Comment by limbero
3 hours ago
Sorry, but you seem to be implying that European public owned media outlets are not normally to be trusted. Why?
I started out writing a list of European countries with high quality public broadcasters, but the comment started looking silly since the list quickly grew very long.
I've lived for many years in two large European countries and in both cases I found them hard to trust. Perhaps you have deep, first-hand knowledge of multiple European countries but in my experience they take too much money and are heavily biased. For that reason I'd prefer there to be no public broadcast companies - at least so my tax money doesn't support manipulation. In over 30+ years of life, I've never encountered a truly neutral public broadcaster in Europe, though I'm sure there may be exceptions.
In my country I judge them purely by what they do and say in the sectors where I know a lot about, and the facts they bring are mostly correct.
Also, they don't tout a single party line.
They have left leaning biases, RTVE is basically a propaganda channel for the PSOE at this point and France Info/France2 have center-left biases which makes them not neutral and representing the corpus of society. They are all well-funded though.
> Sorry, but you seem to be implying that European public owned media outlets are not normally to be trusted. Why?
The quality of European publicly owned medias is highly country specific and variates quite a lot:
- Some of them are critically underfunded and it becomes visible (tendency to cheap sensationalism, superficial investigation or recycled content).
- Some of them are politically rooted (Left or Right) or controlled due to a direct/indirect government involvment.
But all considered: I would say that the average are still an order of magnitude better in term of content quality and independence that the average privatized media.
The national broadcaster here in Romania has been politically leaning on whoever was paying the bills, hence on who’s holding political control over the country.
I can say the same about the foreign bureaus of State-owned media thingies like Deutsche Welle and Radio France Internationale, both of these entities actively rooting for the Romanian political candidate that was seen as closer to German and French interests (I’m talking the last couple of rounds of Romanian presidential elections).
You're probably responding to Swiss person that lives in the USA.