The BBC isn't directly funded by taxes in the usual sense (and therefore the government, which is a tricky situation to be in). It's funded by the collection of a license required when you have a TV, and it's collected by the BBC itself (in reality outsourced).

The BBC is obliged to collect it (through their contractor) but the government chooses how much is collected and how to spend the money. Some even goes to what you probably think of as privately owned local newspapers. When money was tight at Channel 4 (a publicly owned company that runs a TV channel with advertising and a very different remit from the BBC - the BBC's mission is to educate, while C4 is more about pushing boundaries, so that amazing wildlife documentary is from the BBC but the first soap opera to have a gay Muslim couple get married is probably C4) C4 were going to take some of the license fee money too.

Though in the end there is absolutely no difference.

In Sweden we are abandoning that concept because it is an unfair system and lots of people have switched to the internet for the same content (and don't even have a TV).

It's just semantics, sure, but it does mean the UK's largest broadcaster is not state-owned and has independence. That's important.

It does not. Politicians have absolute power over funding regardless. They decide exactly how much BBC can collect and in what circumstances (or they give BBC the mandate to do it themselves, but they can revoke or change that at will).

It is just one, insignificant, layer of indirection.

Who mandates the license fee? The government. So, it's a tax, and the BBC is both the state agency collecting the tax and the state agency funded by the tax.

This works on a national level. Switzerland does it too. But I don't want to read only Swiss Newspapers, I wanna read the NYT and The Times etc. as well. I do think that the digital pass idea is worth thinking about more.

That doesn't solve it. It ensures you have people calling themselves journalists who get paid, but journalism is in decline because (a) trust in journalism is in decline and (b) a lot of it is duplicated.

The BBC specifically has a trust issue in the UK. Even one of its own long term journalists wrote a book called "Can we trust the BBC?" (spoiler warning: the given answer is no).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Can-Trust-BBC-Robin-Aitken/dp/08264...

Tax-funded institutions that are not accountable to the people paying the tax is corrosive. Resentment builds and has nowhere to go. For now at least if you're willing to disconnect from broadcast television entirely, you can avoid paying the license fee. But similar license fees in other countries have been adapted to include the internet; it's hard to know if the same will happen in the UK.

My favourite recent example of ridiculous tabloid-level BBC journalism is "Brexit threat to sandwiches":

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44960293

Staying in the EU for a bit longer would keep the chiller cabinet full of sandwiches - but it would doubtless raise the political temperature.

The story literally argues that the UK would not have sandwiches anymore if no deal with the EU is reached. The sandwich was invented in the UK.

This is hardly an isolated example. Consider what sort of journalistic process led to this story being written, edited, reviewed and approved for publication. Is it one citizens should be forced to fund? What does that sort of thing do long term? Is it any wonder that trust in the press is in long term decline in the UK?

>The story literally argues that the UK would not have sandwiches anymore if no deal with the EU is reached. The sandwich was invented in the UK.

That is not what the article is about at all, "sandwiches" are just the hook. In fact the word sandwich only appears in the first sentence and the last. The article is about whether Brexit would lead to supply chain issues with food, which could result in food shortages.

No, sandwiches are referred to in the headline, the first paragraph, the second paragraph and the third paragraph ("the space between two pieces of bread"), and the final paragraph.

Regardless of how you prefer to interpret the story, absurd clickbait "hooks" are the sort of thing that drives distrust in the media.