If the BBC advertises Tesco, why is there a licence fee?

Just listened to a ten-minute advert for Tesco on ‘You and Yours’ on Radio 4, masquerading as news. I have some questions:

1. If the BBC is going to advertise the corporate sector, why is the public asked to pay a licence fee? (see here)
2. Why is the BBC allowing corporate product placement on its world news channel? (see here)
3. Why is what Tesco are doing to make more money considered news?
4. Why is the BBC advertising the corporate sector at all? Don’t they know that:

• supermarkets destroy jobs and small businesses? (see here)
• supermarkets suck money out of our communities to pay shareholders
• supermarkets destroy farmers’ livelihoods? (see here)
• Tesco, along with other large corporations, avoid paying their fair share of tax, so that the rest of us have to pay more than our fair share? (see here)

I believe that the BBC does know these things, but the BBC is a state organ, and the state is corporate-controlled, and they are therefore perfectly happy to promote the corporate sector.

BBC staff clearly don’t care about the issues above, and neither to the shoppers who were interviewed for the pro-Tesco ‘news’ piece. They were only interested in prices, and so I don’t expect them to care about or even understand the arguments that we present on this site.

But I wonder if there’s a point at which Tesco shoppers would say ‘enough’? Or could Tesco spit-roast babies in-store, but not lose custom as long as their fizzy drinks were a penny cheaper than elsewhere?

I haven’t mentioned the horse meat scandal because, really, if we eat cows, what’s the problem with eating horses (although they could have let people know, so they could make up their own minds)?

Here are more concerns about Tesco.

And here’s a local group that’s just not having it.

what we can do:

1. don’t shop at Tesco or any of the other corporate supermarkets except the Co-op or Waitrose (neither of them suck money from communities to pay shareholders – one is a co-operative and the other is a partnership with no external shareholders); or better still, shop at small, local shops.
2. boycott the BBC; or better still, defenestrate the telly.