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Comment by antimagic | Hacker News Reader

This type of arrangement does actually exist already. The BBC in the UK, and the ABC in Australia are both openly critical of governments - I know that the political right in Australia finds the ABC overly biased to the left, and the political left finds it overly biased to the right (although the right seems to be a bit more serious about this - they routinely try to hamstring the ABC when in power, whereas the left tends to increase funding).

Anyway, the point is that publicly funded broadcasters can and do criticise their governments.

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Regardless of what a politician says, if they try to increase the funding (or keep program alive) then they like it and their complaint is pro-forma only. Its fun to watch floor speeches in the US then see what they actually amended the funding bill to be.

As do the Norwegian one. The claim that they leave the left alone have been a empty refrain from the "libertarian" right for a generation. Their real beef that it is funded by a fee rather than "commercially", as they have a fervent belief in only paying for something they use (and clearly they don't "use" the national broadcaster).

I'm one of the many who thinks that Norwegian press, including state TV, is heavily biased towards the left.

I've had to change few of my strongly held beliefs a few times but I currently maintain the view stated above. Feel free to check my posting history and feel free to dismiss my view afterwards : )

They also don't need to be critical. Being critical is necessarily editorializing, which we have no shortage of. The shortage is of hard journalism.

> Anyway, the point is that publicly funded broadcasters can and do criticise their governments.

But only to a certain point.

You need to provide a concrete example. I agree with you and one concrete example was the BBC coverage of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum was cringeworthy in its level of intense propagandistic sophistic bias. London told them what to write, and they rolled and wrote what they were told, to the letter. For a news outlet with an otherwise excellent reputation it was truly awful. Possibly they did such a juvenile job of political propaganda spreading as a form of civil disobedience, which would be kind of brave of them.

The BBC is more like a collection of fiefdoms than a single entity with a well-defined editorial policy. So it's not good at being consistent.

But as a rule it's pro-Establishment - sometimes smarmily so - with occasional progressive breakouts.

Generally the media in the UK are terrible, with a definite right-wing slant, even from supposedly left-leaning dailies like The Guardian = which practically exploded with rage and 'What's wrong with all you peasants?" indignation when Corbyn was elected to lead the Labour party.

Unfortunately racism and hate have a big audience. The Murdoch papers and The Mail would have no influence if people decided they were trash and stopped buying them. But no one ever went bust pandering to lowest-common-denominator smear-and-fear journalism.

Finland has YLE.

It's good to have. But it's a mess really. Their most recent stuff is called YLE kioski. Click bait website combined with TV show discussing click bait stuff. YLE tries to be neutral, but when that fails they are obviously left leaning. All this while bleeding money by running three separate TV channels and buying broadcasting from a monopoly company they created themselves.

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