Reply #5: It's part of a plan Labour has had since '97 to separate the

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entertainment part of the BBC from the news part, I suspect.

The Tories probably want to do this too, but would sell the entertainment parts off at a huge discount to insiders (not unlike Republicans who do this with railroad rights of way, mines, timber, Social Security, feeding troops, etc. etc.).

It's my impression that Labour doesn't think it's right that there's such a concentrated control of culture and information, regardless of whether it's privately or publicly controlled. They want to push control of news down and out to the regions (ie, rather than have all the news produced in London, Labour want the regions to have more control over their own news shows) and they don't want the government to have so much control over what entertainment gets produced, so they're going to cut back on entertainment production (which is most of what BBC does -- BBC is way more about promoting music and the premier leauge than it's about reporting on the government these days, which is a huge problem and a huge conflict of interest).

In principle, what Labour is doing is actually a pretty smart and effective antidote to fascism. I think having such centralized control of the media is one of the reasons Thatcher and Major made it as long as they did, but that's just a hunch -- I do know that the BBC really does have a huge influence on how Brits think of empire, and their reporting on Africa and former colonies is awful despite having a general approach to news which is about 100 times better than the approach in the US (they actually have issues that go through news cylcles and they really get into them).

I know that most people won't agree with me, but I think decentralizing control of the news and cutting out entertaiment (which the government currently funds with the regressive TV tax) is a good idea.

People here will probably say that the BBC needs to be big and centralized to fight the government. But I think -- just like in the US -- news needs to be something that more directly reflects what's going on locally -- or where there is less distance between the listener and the source of information, in all respects (geographic, class, etc.). Consider NPR: I wish my local NPR could control content and didn't pipe through the national propaganda 6 hours a day. I donate to my local station and I want them to respond to me, and I want the people who make decisions to come from MY community and not from the Beltway. I thik that's the way to make the media a stronger voice for combatting fascism. The downward and outward flow of power is almost always the antidote to fascism, and not the concentration of power in the hands of fewer and fewer increasingly powerful people. And I think, at its heart, that's what Labour is trying to do with the BBC.