Expainer: Yes, the Beeb is for sale
How do we define commercial free? Let’s not resort to the dictionary here. Quite simply for a media enterprise, it’s to not sell time or space to advertisers. Now, why provide this? Again, we don’t have to get too technical here. It’s not because soap and car commercials are annoying (though they are) but so that the organisation’s content is not bound or somehow compromised by deals with businesses or individuals who may have interests contrary to the public good.
There is ample room for a healthy debate on the merits of this argument, and I don’t really fall directly on one side or the other, but I’ll leave it for the comments section of this post. Publicly funded news has its compromises just like commercially tied organisations. But what happens when a purportedly noncommercial news organisation tries to have it both ways? This brings us our current episode’s subject: The BBC.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
