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If you live in the EU, just have a look at for example this recent mainstream media broadcast from "Arte", a state-funded French-German channel: https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/... (watch starting from position 01:05:03).

Anti vaccination propaganda is obviously not limited to the underbelly of the Internet.

I recently saw a documentary (in Dutch) on this topic on TV (which was a translated version of a French documentary).

They indicated many different causes:

• the parasite (a kind of mite) mentioned in the summary, and the fact that it spreads viruses. Good news: a few colonies have learned to adapt by recognising and killing larvae infected with mite eggs, and removing them from the colony

• The current bee population is way too homogeneous. All bee queens that are currently sold on the global market are bred in the US by a handful of people. Moreover, the bee population in the US is was already not very diverse in the first place because honey bees are not native to North America, they were imported by European settlers (so they all descend from a few colonies).

• The global bee trade from the previous point also results in quickly spreading diseases and parasites all over the world.

• Bee colonies are "abused" in many parts of the world. For example, California has immense almond plantations, with hundreds of thousands of acres that contain nothing but grass and almond trees (apparently it's the state's larges source of income). These flower at the end of winter and have to be fertilised within a period of a few weeks. In order to be achieve this, they import bee colonies from all over the US.

  Problem: bees are normally still hibernating at that point. "Solution": a few weeks in advance they put patties with antibiotics and food concentrate in the colonies to "warm them up". Problem: apart from the forced de-hibernation, many bees die of malnutrition in those plantations because even though there is an abundance of pollen, it's all almond pollen and these do not contain all different kinds of nutrients that bees requires.

• Pesticides, in particular neonicotinoids (but not just those). There were some pretty horrible stories in the documentary about Bayer refusing all responsibility in the face of all evidence, which included negative effects on bees even when researchers diluted the pesticides to the extent that they could no longer detect them.

  It has become that bad that several beekeepers now take their colonies "on holidays" (e.g. to the Provence in France) to allow them to recuperate from all the poison they get from the farmlands and plantations. Even more surreal was that apparently a number of beekeepers are moving from the countryside into cities, because the lack of pesticides in urban settings more than compensates for the other pollution and the reduced availability of pollen.

I can only talk for myself, but I tend to record documentaries. Mainly because, when it becomes late and the documentary isn't finished but I absolutely have to go to bed (getting up early isn't easy for a night-owl like me), I just put in a DVD and hit record. Of course, I don't keep this stuff. It's just for timeshifting.

Arte, for example, has "theme-nights" where one particular theme is used for the whole evening. Could be, for example, about Charlie Chaplin. You get to see "Modern Times" and "The Dictator" and those movies are them complemented with documentaries setting them in their time. Just an example. I saw another one completely dedicated to space probes like Voyager, including "How to Communicate with Aliens, should we find them" (Carl Sagan's ideas, etc...)

So, I do find stuff worth watching. If I had BBC, I'm pretty sure I'd watch their documentaries. However, I have Google Video for that now ;-)

- the public TV programmes are of good quality. Maybe not appealing to all viewers, but it is clear that care has been put in making them. - some commercial TV programmes like RTL are not that bad, but the amount of commercials (and especially the length of commercial blocks) is awful.

I guess we need to distinguish what kind of shows we compare. If we're to compare entertainment (movies, TV serials), most of the time the big commercial channels have better things to offer.

But when it comes down to information, no commercial channel (not even the news channels) has such a wide and good variety of shows as the public channels. And if you move your attention over from the two "big" public channels to the smaller ones like Phoenix, 3SAT, arte you'll find documentations that no commercial channel will ever produce because the number of people interested in those topics will be way to low or the content documantary will be to radical for any promoter who's willing to buy ad space in a show.

And those are exactly the kind of shows this fee was originally intended for. Of course, like anything else invented in good will, it has degraded over the years.

The "hosts" were animated drawings

who would seriously take their ipod into a combat situation?