatcher did not agree with the Television licence, she wanted to deregulate British broadcasting and she regarded the BBC as overmanned and uncompetitive, as well as biased against her. Throughout the 1980s her government appointed more and more Conservatives to the Board of Governors of the BBC, but controversies continued with the likes of the Nationwide general election special with Thatcher in 1983, a Panorama documentary called Maggie’s Militant Tendency, the Real Lives interview with Martin McGuinness, the BBC’s coverage of the United States’ Bombing of Libya and the Zircon affair. In 1987 the Director-General of the BBC, Alasdair Milne, was forced to resign. Thatcher later said: “I have fought three elections against the BBC and don’t want to fight another against it.†[62] In 2006 Tebbit said: “The BBC was always against Lady Thatcher.†[63]
By contrast, left-wing figures such as the journalist John Pilger have frequently accused the BBC of a right-wing bias, a view supported by the left-wing website Media Lens. Websites such as Media Lens claim that the BBC acts to narrow the range of thought and like most commercial broadcasters it inherently portrays the opinions of the powerful [64]. This echoes the famous statement of the first Director General of the BBC (Lord Reith), who confided to his diary in the midst of the 1926 general strike. The cabinet had decided not to take over the BBC. Reith noted that the decision was really a “negative one” because “they know they can trust us not to be really impartial”. Since that time UK news has very rarely departed from the assumptions implicit in that judgment[65]. The Respect MP George Galloway has referred to it as the “Bush and Blair Corporation”.[66]
Still, it’s better than the alternative, which is Fox News:
So, why doesn’t the US have such a concept? Mostly because you yanks haven’t got a clue what “politically neutral organizations” are, and that your corrupt little senators and representatives are in the pocket of, well, everyone who have money.
And it’s all thanks to:
I use Ronald Reagan as a symbol here, of the deep mistrusts the common American have in any government venture, also because that is a really fucking awesome little gif.