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.