US Politics 2

I honestly think that Laura is just a bad journalist TBH.

Lex-Man wrote:I honestly think that Laura is just a bad journalist TBH.

I think it says a lot that the job she's in now came down to her or the person who is now Number 10's press secretary though.

It’s funny that a number of both left and right wingers complain that the BBC is biased the opposite way. In realty they try to be the least biased they possibly can however ultimately you often can’t stop the beliefs of a reporter, journalist, programmer from showing at various levels.

I’ve just watched the clip from the bbc story, it’s clear that they are attempting to take the piss out of both Trump and Biden which is not what the bbc should be doing. The music they’ve overlaid clearly shows this, it’s like a parody sketch.

Return_of_the_STAR wrote:It’s funny that a number of both left and right wingers complain that the BBC is biased the opposite way. In realty they try to be the least biased they possibly can however ultimately you often can’t stop the beliefs of a reporter, journalist, programmer from showing at various levels.

That's true, but the "balance" is completely off at the BBC.

The Last Week Tonight video I posted shows why. For the BBC, balance is having two people who are opposed. But that's not true balance as it gives equal weight to unequal arguments. If 99% of scientists agree climate change is real, it's not balance to discuss the issue using 1 scientist that believes it's real and 1 scientist (although usually it'll be a journalist or worse a lobbyist) that doesn't believe it's real.

It's also not balanced to say "Trump and Biden both tell lies" when Trump outright lies thousands of times and Biden dodges answering one question.

Moggy wrote:

Return_of_the_STAR wrote:It’s funny that a number of both left and right wingers complain that the BBC is biased the opposite way. In realty they try to be the least biased they possibly can however ultimately you often can’t stop the beliefs of a reporter, journalist, programmer from showing at various levels.

That's true, but the "balance" is completely off at the BBC.

The Last Week Tonight video I posted shows why. For the BBC, balance is having two people who are opposed. But that's not true balance as it gives equal weight to unequal arguments. If 99% of scientists agree climate change is real, it's not balance to discuss the issue using 1 scientist that believes it's real and 1 scientist (although usually it'll be a journalist or worse a lobbyist) that doesn't believe it's real.

It's also not balanced to say "Trump and Biden both tell lies" when Trump outright lies thousands of times and Biden dodges answering one question.

Oh yeah I 100% agree with this.

Cuttooth wrote:

Lex-Man wrote:I honestly think that Laura is just a bad journalist TBH.

I think it says a lot that the job she's in now came down to her or the person who is now Number 10's press secretary though.

Yeah, it's just a significant amount of the BBC's most senior political journalists, on and off-camera, repeatedly advancing the Conservative agenda for the last decade by mistake!

A deeper issue here is that being centrist and following an establishment consensus isn't the same as being unbiased. I don't think the BBC actually is centrist - it had a clear preference between Corbyn and Johnson, and many of its top brass are open Tories, and this has actually been consistently true since its inception, when it was used to propagandise against the labour movement - but OK, whatever; even if it were centrist, centrism is a political ideology that has its own tenets and world-view.

There's no such thing as unbiased news media, it's better to just be aware of the ideology of each source you use. IMO you'll find news most informative and least stressful if you decide which political ideology you are, by considering what your values are, and then get news from sources that broadly align with your world-view.

You cannot eliminate bias, especially in the curation of what is considered newsworthy, but there is still a scale of bias. You can objectively compare the truthyness of news reports for example. Being aware of the ideology of the source of news is great advice. I'm not so sure about resigning to being happy with a news source you simply agree with if your assertion that no news is unbiased leads you to the incorrect assumption that all news sources are as good as each other.

OrangeRKN wrote:You can objectively compare the truthyness of news reports for example.

You can at the extremes, sure. You can see if a piece of news is completely made up, or you can see if it references real events. But word choices and tone, selectively choosing what to report, and which details to report, is not "lying"; and an article can be correct in the spirit of its analysis while having some trivial details wrong.

Abandon the idea that "news" is ever meaningful as a source of factual data. News is propaganda and it either serves you or your class enemies.

The News: "Today a primary school held their summer fete"

Karl: "PROPAGANDA! THE NEWS DIDN'T MENTION THAT FETES ARE CAPITALIST BRAINWASHING FORCING KIDS TO BE GOOD LITTLE CONSUMERS!"

^^^ This but unironically

good satire dude

Biden beat Trump in the ratings

Thats probably upset Trump more than anything else this year

Tomous wrote:Biden beat Trump in the ratings

Thats probably upset Trump more than anything else this year

He's going to be furious

More people watched Biden on ABC than Trump on NBC, MSNBC and CNBC

Joe Biden's town hall on ABC averaged 13.9 million viewers on Thursday night, easily surpassing the Nielsen ratings for President Trump's town hall on NBC. That alone was a result virtually no one in the TV business expected. And that's not even the most surprising part.

The Trump town hall was simulcast by two of NBC's cable channels, MSNBC and CNBC, but even when those channels are included in the total, Biden -- on only one network -- still prevailed.

The Trump town hall averaged 10.6 million viewers on the NBC broadcast network. On MSNBC, Trump reached 1.74 million viewers, and on CNBC, about 671,000 viewers. So Trump's gross audience across the three channels was 13 million, about one million fewer than Biden's audience on ABC alone.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/16/medi ... index.html

I'm actually surprised. I thought people would tune in for the car crash.

Hopefully this shows how people are just over him now.

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Return_of_the_STAR wrote:It’s funny that a number of both left and right wingers complain that the BBC is biased the opposite way. In realty they try to be the least biased they possibly can however ultimately you often can’t stop the beliefs of a reporter, journalist, programmer from showing at various levels.

Unfortunately this is simply not true. Independently analysis of things like instances of negative/positive wording repeatedly demonstrates the BBC to be deferential to the government and airtime appearances show bias to right leaning voices and that of industry leaders over trade union opinion by a wide margin. The BBC has an objectively measurable bias to authority.

Being generous, I think much of the problem with the BBC is that they look at newspaper headlines and use them to judge the temperature of the current debates. However, the problem with that is that the print media in the UK is dominated by foreign billionaire press barons who are essentially spokespeople for the Tories. This basically means they end up amplifying the already unbalanced media in the UK.

Tomous wrote:I'm actually surprised. I thought people would tune in for the car crash.

Hopefully this shows how people are just over him now.

Presumably it's just got old now.

Meep wrote:

Return_of_the_STAR wrote:It’s funny that a number of both left and right wingers complain that the BBC is biased the opposite way. In realty they try to be the least biased they possibly can however ultimately you often can’t stop the beliefs of a reporter, journalist, programmer from showing at various levels.

Unfortunately this is simply not true. Independently analysis of things like instances of negative/positive wording repeatedly demonstrates the BBC to be deferential to the government and airtime appearances show bias to right leaning voices and that of industry leaders over trade union opinion by a wide margin. The BBC has an objectively measurable bias to authority.

Being generous, I think much of the problem with the BBC is that they look at newspaper headlines and use them to judge the temperature of the current debates. However, the problem with that is that the print media in the UK is dominated by foreign billionaire press barons who are essentially spokespeople for the Tories. This basically means they end up amplifying the already unbalanced media in the UK.

Have you got sources for that?