> What is absolutely clear from history is commercial media outlets fuel political bias, and it seems to be increasingly damaging to society.
Public broadcasting fuels political division a lot. The most worrying is that you don’t notice it.
It is increasingly worrying because when people are exposed to the other side, they immediately « catch fire », wonder why they have been lied to, and never trust public broadcasting anymore. With luck, they may smoothen their beliefs a bit later in life, for the most centrist ones.
To me, public TV, especially BBC, shouldn’t be one-sided as it is now.
I regularly see the BBC criticised by both sides for being one sided. I’m not saying that’s a get out of jail free card but from your comment I genuinely don’t know which side you come down on, which surely says something.
I don't mean to dismiss the complaint. Public media news is weird: it's funded by the government, but it should criticise the government. There's a tension there. But looking at the US news landscape I see that for-profit news is just as if not more compromised.
I have read across the spectrum for years in the UK, the BBC is not especially biased, maybe a little liberal and it ignores poorer people, but almost all media does that in the UK. But the histrionics frim the Tories and Momentum about the BBC is wildly misplaced.
In comparison I never really watched the US "news" until the recent US election, occasionally watching a bit of CNN/ABC/Fox News. But I've been watching it these last few months, a mix of CNN, Fox and CNBC.
I was shocked at how CNN and Fox both present their often extremely partisan and biased opinions as news. They "report" on a story, but just constantly throwing in their own slant, not reporting the facts, but spinning it. CNN is not quite as bad as Fox, but it's still really, really bad.
That's not news to me.
The BBC does not do that. They don't have reporters sit their and rant about stuff, or label huge swathes of the population as X, Y or Z.
While there is bias by omission, or by the order in which they present the news, it's nothing like the 'news' I see coming from America.
We see CNN over here for ages too but they really clipped during the trumps presidency. Probably so much attention by that clown made them think they shall be the messiah who bring him down now matter what and how they report. They really weren't that bad before imo.
The thing with the BBC is that people on both sides of the political spectrum claim it's biased towards the other guys. That at least suggests that its overall balance is relatively neutral, even if specific individual programmes it broadcasts may not be.
I do feel that in recent times, the BBC's big name current affairs programmes have often given politicians of all parties an easy time in interviews, which I think is more worrying as a trend. I think the BBC should still challenge government representatives to explain and if necessary defend their policies, and should also still challenge the Opposition and smaller parties when their own representatives make dubious claims even if they're not currently in power to implement them.
>It is increasingly worrying because when people are exposed to the other side, they immediately « catch fire », wonder why they have been lied to, and never trust public broadcasting anymore.
Compare this to people who watch commercial TV, see an opposing view, and immediately wonder why they're currently being lied to, and go back to trusting their single source of commercial programming.
“To ensure that news, in whatever form, is reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality.”
Personally I occasionally find that the BBC news website misses the mark, more often on quality than bias but they have a very transparent and available complaints process online that I suggest you use if you have noticed specific instances of bias.
Public broadcasting fuels political division a lot. The most worrying is that you don’t notice it.
It is increasingly worrying because when people are exposed to the other side, they immediately « catch fire », wonder why they have been lied to, and never trust public broadcasting anymore. With luck, they may smoothen their beliefs a bit later in life, for the most centrist ones.
To me, public TV, especially BBC, shouldn’t be one-sided as it is now.