Why State Broadcasting Is Immoral

Top-down information diffusion from a central, state-owned bureaucracy is immoral and encourages lies and disinformation.  The spreading of official lies and disinformation is harmful.  At best, it leads to people taking actions based on false or wrong information; at worst, it amounts to creating an artificial world in which people live a lie.

To illuminate the point, let us consider one of the BBC's biggest-ever whoppers, which in the pre-digital era was used to prop-up the TV license fee system: the detector van, manned by enforcement officers who would, supposedly, be able to detect whether a television was being watched in a particular house and what was being watched.  

The detection technology was science fiction. Obviously equipment designed to detect radiated signals will pick up something, but the accuracy claimed in the video is totally non-existent.  Crucially, there is no record of evidence from detector vans having ever been used in court.  The purpose of these vans was clearly to support a Big Lie, and the purpose of the Big Lie was deterrent: to dissuade TV licence fee evasion and also perhaps to bluff and bully people into payment.

Unbelievably this Big Lie is still rolled-out today in a different form, though very many less people will be inclined to believe it.  Most of us laugh at this now and perhaps smugly wonder how people in the past could have been so naive as to believe in the Detector Van Lie.  It's a lie that harks back to a more innocent time in this country, when people accepted most of what they were told by authority.  We do want to restore some of this country's past innocence – but not all of it.  We think it is a good thing that the curtain has been lifted and we have discovered that those in authority have a tendency to lie, have a penchant for lying, and lie more than they tell the truth.  The cat is out the bag on that score – and a good thing too.

They lied about race and immigration, and they have lied and still lie about the behaviour of immigrants and non-whites in Britain.

They lied about the European Union.

They lied about the ERM.

They lied about the European Single Currency in an effort to get us to join it.

They lied about the intervention in Kosovo and Serbia.

They lied about Iraq.

They lied about Jimmy Savile.

There will be other things they have been lying about.

Official lies happen because information is controlled by the state and large corporate interests.

Abolishing the BBC is not a panacea for the evils of human nature, but removing the state from broadcasting, media and information would be a step in the right direction.  We don't pretend that a 'truthful society' can somehow be created.  People have vested interests and tell lies.  But what we do say is that in a plural society, there should be free choice about which sources of information we choose and implicit in this is that no media organisation should be privileged with a mandatory subsidy, extracted from us more or less at the point of a gun.