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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Sport
Barney Ronay

BBC showing tennis’s new Battle of the Sexes will just offer up opportunity to belittle women’s sport

Illustrated poster advertising a match between Aryna Sabalenka and Nick Kyrgios
Women’s world No 1 Aryna Sabalenka taking on Nick Kyrgios, who hardly plays men’s tennis any more, is a match that makes no sense. Illustration: David Lyttleton/The Guardian

It’s always best to take a sceptical view of the constant flow of BBC-bashing newspaper stories, which are often simply bogus outrage expressed for commercial gain. Even the war-on-woke, cod-ideological stuff – Clive Myrie INSISTS hamsters can breastfeed human robots – the bits that make you want to smear your face with greengage jam and weep for England, our England, with its meadows, its shadows, its curates made entirely from beef. Even these come from a hard, transactional place.

Basically, it’s the licence fee. The BBC is free at the point of delivery, but paid for by a national levy. The BBC is also a direct commercial competitor to every other form of legacy media, all of which are trying to find ways to survive and recoup revenue.

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