Comment by another_twist
21 hours ago
Thats expected. In functioning democracies state media is run for the purpose not profit. It doesnt have the corrupting influence of political money. PBS in the US could be so much better. Just look at what BBC is able to do in the UK.
> PBS in the US could be so much better.
PBS Newshour is pretty much the best/balanced news programming on US TV at this point. They take deeper dives into issues than most of the other shows out there. And then there's Frontline which is excellent and goes even deeper with a documentary format. The rest of PBS - there are a few good parts like Nova, but a lot of what plays on PBS stations these days is UK crime dramas - man, there seems to be a lot of mayhem going on in merry old England these days.
>PBS Newshour
Haven't watched this since I was a kid. Just scrubbed through the latest episode. I was surprised, it's not bad. Left-leaning to my eye, but FAR less so than any other left-leaning mainstream TV media I can think of. And as you point out, more substantial and meaningful coverage than you typically get anywhere else. I would be happy to encourage anyone to watch more PBS Newshour based on that
Is there a specific example of the left-leaning bias you can mention?
9 replies →
> PBS Newshour is pretty much the best/balanced news programming on US TV at this point.
Ah yes, the news show that has a weekly politics round table that brings in a balanced approach to see issues from both sides: The side of an anti-Trump Democrat and the side of an anti-Trump Republican.
Good riddance!
How many pro-Trump Republicans actually want to engage in a fair round-table style debate?
This administration makes a point that they only do interviews with sources favorable to them. They can't opt out of the media and then pretend to be victims.
2 replies →
>Just at what BBC is able to do in the UK.
This is funny because BBC is a prime example of being a propaganda channel for the government of the day. And that's not new at all just look back at the coverage of the Troubles or the miners strikes in the 70s-80s.
Yes it's not on the level of CGTN or Russia Today but BBC is not neutral at all
https://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-how-biased-is-the-...
A lot of people are unable to see their own political bias; they look at BBC or Fox News and see “unbiased true reporting”.
I highly suggest using Ground News (ground.news) for a week or a month as your sole portal into news stories, and then use their features to analyze bias in your selection of news stories and outlets.
I use it regularly to try to offset my own biases.
I think comparing BBC new to fox news is a piss take.
of _course_ there is bias at the BBC. But to comparing it to Fox is uncharitable at best.
1 reply →
Also the Wikipedia Current Events portal [1]. It’s definitely biased by the Wikipedia editors decisions on what to add there (especially the “Topics in the News” box) but it gives a more or less neutral dump of the daily events.
It’s pretty much the only place I know to find news on all the conflicts that Western media tends to ignore.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
1 reply →
At your recommendation I took a look at Ground News.
I'm not a fan of the continued reification of "left" and "right". I have heard conservatives lament that MAGA isn't truly conservative. I've heard economic reformers lament that liberal social policies are sucking the oxygen out of the room for real structural reform. In both cases the idea of a single "left" and "right" as a group, or even worse as the two sole options on the menu of how to think, is severely damaging to productive political dialogue.
Framing everything as left-vs-right is like doing PCA and taking only the first principal component - sure it might be contain some signal, but it flattens any nuance. Critically, it also pre-frames any debate into competing camps in a way that harms rather than serves. I would challenge groups like Ground News to offer other framings - why not "owners vs workers"? Why not "rural vs urban"? We should ask why they chose the framing they do. I have my own cynical opinion but I'll refrain from sharing.
1 reply →
I don't know about your suggested site, but I use foreign news for this. I have switched to "consuming news" [0] almost entirely from a variety of English-language foreign services.
All national media services have their own bias and propaganda, but if you switch them up it becomes obvious very quickly. It also means that I miss out on most of the US political noise [1], which is a benefit to my mental health [2].
[0] Hot/lukewarm take: "consuming news" is a waste of time, and should be minimized. This really hits you like a brick to the head when you see the stuff that foreign countries are obsessing about, and how tiny it feels to you. Guess what: your news media is filled with the same crap.
[1] I still get the foreign opinion on it, obviously, but this is usually pretty mild. Most countries don't care about the US nearly as much as US citizens think they do.
[2] If you think that CPB/NPR don't have bias, I strongly suggest that you try this. You're probably in a bubble, and an "international perspective" is something that most NPR listeners claim to value. Removing US media from my life eliminated a huge source of angst (particularly after 2016), and revealed that all of the major US media sources are various forms of hyper-polarized clownery.
2 replies →
I've been a subscriber for a few months now and it's well worth it.
Ground News worries me because now we don't need to use our brains the app just tells me the bias! Ground News could be biased!
Leads to shallow discussion where all news sources are tossed out for bias leaving nothing (or what ground news wants you to listen to). God forbid we critically examine for ourselves the information we consume.
4 replies →
In fairness to the BBC on the rare occasions they do cross paths with the government this happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry
I'm not sure anyone that is familiar with this has been able to take what they say seriously since because they are so clearly on such a short leash.
To quote David Mitchell - "news is a very small of the BBC...BBC is an organization that is loved around the world for its drama and stories and not just the ruddy news".
How is it not neutral ? I follow some of the news. They've criticized both Conservative and Labour governments. Of course there are problems like the whole Martin Bashir thing but recently I've seen the BBC be more self-critical than other private TV channels. If we're comparing mistakes from the past then in the 90s, Roger Ailes was molesting women behind locked doors. Lewd comments were the norm across several news rooms. Doesn't mean that all private media is bad.
>They've criticized both Conservative and Labour governments
this is really the main problem with the bbc. for example one week they publish a story talking about something horrible israel has done then the next they publish another seemingly taking their side on something. it just ends up annoying and confusing both sides instead of one
The BBC has routinely been called biased by all sides of the spectrum - it is effectively the best we are going to get in terms of neutrality.
It would help a lot if you would offer some points of comparison for which channels you think do a better job in this area.
The BBC is pro-Establishment rather than in favour of the government of the day. I.E. Strongly pro-EU / anti-Brexit. It's also decidedly pro-Woke.
I do think it is pro-establishment but as a remainer I was exasperated by both the outsized presence Mr Farage got on BBC programming and also the uncritical nature of the coverage of the post-Brexit negotations and treatment of dissenting MPs, so I am not convinced at all the BBC had a particularly pro-EU position.
I think you could argue it had a sort of pro-Cameron lean to it for a while simply because he initially positioned himself as quite a boring centrist, but I don't believe there was any policy alignment generally.
Less sure re: the scottish independence vote but I think in that case the BBC was sort of paralysed by what the outcome would mean for it, and that may have made it difficult for it to comprehensively handle.
BBC has unparalleled quality TV programming for both kids and adults, but their news channel has been compromised by conservative influence (namely the director Tim Davie) for a while now.
Channel 4 news is surprisingly now the better news source for actual events.
Channel 4 unfortunately doesn't have the breadth of news coverage (though they definitely have the depth) that the BBC has. They don't have anything like the local/regional news coverage and have to be very selective about what they report on. They're also 1 medium only (TV) whereas the BBC are TV, radio, and what is effectively the UK's biggest online newspaper.
They're also living on borrowed time. Channel 4 is publicly owned but completely self funded, largely through ad revenue. Ad revenue for TV is not what it used to be.
There's been serious consideration given to the idea of merging Channel 4 into the BBC to share admin costs but keep it editorially separate.
> PBS in the US could be so much better.
Do you have a specific grievance? How could it be better?
BBC is not 100% neutral on all issues. No one is. One could argue that it is less bad than the for-profit channels in the UK but no channel is without biase.
BBC is a bad example because they clearly cater to local politics and their monopoly on programming and news for large swaths of their country is not particularly healthy.
State media is inherently going to be pro-establishment and failures to report on their own internal scandals I think should give everyone pause about being all-in on something like the BBC.
Monopoly?
State media doesn’t have corrupting influence of POLITICAL money? It’s inheriting my political! Government media is the worse possible thing.
>Just at what BBC is able to do in the UK.
Every household that watches BBC in the UK needs to pay £174.50 ($230) a year. (the wording here has to be done carefully, let's not digress into being exact on who has to pay it)
Federal funding for public media distributed out to $1.54 per person in the US last year.
There's... uh... a bit of a difference in the national funding for the BBC and public media in the US.
Agreed. My argument was that US has a much stronger economy than the UK and clearly bigger state coffers. With proper funding there's no reason why state run media can't put out good quality stories and content. Not just news.
Every household that has a TV, regardless of their use of the BBC. I don't know why people who essentially use a TV as a monitor for games consoles need to pay it.
We don't.
1 reply →