The BBC Protection Ministry (sometimes knowns as the ‘Independent’ Television Commission), has banned the US news program “The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board With Stuart Varney” and threatened CNBC with fines. As the Opinion Journal puts it:
“Let us see if we get this straight. The ITC thinks it is protecting viewers by refusing to let them hear the viewpoints of a roundtable of American newspaper editors? These same editors may state their views in a newspaper that bears the name of The Wall Street Journal, but if they utter them on a TV program that bears that newspaper’s name, their views are somehow tainted? That sure sounds like a free-speech issue to us.
Which leads to the question of what the case is really about. The answer–and we wish we could say this with the requisite plummy accent–is the BBC. The ITC’s actions against CNBC Europe and CNN amount to little more than the British government harassing private competitors of the publicly funded British Broadcasting Corp.”
I’ll be a bit less compromising than our friends across the water. What the bureaucracy really doesn’t like is the non-Tranzi slant of the WSJ. They don’t want the BBC to have to compete with ideas.
I hope our Russian ex-pat friend succeeds in taking the Beeb down a peg or two!
How much freedom of speech can one expect in a country where you have to get a license to own a television set?
The BBC Protection Ministry is yet another argument for satellite dish TV. Five hundred channels of American programming direct from the source instead of being filtered through government TV.
What’ll they do, shoot down our broadcast satellites? Uh, maybe we better not let the British government get its hands on this.
Someone may correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the UK is *well* outside the footprint of the eastern most US GSO sat.
Memo to BBC and ITC:
Wusses.
Even if we could get the US channels they would be subject to UK law.
Witness the demise of “Adult” television from the Netherlands when it was decided it fell foul of UK anti-porn laws.
This is why they feel they can chastise CNBC, by their definition it fell foul of the regulations.
Whilst the banning is definitely wrong, I am unsure if the ‘protectionist’argument is sufficient to explain this action.
It stems from a paternalist culture that considers ‘trade’ to be a dirty word and considers capitalist affiliation to be a form of bias that somehow debases the programme’s content.
It is disturbing that this culture has survived Thatcher and appears to retain a hold amongst the cultural regulators.
Here on the edge of the Anglosphere I can watch CNBC uncensored.
Am just getting my wireless LAN juiced up so I can use the laptop on the beach.
But I am in third-world India….
Maybe we should set up a TV version of Voice of America station on one of those abandoned gun platforms in the English Channel. And another one on a North Sea oil rig to cover the northern half of Britain.
Or Samizdata could set sail outside the territorial limit and start up SamizTV. “Radio Clash” could be the official network jingle. Give the CBS eye another eye to compete with…