Continued from above...
Eventually the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, led by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, went so far as to attempt to get rid of PBS entirely. Although the Gingrich effort failed to destroy public broadcasting, it was left weakened and more vulnerable than ever -- dependent on an increasingly polarized Congress for funding, and prone to staving off extinction and striving for more 'balance' by funding explicitly conservative programmes, producers and hosts.
Here in Britain, of course, the BBC has one great advantage over PBS in America -- the freedom from such political pressure that is afforded by the annual license fee that TV owners pay to fund BBC programming. This ensures that the Beeb is far less vulnerable to political pressures than PBS, which must get its appropriations approved every year from Congress.
The BBC is supported instead by an annual tax of £116 (US$195) paid by every British household that owns one or more televisions. The tax raises as much as $4.2 billion for the BBC every year and nobody in government can reapportion it or redistribute it. Thus the BBC, unlike every other public-broadcasting system in the world, is not only well funded but also well protected from politicians.
IN RUPERT'S GUNSITES
Every ten years, though, there's a charter review in which the budget and performance of the BBC is re-assessed. The next one is in 2006 and as the BBC is one of the most influential institutions in British life, the upcoming review will be one of the nation's most profound political battles. As media maven Michael Wolff puts it, it's all "about getting a piece of the pie. Or at least it's a fight about Murdoch's piece of the pie."
Not surprisingly, then, Rupert Murdoch and his political cronies have begun to lay the groundwork for an all-out assault on the BBC and the annual fee. While they will probably not be able to eliminate it, their endless attacks, slanted polls, and political pressuring may well result in a lessening of the amount the BBC gets annually, thus weakening the BEEB as a 'public' competitor to all private interests, but especially to the multi-channel Murdochian news and entertainment network BSkyB.
All this must be viewed through the prism of what otherwise appears the oddest of couplings: Rupert and Tony Blair. Blair first became Prime Minister owing in large measure to the endorsements of the traditionally right wing Murdoch press. It now seems apparent that Blair made a devilish pact years ago to garner Murdoch's support, despite their obvious political differences, and Murdoch is now collecting his payback on the instalment plan.
Couple this scenario with the BBC's controversial Iraq War reporting, the drama over reporter Andrew Gilligan's accusation that the Blair government "sexed up" the WMD dossier, (which led, in turn, to the suicide of weapons expert and BBC source David Kelly,) and the Blair government's resultant assault on the BBC -- and the interests of Blair, Murdoch and the American right-wing can be seen to merge.
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