While BBC is usually a decently produced news source, they still have levers than can be manipulated by the government. They were beating the war drum pretty hard in the run up to the war with Iraq after 9/11.

The BBC is not government funded, it is funded by a compulsory licence fee, and is independent. They have come under government pressure in the form of having their budget effectively reduced by the government resulting in a shrinking news department.

BBC news was not pro war in the run up to the Iraq war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_Dossier#The_45_minut...

The government can change the rules on how the BBC is funded any time they want. They can also change how the BBC is governed and can influence the actual people currently governing the BBC without changing any rule. The BBC is obviously fully aware of this and would be very careful about crossing the government about anything really important.

If someone controls your budget you are not independent.

This is kind of an apathetic mid-90s defeatist attitude is I think easy but not particularly nuanced or helpful.

With that attitude nothing is independent: money has to come from somewhere. I think it's fair to say that every organisation has some amount of independence, some have money structures that allow them to have more than some others, and the BBC is an example of a situation where they can be more independent than an organisation that is more directly government funded.

The BBC is certainly pretty much independent of the folk who actually compulsorily fund it (£3.65 billion tax-free income via the licence fee) even if they never watch or listen to it.

The EU chip in a bit too. Not much as a % but it was £3 million of EU funds (i.e., European taxpayers who don't have a say in that either) between April 2011 and November 2013.

To some extent, but people from all sides have thought about this a lot in the UK, and other countries with a state television that is supposed to be as independent as possible. They are a lot more independent than most commercial outlets.

The biggest political influence is the board, not the budget. Since it takes a while to change the laws governing how BBC and similar agencies are run, I do not think the economics is the most interesting part.

The change from a Board of Governors to the BBC trust was a big one and not something done easily, so even there you have problems with affecting programming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_Governors_of_the_BBC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Trust

That basically eliminates the concept of independence in media. As far as I know, all major media outlets are funded by some combination of government, corporate sponsors, and subscribers. I don't know of any profitable media outlet that does not have corporate sponsors.

> I don't know of any profitable media outlet that does not have corporate sponsors.

9 year-old girls, obviously.

Could not the government's ability to increase or decrease their budget influence their coverage? This is exactly the complaint against government funded news.

They are also not owned by billionaires with agendas or have to pay lip service to advertisers no matter what they do. News these days is but a joke and mostly simply public relations and propaganda, listening to it in my opinion opts you in to being coerced by other people's agenda. It's good if you are an idiot and need coercing to behave, but for people who can form their own opinions have no need for this.

BBC is going downhill lately

BBC suffers increasingly from D-notices (secret bans) on stories.

e.g. Unaoil scandal is glaringly absent from the BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=unaoil

The BBC and every other mainstream media source, it seems.

I had never heard of this, and the only "major" source I could find was a Reuters wire story (that seems to not have been picked up by other media): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/iraq-probe-claims-unaoil-corr...

Honestly, from reading that, it's not clear why this would be a story worth covering. Corruption in Iraq is like rain in Seattle: Depressing, but barely newsworthy.

Yes D-notices are applied nationally in the UK.

Unaoil is not intersting for Iraqi corruption but the foriegn offshore multinatinational beneficiaries.

Deserving of a least a column inch - the obvious D-noting makes it a LOT more interesting from a UK perspective.

Here it is covered in The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/01/authorities-...

Since D-notices are not legally binding, if The Guardian received one but chose to report anyway, I'd be very surprised if they didn't mention a D-notice - the times government have overstretched with respect to D-notices, it has usually caused a major stink.

Isn't The Guardian is now based in the US, since GCHQ ground up some of their computers ?

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-relea...

Nice catch.

Isn't The Guardian is now based in the US, since GCHQ ground up some of their computers ?

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-relea...

No.

The Guardian is wholly owned by a UK trust, and its head office remains in London.

The only thing that changed was that reporting of the Snowden affair was shifted to their US office. The Guardian pointed out to GCHQ in advance that it made no difference as they already had copies of the data elsewhere.

Furthermore, it was The Guardian itself who "ground up" their computers, as they refuse flat out a request to let GCHQ inspect the computers and do the destruction. Instead they agreed to destroy them in the presence of GCHQ staff, exactly because it didn't matter, and let them avoid legal liabilities. And frankly being able to put the story in the paper probably didn't hurt. From the article you linked:

'"Three Guardian staff members – Johnson, executive director Sheila Fitzsimons and computer expert David Blishen – carried out the demolition of the Guardian's hard drives. It was hot, sweaty work. On the instructions of GCHQ, the trio bought angle-grinders, dremels – a drill with a revolving bit – and masks. The spy agency provided one piece of hi-tech equipment, a "degausser", which destroys magnetic fields, and erases data. It took three hours to smash up the computers. The journalists then fed the pieces into the degausser.

Two GCHQ technical experts – "Ian" and "Chris" – recorded the process on their iPhones. Afterwards they headed back to GCHQ's doughnut-shaped HQ in Cheltenham carrying presents for family members, bought on their rare visit to the capital.

"It was purely a symbolic act," Johnson said. "We knew that. GCHQ knew that. And the government knew that," He added: "It was the most surreal event I have witnessed in British journalism."'

Their budgets have been squeezed for years now, the result isn't that surprising.

Less than everybody else.