O Intermitente
(So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, good-bye)

quarta-feira, julho 16, 2003

Televisão Pública

Jonathan Miller do Daily Telegraph enfrenta um julgamento por se recusar a taxa que financia a BBC. Eis o essencial da sua argumentação:

"It is at first unsettling being a criminal defendant, since I am normally one to offer tea to the police. It would have been much easier to pay and spare myself all the threatening mail from the BBC's TV licensing contractor.

But the licence fee makes no sense. If everyone loves the BBC so much, why is the public forced to pay for it? It's an extortion racket."


"The other point is that the reason the BBC licence was ever legitimate in the first place has expired in the white heat of technology.

I am 51, and have watched television expand from one channel to channels too numerous to count. The broadcast medium that used to be limited by radio spectrum scarcity has transformed itself into a digital cornucopia.

The stated rationale for the TV licence, according to the prosecution's skeleton argument against me prepared by Emerson, a leading silk in Cherie Blair's Matrix Chambers, is to ensure pluralism.

But there is no finding of market failure to justify this massive imposition. I can choose from hundreds of channels, with more providers than ever.

There is no possible justification for a constantly expanding BBC, paid for by a blanket impost on television sets and even broadband computers. It is like being told to give more and more money to the Guardian to be allowed to read the Sun"


"The BBC does some things that are good - it would be surprising if, with £3 billion of other people's money to spend, it did not produce some quality programmes nor employ some clever people.

But how much BBC do we need? Why does this organisation need to be so vast, rampaging through markets, competing unfairly with those risking their own money?

I am not against public broadcasting. When I lived in Washington DC, I was happy to be a paying subscriber to WETA, the public station there, and had the right to vote for the station's board of directors. Were the BBC to approach me not with a threat but a considered commercial proposition, I would probably subscribe (with millions of others)."



posted by Miguel Noronha 8:12 da tarde