The debate about BBC funding is a staple in media pages, throwing up an approximate divide between the political poles – the right deploring the waste of money and leftist tendencies of the organisation; the left committed the doctrine of supporting a publicly sponsored propagator of information/entertainment untainted by the commercial influence of advertisers.

Nobody’s suggesting – at least not very loudly – that the BBC should cease to be funded at all, but the Tories have signalled their intention to freeze the Licence fee.

The proposal that the BBC should derive some supplementary revenue from its digital online news dissemination treads on the toes of neither party.

I have argued on http://www.peterburden.net/archives/144 that, if as a nation we want to keep a healthy, independent press, we must create circumstances in which newspapers can earn revenue from their online news services; this can realistically only be achieved if the BBC – a principal source of online news – is also required to charge, thus creating a fair commercial platform for competition between public and private online news services.

No reading of the BBC Charter specifies that it must offer online services for nothing. And to those who would argue that the poor and unwaged would be starved of news to which they are entitled (and some will, you can be sure) I say, listen to Radio 4, which is free, then go to the public library and read the papers there.

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