They really are, I went through a lot of them to find out who owns them. I maybe stopped too early, but it was getting depressing. Reuters? Owned by a billionaire Canadian family. NYT? A huge portion controlled by the same family since the 1800’s even though it’s publicly traded. Our news needs to be sanitized and brought back to old timey journalism.
“Old timey journalism” was usually when someone with a political axe to grind started a local newspaper to try and counter the other guy who had started a newspaper. That’s when you get editorialism and a particular slant on your news.
You probably want something like large public-funded-but-relatively-neutral news agencies, who have the resources, time, and budget to allow proper investigative journalism to take it’s full course, and are large enough that they don’t have to pander to the politicians of the day or big business.
So we’re talking at this point about BBC, ABC (Australia), Al-Jazeera, Deutsche Welle, and other similar organisations.
None are without bias - it’s very difficult to actually be bias-free, most will have a home country bias, for example. But they’re better than the billionaire’s media circus.
The appeal of state media is that the bias is obvious.
We know who’s paying the bills at the CBC or Xinhua, but it’s gonna be a lot more subtle for the local broadcaster who mysteriously drops their investigative series right after the target buys a premium ad package.
It also means you can triangulate. If the BBC and TASS both report the same details on a story, those are probably legit.
When you realize all the news outlets are owned by billionaires it kind of makes sense
They really are, I went through a lot of them to find out who owns them. I maybe stopped too early, but it was getting depressing. Reuters? Owned by a billionaire Canadian family. NYT? A huge portion controlled by the same family since the 1800’s even though it’s publicly traded. Our news needs to be sanitized and brought back to old timey journalism.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/20890256
“Old timey journalism” was usually when someone with a political axe to grind started a local newspaper to try and counter the other guy who had started a newspaper. That’s when you get editorialism and a particular slant on your news.
You probably want something like large public-funded-but-relatively-neutral news agencies, who have the resources, time, and budget to allow proper investigative journalism to take it’s full course, and are large enough that they don’t have to pander to the politicians of the day or big business.
So we’re talking at this point about BBC, ABC (Australia), Al-Jazeera, Deutsche Welle, and other similar organisations.
None are without bias - it’s very difficult to actually be bias-free, most will have a home country bias, for example. But they’re better than the billionaire’s media circus.
You’re absolutely correct, we need a form of the fairness doctrine back and a break up of all media conglomerates.
The appeal of state media is that the bias is obvious.
We know who’s paying the bills at the CBC or Xinhua, but it’s gonna be a lot more subtle for the local broadcaster who mysteriously drops their investigative series right after the target buys a premium ad package.
It also means you can triangulate. If the BBC and TASS both report the same details on a story, those are probably legit.