A glorious little spat is developing between James Murdoch and sundry vassals of the BBC empire, faithfully recorded by The Guardian. This follows a speech by the son and heir to the Murdoch empire on Saturday evening at the Edinburgh festival, when he launched a "scathing attack" on the BBC, describing the corporation's size and ambitions as "chilling" and accusing it of mounting a "land grab" in a beleaguered media market.

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Do people in the UK still dutifully go out and buy a TV license?

Do the serfs realise that the silly detector vans cannot detect a plasma or LCD screen; that they cannot distinguish between an old fashioned TV tube and an old fashioned computer monitor?

We don't have to read it - as long as it's there, it stops powerful, sinister looking people like Murdoch jnr charging for news and comment and making society that little bit less open.

Though of course he could charge now for opinion pieces - which the Beeb doesn't carry - and see if people were willing to pay.

Come to that, most of the stuff on the front pages of The Sun and the NoTW doesn't make it to the BBC's site. So come on, Murdoch, start charging for those now!

And did he suggest that the market he wants to create would bring us any developments in journalism that we don't have already? If so, I missed it in the coverage.

Murdoch's special pleading manages the tricky feat of being more repellant than the BBC by a mile.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

I had a little smile when I read Murdoch Jr's statement about the apprent unavailability of journalism on the internet. These days it's the only place you can get real news thanks to the spineless and moronic MSM. Shame I don't need to visit any Murdoch bumrag site to get the kind of news that really matters so I guess I won't be paying for the priviledge of reading absolute celebrity tripe in the future. I certainly don't spend hard earned money reading the dead tree version.

At least you identified a valid reason for keeping the seriously pisspoor Beeboids around. I didn't know such a concept existed...

Wow! It seems that the British really do value the BBC, that is a surprise to me as it is a Statist, Authoritarian Socialist enterprise, always in favour of higher taxation and more State power. The BBC is rabidly pro EU and UN. They have swallowed whole the alarmist Climate Change agenda. There are no voices on the BBC calling for restraint in Government. Were the BBC as well loved as they claim to be, surely a subscription funding model would prove the point.

Murdoch may be all of the things that his critics claim but you are not forced to fund or consume his output and I see none of the Soviet Authoritarianism that colours the BBC output. The BBC is the 'do as I say, not as I do' voice of the establishment.
'Just a Minute' and a few other well regarded pieces are a cover for a huge Socialist agenda.

Is that right ? I have a vague memory from O-level days that the receiving circuits bounce back a signal at twice the frequency ( or maybe half ?) and that this is what detectors can pick up - it's nothing to do with the type of screen. Any electronically-minded folk out there ?

Do I want the BBC destroyed? Yes.
Would I pay to destroy the BBC? Yes.
Do I want to be charged for reading online news? No.



Online, not so much, although broadband has merged the distinction between "online" and "TV" which means there is far more to this than Beeb versus Murdoch.

If the Beeb disappeared tomorrow Microsoft and Google would be the largest beneficiaries, as would the "niche" online low overhead media.

if people want to pay for their politics, business, international, weather, music, entertainment, sport..., they'll pay for the specialist dedicated to the subject, not the general trash merchant like Murdoch.

Hell, people will go to http://www.number10.gov.uk if they have to and learn to identify other primary sources for news.

News Corp has in fact a cosy relationship with the BBC, benefiting from a large but limited BBC raising the cost of entry to new competitors.

So the complaint is not really about the Beeb's free news content but about how it defines "essential" content - the broader the definition, the more this eats into Murdoch's profit margins.