When the BBC deleted its archive
May. 14th, 2016 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pallas_athenaAs someone who gets the majority of their news online, I am incensed over the proposed cuts to the BBC's website. That site is the beau ideal of websites: no ads, no messy Flash crap and the links stay good forever. (Or at least until now.)
Apparently the vast archive of written articles, recipes and general information are "competing unfairly" with commercial news sources. That is, they have too much good content, so they have to make it less and worse.
The thing is, that site is a perfect example of the BBC fulfilling its mandate-- which is to make information freely available to as much of the public as possible. That archive of news articles, historical précis pieces, recipes and general life information is OURS. We PAID FOR IT and are soon to pay more (since the licence fee will now rise in line with inflation). The government has no right at all to take it from us.
Compare and contrast the US-based National Public Radio's website (for which I occasionally write): That site is full of excellent content, much of which, again, stays archived forever. You can listen to years' worth of in-house mini-concerts by all sorts of musicians who dropped into NPR for a session. ( http://www.npr.org/series/tiny-desk-concerts/ ) They have much of the radio content archived, but they also have a huge amount of audio, video and written articles that aren't on the radio, including a huge "arts and life" section. And NPR is *one radio station*, not a multi-channel media juggernaut like the BBC.
It's not hard to see the fingerprints of the Murdoch empire all over the recent white paper-- the (paywalled) Times recently ran a story with the headline "BBC's entertainment and soft news costs rivals £115m". But there's also a broader Tory philosophy at work here: that things that are free and public always need to be *not quite as good* as things you pay for. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons they're so determined to kneecap the NHS is to drive people to spend money on private health care and private insurance. Similarly, Cameron and his cronies have realised that the only way to force online readers to pony up for paywalled content, or endure sites that vomit Flash and autoplaying video ads all over the page, is to make the advert-free content at the BBC less good.
Of course, the BBC isn't free; it's paid for by us. But the Tories have handwaved that away and made the decision without any consutation with license-fee payers. If you want to imagine the future, imagine a page-covering ad flashing up on top of the article you're trying to read, forever.
(Posted to Facebook 14 May 2016. In retrospect, this was the beginning of the end for the BBC.)
Apparently the vast archive of written articles, recipes and general information are "competing unfairly" with commercial news sources. That is, they have too much good content, so they have to make it less and worse.
The thing is, that site is a perfect example of the BBC fulfilling its mandate-- which is to make information freely available to as much of the public as possible. That archive of news articles, historical précis pieces, recipes and general life information is OURS. We PAID FOR IT and are soon to pay more (since the licence fee will now rise in line with inflation). The government has no right at all to take it from us.
Compare and contrast the US-based National Public Radio's website (for which I occasionally write): That site is full of excellent content, much of which, again, stays archived forever. You can listen to years' worth of in-house mini-concerts by all sorts of musicians who dropped into NPR for a session. ( http://www.npr.org/series/tiny-desk-concerts/ ) They have much of the radio content archived, but they also have a huge amount of audio, video and written articles that aren't on the radio, including a huge "arts and life" section. And NPR is *one radio station*, not a multi-channel media juggernaut like the BBC.
It's not hard to see the fingerprints of the Murdoch empire all over the recent white paper-- the (paywalled) Times recently ran a story with the headline "BBC's entertainment and soft news costs rivals £115m". But there's also a broader Tory philosophy at work here: that things that are free and public always need to be *not quite as good* as things you pay for. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons they're so determined to kneecap the NHS is to drive people to spend money on private health care and private insurance. Similarly, Cameron and his cronies have realised that the only way to force online readers to pony up for paywalled content, or endure sites that vomit Flash and autoplaying video ads all over the page, is to make the advert-free content at the BBC less good.
Of course, the BBC isn't free; it's paid for by us. But the Tories have handwaved that away and made the decision without any consutation with license-fee payers. If you want to imagine the future, imagine a page-covering ad flashing up on top of the article you're trying to read, forever.
(Posted to Facebook 14 May 2016. In retrospect, this was the beginning of the end for the BBC.)