A recent announcement took the BBC’s employees by storm as the company announced it was terminating several “linear broadcasting (TV)” programs and was further laying off over 450 employees. The Daily Mail reveals that these layoffs are not your typical sack Dave layoffs, but impacted several high earning presenters as well.
Unsurprisingly unions are now threatening strikes if the BBC doesn’t reverse its decision. But with the troubled times ahead of the company, it is unlikely they will capitulate under the new conservative government. Naturally rather than divulge the actual reason for the terminations BBC employees went into damage control mode arguing it was for the consumer, to save money, or that they were, in fact, doing fine.
‘We need to reshape BBC News for the next decade in a way which saves substantial amounts of money.
‘We are spending too much of our resources on traditional linear broadcasting and not enough on digital.
‘Our duty as a publicly funded broadcaster is to inform, educate and entertain every citizen. But there are many people in this country that we are not serving well enough.” – Fran Unsworth, director of news and current affairs (£340,000)
It is the 21st century, if people want to tune into your content they have an innumerable amount of ways to do so. This by no means is about cost savings or viewership, which as been on the decline for decades with reports from outlets like The Telegraph indicating less than half of younger generations even tune into the fake news peddling dinosaur.
When brought to task over failing numbers, Ms. Derbyshire who made £215,000 a year before bonuses, claimed that her show has successfully boosted online views as they were instructed to do. The problem with this claim is the BBC was exposed for rigging the statistics by counting a few seconds as a viewer rather than any longer metric that other reputable digital platforms use.
Other commentators hit closer to home in regards to what is triggering these decisions at this time.
‘These damaging cuts are part of an existential threat to the BBC and a direct consequence of the last disastrous, secret licence fee deal the BBC agreed with the Government. This is before the impact of taking over responsibility for the over-75s licences kicks in.” -Michelle Stanistreet
One has to ask why a publicly funded television network is conducting secret backroom negotiations with publicly elected officials over how much the citizenry will have to pay? It would seem we need not wait for flying cars, lunar cannons or cyborgs to reach the dystopian levels of corporatism. Demonstrating once again writers who forewarned us about these nightmares were too generous in what they believed would be the perks of living in such a society.
Make no mistake, reading through all the pleas to emotion, arguments that people will lose a service they don’t use and one that has increasingly done nothing, but spew anti-UK propaganda at them is the fact this is all about money and politics. At 11:00 pm January 2020, the UK will no longer be a member state of the European Union as a result of the sweeping election results that seated Boris Johnson as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdoms. Leaving the United Kingdom’s government with sole arbitration and governance over their territory.
Any aid and protests coming from outside the United Kingdoms will be seen as interference in internal politics by the Johnson administration. Further, the BBC will be unable to take anyone to court under EU law and will soon be governed completely by United Kingdom Laws.
Of which rest at the heart of the issue, the Johnson administration has revealed its plans to decriminalize not paying the mandatory BBC licensing fee. Meaning their socialist funding is about to come to an end as everyone with no use for the service will begin not paying for the BBC. These cuts are their way of cutting the most unproductive sectors of their company ahead of this reality.
If the Johnson administration goes through with the legislation decriminalizing not paying for the BBC the giant will still be seen by everyone, on One Angry Gamer’s Get Woke Got Broke Master List.
