BBC ‘government-funded’ Twitter tag triggers journalists
RT | April 10, 2023
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has ignited a feud with the BBC by labeling the British broadcaster a “government funded media” organization. The BBC denies taking state money and its defenders claim that being funded by the British government differs from being funded by the British public.
Twitter applied the label to the BBC’s main account earlier this week, after slapping US broadcaster NPR with a similar tag describing it as “US state-affiliated media.” While Twitter previously reserved such labels for foreign media outlets – like RT and China’s CGTN, Musk said that applying it to NPR “seems accurate.”
NPR’s tag was changed to read “government-funded media” after an outcry from US liberals.
The BBC bristled at receiving the tag. “We are speaking to Twitter to resolve this issue as soon as possible,” the broadcaster said in a statement on Sunday. “The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee.”
On Twitter, the BBC’s defenders pointed to the license fee as proof of the network’s independence. The BBC, Deadline reporter Jake Kanter argued, “is funded by the British public through a system known as the licence fee. The BBC’s operations and editorial decision-making are entirely independent of the government.”
However, commenters pointed out that the license fee “is a government tax in all but name.”
Set by the government, the fee is an annual payment of £159 ($197) owed by any household with a television or device capable of receiving television broadcasts. The BBC hires contractors to visit the homes of suspected evaders, and those who refuse to pay can be prosecuted by the broadcaster. Around 45,000 people per year are prosecuted for failing to pay the license, the Telegraph reported last month.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics classifies the fee as a tax, and the BBC as part of the “central government sector” of the UK economy.
Additionally, the broadcaster does actually receive direct government funding for BBC World Service. The TV license covers 75% of the service’s operational costs while the rest is directly paid for by the UK government to the tune of some £90 million ($111 million) per year. Last month, the service was also awarded a £20 million ($24 million) one-time payment to help “fight against the spread of disinformation around the world.” BBC World Service is predominantly aimed at non-UK audiences and broadcasts in over 40 languages.
The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office is also the biggest funder of the BBC’s Media Action service, which additionally receives funding from the governments of the US, Canada, Norway, Sweden, the EU, the UN, as well as donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The service supplies two dozen developing countries with “information they can trust,” per the BBC’s own website.
While the BBC stated that it is editorially independent, internal communications published by the Guardian last month showed that its editors asked reporters to avoid using the term “lockdown” when talking about the government’s response to the Coviid-19 pandemic, under direct order from the government. Furthermore, journalists were instructed to be more critical of the opposition Labour Party due to complaints from the government.
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RFK’s False-Flag Assassination, and the Forgotten Palestinian Patsy
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • JUNE 5, 2021
On June 6, 1968, Robert Kennedy had just won the California Democratic presidential primary, when he was shot dead, five years after his brother. David Talbot has shown in his book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, published in 2007 by Simon & Schuster, that Robert had never believed in the conclusion of the Warren Commission Report, and that, had he succeeded in becoming the next American president, he would have done his utmost to set up a new investigation. Whether he would have been able to get to the bottom of it is another matter. But it is a reasonable assumption that the forces that had killed John were the same that killed Robert on his way to reclaim the White House. After all, as Laurence Leamer writes in Sons of Camelot: “Bobby had been the president’s alter ego and protector. . . . He had loved his brother so intensely and served him so well that within the administration it was hard to tell where one man ended and the other began.”[1] After 1963, Robert was still his brother’s continuation. He was the heir and the avenger.
That is why I have argued before — and I repeat in my new book — that the ultimate key to the JFK whodunit is in RFK’s assassination, which has a very clear, unmistakable Israeli signature. RFK’s assassination is a masterwork of false flag operation, designed by a supremely intelligent, Machiavellian, and organized cabal, the same that orchestrated one year earlier, with Johnson’s complicity, the attempted false flag attack on the USS Liberty (watch the new groundbreaking four-part documentary film Sacrificing Liberty).
What is truly extraordinary, and demonstrates an unmatched expertise in the industry of lies, is that the conspirators succeeded to get rid of Robert Kennedy while at the same time blaming the assassination on their enemies — the Palestinians — and thereby giving themselves both an alibi and a victim’s role: through RFK, Israel was the target, they claim. … continue
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Aletho News 
In addition to being ‘State funded’ the BBC tows the UK State lines on several major issues: 1. On Covid it ignored the fact that deaths were inflated by the WHO Directive to ascribe all deaths to the disease where symptoms were present even if deaths were from other causes like traffic accidents. 2. On vaccines, it fails to report the deaths and other side-effects from vaccines. 3. It fails to acknowledge that lock-downs were excessively severe and counter-productive. 4. It has not taken issue with government-funded scams over masks and other PPE provisions.
5. On Ukraine it fails to admit that NATO’s creeping front line against Russia caused Putin to call a halt. It also neglects the attacks on Russian patriots in the Donbas by the neo-Nazi Azov battalion since 2010. 6. On China it always dismisses China’s rights to Taiwan and the S. China Sea while supporting UK/US military threats to that area. 7. On ‘9-11’ it ignored the fact that the Saloman Building (7) was brought down by controlled demolition which the BBC claimed was due to a plane crash while it still stood behind the reporter! 8. On Syria it ignores the secret false-flag attacks by the government-funded White Helmets, blaming the Syria ‘Dictatorship’. 9. On Libya it ignores the chaos and bloodshed caused by the US/UK attacks on Qaddafy’s attempts to quell civil war. 10. On Iran it denigrates the Iranian government as ‘sponsoring terrorism’ and committing Human Rights abuses while ignoring its aid to the blockaded, persecuted and bombed Palestinians. 11. On Palestine it regularly portrays the Israelis as victims and the indigenous people as ‘terrorists’ when the reverse is the truth. These are a few examples of warped reporting which misinforms susceptible public. This no doubt drove Elon Musk to label the BBC as it were State controlled. The BBC pulls no punches in labelling Russian, Chinese or Iranian media as ‘State controlled’ even though they host counter-opinions, while it regularly refers to critics of vaccines, government fraud, NATO, the ‘9-11’ truth movement and so on as ‘conspiracy theorists’, in order to disinform public scrutiny.
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BBC Media Action means that it is not a news reporting agency.
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