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To: Raymond Duray who wrote (350)	11/10/2003 1:06:34 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 718

Continued... Part of the Blair animosity toward the BBC is that he is in partnership with Murdoch, and this is in part Murdoch's war with the BBC. Thus Blair and his then-mouthpiece Alastair Campbell went to war against the BBC with two aims: one, to distract attention from whether the nation and the world was deceived on the road to war against Saddam; the other to soften up the BBC for Rupert down the line, and reduce British broadcasting to what one Labour Party renegade, Claire Short, has termed "the sort of commercially dominated, biased news reporting that controls the US airwaves." EVERYTHING 'UP FOR GRABS' Announcing the formation of a charter advisory panel, Tessa Jowell, Labour's culture secretary, recently announced that everything was up for grabs, including how the BBC "should be funded and regulated and whether it delivers good value for money." And Gerald Kaufman, the Labour member of Parliament who, as chairman of the Commons committee on culture and the media, has emerged as one of the BBC's most vocal opponents, was even more blunt. "The BBC is no longer relied on in the way it was," claimed Kaufman. "It's placed itself in a situation where its word isn't accepted automatically anymore. It's gone from being an institution to just another broadcaster, and a shoddy one at that." Add to all this the next salvo -- Murdoch crony Tony Ball's recent claims that growing public antagonism is the real threat to the BBC's future. Citing his own poll, Ball claimed that more than half of all Brits don't think they are getting their money's worth from the license fee (or 'unfair tax' as Ball terms it,) that money spent by the BBC is 'money coerced,' and so on. Ball posits that "today, television is much more democratic," and that "anyone can launch a TV channel." And he adds that the forthcoming BBC charter review provides an opportunity to start "from first principles." In other words, let's throw out the past and re-examine from scratch, a highly dangerous proposition of course when dealing with "compulsory taxes" like the license fee. In the ideal world then, from Murdoch's vantage point, the BBC would become something much more like public television in the U.S. -- there, but hardly there. Now, with charter review coming up, if he can grab a little more leverage and power at the expense of the BBC, he will certainly do it -- and his lapdog Tony Blair will be yipping along with him every step along the "fair-and-balanced" way to the Foxification of England. -- Dame Anita Roddick is a board member of Mediachannel.org, the global media watchdog