I'm not Elon's biggest fan, far from it! He drove me out of Twitter into Mastodon. However, people are pretending that his statement that the #BBC is government funded is somehow hugely shocking. Given his history of lying, I don't find this one statement hugely shocking, or that big a lie!

The reality is that the statement that the BBC is government funded is at least partially true, but not 100% accurate. The BBC receives most of its funding from the licence fee, which can be argued it operates as a tax because it is so hard to avoid paying even if you watch no BBC content. This tax or fee is a form of public money that is collected by the government and allocated to the BBC by Parliament (so yeah, taxpayer-funded and allocated to the BBC by the government!). However, the BBC also has other sources of income, such as its commercial operations and its funding from donors, which are not public money and do not affect its editorial independence.

Therefore, the BBC’s funding is more complex and diverse than Elon said, and cannot be reduced to a simple label of being government funded or not. Partially government-funded would have been more accurate.