Comment by immibis
1 year ago
Is it because they have to, or they choose to? There are a great many right wing outlets that call themselves impartial.
1 year ago
Is it because they have to, or they choose to? There are a great many right wing outlets that call themselves impartial.
The BBC being publicly funded has a genuine obligation to be neutral, which sometimes turns into "both sides" weirdness.
I think it's a more recent phenomenon that they go to lengths to find someone to report "both sides".
20 years ago, they didn't need to interview extremists — staying neutral meant reporting on the centre viewpoint.
Having an obligation to be neutral isn't the same as being neutral - people and especially institutions break their obligations all the time, often without penalty.
It's still a choice. They don't do it when there's an article on the dangers of the rise of Neo-Nazism, or on the horrors of IS. "Now we interview Paul (32), who doesn't think it's dangerous at all, in fact he thinks it's pretty great!". Or on new cancer medicine; "Now we go to Mary (55) who isn't a fan of the new medicine, advocating that cancer patients cure it with yoga instead.".
"Neutral" also doesn't have to mean "both sides".
Neutral is kind of a silly concept. Any attempt to even describe the sides, or even to enumerate them, will reveal inherent bias. You see this all over newspapers in the US who try to remain unbiased (between the two political parties), which results in an incredibly nasty feedback loop where parties and the media dictate policy to each other while ignoring every other viewpoint in existence.
Give me reporting with clear polemic any day, please. At least I can adjust for that and consume contrary polemics.