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Comment by rogerbinns | Hacker News Reader

The article did not mention Al Jazeera deciding to remove their Internet streaming, and requiring that you can only view via your local cable provider. See this page with the big note to US people: http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/201146152255537258.html

I used to check in on their coverage on the Roku channel, but they made a business decision to prevent that. I can understand their decision to make their success dependent on the existing way of doing content business in the US (cable channels), but the number of cord cutters keeps increasing, the most valuable segment for advertisers (younger folk) are the most likely cord cutters (or cord nevers), and the cable business depends heavily on bundling. For example Disney owns ESPN (most of it), so they can make the cable companies to take a portfolio of channels, or get none of them. Al Jazeera had no such leverage.

Their business model was a big gamble, based on the past, and didn't work.

View on HN

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo (and subsequently Netflix). Tivo started it with the ability to record and watch later while fast forwarding through commercials. Netflix with it's mountains of commercial free content followed next.

That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking Dead that have community reactions as episodes air.

The reality for cord cutters and cable companies alike is that, if it weren't for ESPN I'd have no reason to have cable. It's the only reason I have a pay TV package.

When you break down the technology, that won't change anytime soon either.

With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.

Netflix already has local boxes on ISP networks that act as a local cache for customers on that network to ease the load on the ISP's peering connections. A similar architecture could handle that fanout for live content as well.

For $20/month you can get ESPN & ESPN2 and about 20 other channels (Food Network, HGTV, Cartoon Network, Discovery, History Channel are a few of the main ones I use) streamed via Sling TV. For another $5 you can add a few more Sports channels.

Serious question: can I record streams from Sling TV so I can watch on my schedule and skip commercials?

There's no way to skip commercials or record shows. Sling does offer an interesting alternative: each channel is accompanied by an on-demand section of recent broadcasts, meaning you wouldn't need to record anything because it'd already be available for streaming. Sadly, support for this is inconsistent between channels.

I signed up for Sling TV over the summer to help get me through long sleepless nights with a newborn. It's an interesting service but there are lots of little problems like the above. I dropped it around Thanksgiving.

I was on their beta and still have it today. I don't watch it a lot, and only really use it for ESPN and background noise.

But every time I'm about to cancel, there's a big matchup on ESPN that makes me say "just one more month". And then since I have it I throw it on as background noise again. It's a vicious cycle.

It's only a complication for the last mile, and I think it can cope. For the backbone, they can just do poor man's multicast with their appliances for ISPs. Just one stream to each ISP/appliance, which is then repeated to each client.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/

> The reality for cord cutters and cable companies alike is that, if it weren't for ESPN I'd have no reason to have cable. It's the only reason I have a pay TV package.

During college football season I got a Sling subscription solely to watch college football (ESPN and the SEC Network mostly). I never even really used the Sling app much - it's terrible, crashes a lot, and isn't on AppleTV. I just used my Sling account to connect to WatchESPN. That, plus an antenna for the marquee matchups on the major networks covered everything I wanted to see this last year at 1/6 the cost of a cable subscription.

All of my football-watching friends were doing the same thing this year.

The fact is, if I could, I would pay ESPN directly what I paid Sling for access to WatchESPN. Because, just like cable, Sling was giving me a bunch of stuff I don't really care about just to get ESPN. There's nothing else on TV that I can't wait for other than sports.

> With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.

I really don't think the problem here is technological so much as it is economic. The scalability problems could be solved if there was the will. But according to one article [0] an unbunbled or streaming subscriber would need to pay $36 a month for ESPN access for them to generate the same revenue they generate through current cable carriage contracts. Considering ESPN is starting to feel the crunch [1] from cord cutting and is beginning to trim costs, I imagine it will eventually become a reality.

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2015/03/25/are-...

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-television-espn-househo...

>isn't on AppleTV

You can use your Sling membership credentials to sign into ESPN's app. The app does not crash from my experience - works a charm.

Yup, that's exactly what I was doing. :)

Doesn't it air on any open channel?

when i got my friends to watch the world cup at home i attached a $5 antenna to the DVR (i build a computer with a $120 TV-in card, and had never used until then!)

the image was not the best, but for live sports, who cares?! oh and it got worse every time a plane passed above.

anyway, the antenna was a very easy solution for the impromptu need for live sports.

Not sure where you're located, but in the US ESPN is a cable/satellite only channel. The only way to get it is with a subscription.

For college sports, they're also the biggest player. The "big" matchups of the week (usually the highest ranked or most interesting teams) in each market are usually played on the major networks that you can pick up with an antenna from the local affiliate. But the rest of the games being televised are carried exclusively* on cable, usually on ESPN channels.

Keep in mind there are 128 Division 1-A (major) programs, and many more 1-AA and lower programs, so there are a LOT of games going on each week. Some games are played during the week, but the very large majority of them are played on Saturday. So there's way more going on then could ever conceivably be carried over the air.

During college football season, there are something like 7 or 8 games playing simultaneously on the various ESPN channels, not including the "Plus" channels that are only available digitally by WatchESPN.

There are a couple others out there (NBC Sports Network and FoxSports come to mind) but neither are bigger in sports than ESPN.

* Depending on where you live, you can also sometimes get radio broadcasts if you live close enough to the school in question that there's a local affiliate that carries the game. Rights for those are handled differently.

i see. well, for air channels, they would probably show the Saturday game with the most local teams only. never really followed american football. but for soccer that works fine for most people. And when there are two games with local teams, they show the bigger one and interrupt it to show goals on the other one.

> an unbunbled or streaming subscriber would need to pay $36 a month for ESPN access for them to generate the same revenue they generate through current cable carriage contracts.

ESPN and professional sports are way over valued and forcing everyone to subsidize sports fans. This is literally the reason why people are becoming cord-cutters, they're tired of paying for things they don't want. Right now 1 in 6 cable subscribers watch ESPN but 6 in 6 cable subscribers pay for it. Cable companies really need to move to an a-la-carte pricing model if they want survive but they're afraid of the large networks pulling their bundles. It's almost like we need a cable monopoly or union to break the network monopolies.

"1 in 6 watches it, 6 in 6 pay for it".

Except that the marginal cost of providing ESPN service to people who do not watch ESPN is nearly zero.

A-la-carte pricing makes sense if the corporation is spending a-la-carte costs, but they're not: the cable hookup and maintenance costs almost the same either way. There are some issues with a cap on the number of channels that can be simultaneously transmitted in a cable pipe, but it's perfectly feasible to launch a few hundred simulcast channels on current tech. You're not paying for the stuff you don't watch, you're paying for what you do watch; Providing the selection of things that you can refuse to watch, is basically free.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Except" or "You're not paying for the stuff you don't watch, you're paying for what you do watch;"

A la carte that avoids ESPN, doesn't exist from the major providers (it's part of everyone's basic packages but ATT that I have seen). That was the point (6 of 6 pay for it).

The cost of the hookup is just one part of the cost. Licensing fees are also present. A quick Google search finds that for ESPN, these are on the order of $5/customer/month. For someone who doesn't watch ESPN, that is a hefty subsidy compared to that of other networks.

Source:http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/dish-espn-trial-off...

Simple_Example_Cable_Company has 200k subscribers, charges $30/month, and licenses:

$10/customer/month to Channel A, which has 100k viewers who only watch it

$10/customer/month to Channel B, which also has 100k viewers who only watch it

...

In 2018, consumer activists manage to break up SECC and institute an a-la-carte system.

In 2019 they can choose to pay $20/customer/month to channel A (which is going to charge enough to keep its revenue at $2M/month), or they can choose to pay $20/customer/month to channel B (which is going to charge enough to keep its revenue at $2M/month).

On top of that, to secure either channel you're going to need a $10 subscription fee to the service provider for hookup (which is going to charge enough to keep its systems operational).

A-la-carte pricing is a zero sum game for the median viewer, so long as the content and the infrastructure keep getting paid for. It is nothing like "But I just want to be able to buy an appetizer, why are you making me pay for an entree!", because appetizers and entrees are both real goods which cost money to produce, while additional permissions to change the channel to something else, are not real goods. Food prices will not drastically rise for the same dish, if the customers order less of it, while entertainment prices will.

I think people are hanging their monopolistic concerns, which are valid for the most part, on a-la-carte pricing, and it's just nonsense.

20/month is 240$ - for 240$ I can buy a season pass (40$) to 6 individual shows. Unless i want to watch more than 6 of AMCs shows concurrently, its much more expensive to pay 20$/ month. Even including shows that are over, I cant think of 6 successful shows on any single cable network. (walking dead, mad men, breaking bad, better call saul?, talking dead?, ??)

On top of this, pricing has already been set and normalized in this market.

Netflix is 7.99

amazon prime is around 8$

hulu is around 9 for ad free

hbogo is 14.99 and is seen as premium in the marketplace

I cant see any network pricing themselves above HBO and being successful.

You have succeeded in completely missing the point, by fixating on an arbitrary number while missing the simple principle that the contrived example is meant to illustrate.

If the service remains the same, the total that consumers pay will necessarily have to remain about the same. Instead of getting the freedom to change channels, they'll be stuck with the limited selection they have subscribed to. The bundling business model is a natural best fit for the technology that permits channels to be streamed simultaneously over the same lines; Anything else is a waste for the consumer and for the company.

You guys are chasing illusory discounts: "If I just had to pay $5 to ESPN and I could drop everythng I don't watch..." cannot mathematically happen, because ESPN has to crank up their prices or end most of their production to survive as soon as their customer base drops by 90% due to the end of bundling.

You have succeeded in completely missing the point.

It doesnt matter what ESPNs current revenue is, and it doesnt matter how many subscribers the lose when the shift towards a la carte.

The fact is that the pricing for sports content has already happened; if ESPN wanted to weigh in on how much sports should cost, they should have gotten to market before the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc.

ESPN can launch at whatever price they want, but if that price exceeds the price of the official league packages that i intend to watch, there is absolutely 0 chance that i subscribe to ESPN

You're chasing illusory revenues, "If I just set the price at X$, we could drop everyone who doesnt watch" cannot mathematically happen, because NFL et al would have to crank down their prices for ESPN to remain competitive.

>or end most of their production to survive

DING DING DING - this is exactly what will happen when espn finds out people dont value their more recent tabloid/drama centered content

An actual example:

I currently pay $150/year for NFL gamepass. This allows me to watch every single NFL game in HD live, including pre and post season games.

150/year is 12.50/month. IF ESPN released a service costing 13/month, i wouldn't buy it. What value does ESPN add to my existing NFL gamepass package? Do they think i would pay 13/month purely for sportscenter? purely for their terrible discussions of the latest drama in the sports world? Maybe if they offered some kind of sports news and debate like they did a decade or so ago.

This is ESPN's competition. They have to compete with existing services that already fill the need for watching sports.

I imagine ESPNs current broadcast contracts do not specifically allow them to move to a la carte structure, nor do i imagine it allows them to begin any kind of streaming service. I very much doubt the leagues are going to be very kind when renegotiating those contracts now that they all have their own streaming services.

Your analysis is all wrong. Not all programming costs the same to make or license and not all people consume the same amount of programming. Your point basically boils down to "those people whose ESPN you are subsidizing are also subsidizing your programming that they might not watch." That's true, but the two don't necessarily cancel out. Sports programming costs a lot to license because there is high demand and there's basically a monopoly.

Non-zero marginal costs would further favor a la carte pricing as it would reduce actual waste, but even with zero marginal cost there is still subsidization.

I don't disagree with you, but I could apply this same logic to the 50 gazillion channels of reality TV cable was offering me that I could not possibly care less about. I don't like subsidizing them, but I was still paying for them.

I wish there was an unbundled option so I could buy just ESPN. That is literally the only thing cable companies have that I care about. Even better for me would be to just cut the cable companies out entirely and let me pay $20 a month or something directly to ESPN for WatchESPN access.

Funny thing is, I don't watch those channels either. That's why I don't have cable, there is almost no value in it. There are maybe 2 or 3 channels that I'd want but I can't get them without paying for 70 channels I don't want.

> an unbundled or streaming subscriber would need to pay $36 a month for ESPN access for them to generate the same revenue they generate through current cable carriage contracts

That subscriber will be worth a lot more once they can be targeted with individually personalized marketing content based on previous TV-watching habits, augmented with third-party data from other digital channels, web browsing history, purchasing history, etc. It's coming; YouTube proves it can be done. It's only a matter of time before we see different business models for the monetization of streaming content on more 'traditional' TV channels as well.

The alternative is a subscription model that would price out many sports fans, or obsolescence followed by slow death for want of revenue.

> It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.

That's a nice use case for multicast. Worked for me over a decade ago. I can only assume the technology has gotten better since.

The number of people and expected video quality have also increased

I think that use case was implied by the OP:

With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast.

Multicast is effectively broadcast -- it's (theoretically) great if what you're distributing is a live video stream. But we're moving toward a world where the vast majority of what we're watching is on-demand. While I could be wrong about this, my strong suspicion is that the technology hasn't gotten better in the last decade; most implementations just don't scale to the level that a service like ESPN would require (i.e., millions of nodes reliably receiving HD video), and I'm not even sure most commercial Internet backbones support multicast.

Does multicast see any actual use? I was under the impression that while it's theoretically great for a live video stream, nobody ever actually uses it.

The last time I checked a few UK TV channels were doing multicast streaming, but none of the big ISPs actually supported it. I have no idea what's involved in making it work but I find it really sad that it's not used more.

Out of curiosity I dug into this a bit more. The BBC's multicast trial (which has been a trial for at least ten years now) is still running, but I assume at this point isn't going anywhere.

However BT (one of the big ISPs) uses multicast to deliver their TV service, so I assume BT their connections are capable of receiving multicasts if properly configured.

Unfortunately more and more people seem to think connecting through NAT is acceptable.

> if it weren't for ESPN I'd have no reason to have cable. It's the only reason I have a pay TV package.

Yup. Unfortunately, even just getting ESPN (and similar channels like FS1 etc) means buying huge bloated bundles. I'm hopeful this will change in the next couple of years though.

Sling TV. $15 a month (ESPN/ESPN2 are included).

Just give me that and the BIG10 network and I'm set.

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo...

Surely at least some of the blame can be shared with the total abdication of the educational mission on the part of thousands of university administrators. The athletic tail has been wagging the academic dog for decades longer than Tivo has been around.

People say that a lot, but most athletic departments aren't actually profitable. The biggest thing that athletics helps with is marketing exposure for the university. Applications go through the roof when a team is on TV. It improves morale in the alumni base which has a big effect in academic donations as well.

I'm a Clemson grad for example and 15 years ago, Clemson's athletic department budget was about $30 million a year (for all sports combined). Since Tivo, it's gone up to about $70 million a year but it's totally self sufficient as well. It's all fueled by donations, ticket sales and TV revenues. TV revenues account for about $20 million of that budget so half of the increase is purely from TV.

Sure, some athletics departments are "profitable", others are not. That doesn't contradict the proposition that there is too much money involved in college athletics, and that it is and was the responsibility of college presidents and boards to prevent that. Blaming Tivo for this is more ridiculous than any Tivo-blaming we ever heard from the copyright mafiaa.

The TV advertising value of college and pro football relative to everything else on TV has gone through the roof ever since skipping commercials became the norm.

If you can identify another reason why TV contracts for the SEC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12 and PAC 12 suddenly skyrocketed in the last 15 years I would love to hear it.

Multicast has been sitting there in the specs since forever. If ISPs ever feel like switching it on, there's your scalability problem solved.

Isn't having millions of people watching the same thing at the same time easier than millions of people watching different things at the same time?

It is on a broadcast where people are listening to a single signal (radio, antenna, satellite, etc).

Over the internet, it has to operate as a point to point TCP connection for each device so 50,000 people watching is 50,000 individual HD streams. If multicast over the internet worked it'd be another ballgame of course.

I understand the difference between broadcast as found in radio and how a "broadcast" would work over the internet.

But 50,000 people watching 50,000 individual HD streams that happen to contain the same thing still seems slightly easier than 50,000 people watching 50,000 individual HD streams with different content.

I'm taking it as a given that the technology and infrastructure is already there to support millions of people watching different streams simultaneously, since that seems to be what Netflix does.

When Netflix does it, during high viewing hours I've seen reports claiming that they account for 30% of all US internet traffic. It's still a very high bandwidth operation.

The equivalent of a CDN where each ISP has a box receiving the broadcast so that all of their local customers don't have to stream direct from ESPN will make it more tolerable, but the big hit will be on people trying to do it from cell networks.

When Netflix does it they are working with pre-optimized content. They get to prepare all of the video to stream in advance, optimize it for each screen size, transfer each variant it down to each ISP and then turn it on when it's ready. With a live feed you've got to do all that on the fly to each ISP appliance that you've got in place.

I'm sure it can be done, somehow, but I have serious concerns about the technological cost of scaling that for a huge audience. Just as a comparison here, the college football title game that just happened garnered about 29 million viewers on TV and about 800,000 streaming with WatchESPN. That was the most streaming traffic ESPN had ever had.

I can personally attest to the impact of this change. I used to watch their English language coverage, but have not done so since the launch of their cable channel. If this decision means I can stream the international feed from the US again, I won't complain.

It's actually still possible to stream their international feed (AJE) from the US. I'd rather not post how here out of fear something will be changed and it won't work any more, but if you send me an email or reply with some way to send you a couple lines of text I'll set you up.

It's stupid easy, streams straight to VLC.

Furthermore are cable customers really Al Jazeera's target audience? Those folks sticking with cable are probably older, more traditional people - do they regard Al Jazeera as legitimate news source or is it "that terrorist news channel" in their eyes? Honest question, I've always enjoyed Al Jazeera, but as a european I don't know if they are mainstream enough to succeed in US cable networks.

> Furthermore are cable customers really Al Jazeera's target audience?

I think it was purely a business decision. The way the US cable model works is the content providers get however many cents a month per subscriber that has the channel. The individual amount isn't great, but the cable company does all the hard work of collecting the money and giving you a single nice bigger cheque.

It also helps with advertising, because they can now give aggregate demographic information to their advertisers such as income levels, locations, and others based on correlation (eg age). Advertisers really don't want to pay for non-target users. For example if targeting women in their 30s, they aren't going to pay for ads going to males in their 60s. The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information, especially if you don't already have it (eg Google and especially Facebook do). This can be somewhat addressed by requiring accounts to view, but that is a big burden for getting new viewers (who wants a new account to view something you have never seen before?)

Ben Thompson of Stratechery (good site and reporting BTW) has a nice overiew article on the US cable tv ecosystem: https://stratechery.com/2015/changing-unchanging-structure-t...

>The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information

Is this a problem in 2016? I'm pretty sure you can get _MORE_ data from internet tracking vs. otherwise.

The cable channel only decision was made in 2013. In 2016 they could just shut down Al Jazeera America, and stream the main channel. (It looks like that is what will happen.)

You do get data from internet tracking, but it is based around your activity and some correlation (eg geoip). Note that Al Jazeera would only get information about their own activity. There are various services that aggregate at a higher level, but they do cost money. I can't find any now, but there were a few companies that had a service you could ask about the current user and they would return likely demographic information.

That all matters if you are trying to sell the advertising yourself. If someone else higher in the user visibility chain sells the ads (eg google, facebook, yahoo) then they already have the comprehensive tracking and demographics. But advertising isn't that profitable and those guys will take a big chunk of the revenue, while you remain beholden to them.

I did wonder if perhaps its name and anti-Arabic prejudice held held it back. It would be a shame if it did, because Al Jazeera seemed like a remarkably sane and thoughtful voice in the otherwise short-sighted and highly partial media landscape of the US.

Yes, that's what I meant - I remember it was an issue when they started to gain traction in the US market. For someone not familiar with them, Al Jazeera likely doesn't sound a like a legitimate news source. I wondered if that's still the case. Persoannly, I found their reports to be excellent in many cases.

I'd also like to add that Al Jazeera's most likely viewers are obviously going to be pretty liberal, and therefore younger and much more likely to be cord-cutters. Basically, their best demographic is going to be Millenials, and those are the most likely to not have a cable subscription.

They really shot themselves in the foot with this move.

I thought Al Jazeera was run at a loss as a propaganda expense by the Qatari government. Is that untrue?

Most of their articles and videos seem to be quite objective. Might be run as a way of raising awareness (every once in a while) of Middle Eastern progress, but I certainly wouldn't call that propaganda.

Their reports on Israel and the Syrian civil war are a very one-sided.

http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/middleeast.html

They try to be objective, but nobody blames any media for siding against ISIL.

As for Israel, I feel like Al Jazeera isn't one-sided; there simply are more articles about Palestinian deaths because there are more Palestinian deaths. Even when around 20 Israelis across a few attacks died at the end of last year, with each death heavily reported around western media, a comparative death toll puts it into perspective: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2015/10/mapping.... It seems that one side simply has better weapons, and so, causes more deaths.

No, it is entirely true.

Might be. But it does not matter that much. A sheikhdom is something else than your regular dictatorship. As long as you stay away from critizising the ruler directly, you can talk about pretty much everything (depends on country of course). Dubai/VAE, for example, feels like an "ok" free country to me, even if it is an absolute monarchy.

This. Moving away from service chord cutters at this point was just odd. Embracing alternative media has done wonders for outlets like Russia Today (Though that's state sponsored so it might not be the best comparison).

> Russia Today (Though that's state sponsored so it might not be the best comparison)

Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar. However, I agree with you that it's not a good comparision. BBC also is state sponsored, but generally considered to be trustworthy.

RT is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi; I wouldn't trust their weather reports.

Same with the Australian ABC. Pretty much only rusted on supporters of the Liberal and National parties are the only ones who don't support it, and even they watch it over the commerical networks.

That said, I really want to see what Netflix can do with the news cycle.

Although it's becoming less meaningful statistic due to a host of reasons the audience figures for free-to-air (FTA) TV have almost always had the ABC trailing the smallest commercial network. A 2009 graph[0] shows how it's historically been although digging into more recent numbers their position is slightly better with the new digital channels.[1] Although we are in the holiday season and the commercial channels seem to perform better in other portions of the year.

[0] https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/research/statistics/archf...

[1] (~467k pdf) http://oztam.com.au//documents/2015/OzTAM-20151227-C1MetFTAS...

> I really want to see what Netflix can do with the news cycle.

I don't see this as a good fit for Netflix as I'm not quite sure what they would bring to the news cycle table that isn't already being done. Commercial free broadcasts? Infrastructure? Most quality, public media stations already upload full, commercial free shows to their Youtube channels (and often with quick turn-around from the original broadcast date.) You just simply need to subscribe to their channel (something that I can't do in Netflix).

Regardless of their propaganda or slant, these outlets are useful specifically because they are not part of the US media cycle "play list". US audiences are in a filter bubble. Also some of the domestic outlets are too busy reposting Vines to cover enough stories in between sports and weather.

Once encountering a story on those alternate sources, you can read with some critical thinking maybe, and then look for other sources to corroborate.

You're trading one filter bubble for another. Unless you want to see how the population of another country experience propaganda, I don't see how it could be useful. You could do critical thinking on any source, not just alternates.

Well I mean I can't say anything to Russia Today but Al Jazeera for instance is often the only english language network with reporters on the ground in a lot of middle east situations.

This. It can be hard to get a non-US spin on middle eastern events, which is I regularly look to AJ and BBC. The value is in getting a different perspective, not completely unbiased reporting. Associated Press feeds can also be somewhat helpful: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/APNewsFeeds

Yep. There's whole different point of views to be seen. People are saying propaganda like it means only the caricaturization of propaganda(i.e.: overt), and, corollarily, like what is not overt is not propaganda or like it's "but ours is nicer/good". It's not like this, propaganda is everywhere. To me, anything that's not the pure facts plus context is the same as propaganda/ideology, there's only reality or propaganda/ideology, it's what I'm saying. If you want to approximate reality of stuff getting the different perspectives is absolutely mandatory. I guess that's too much work for most people, though.

Yes, and even when you are publishing pure facts, which is a good goal for journalists, there is still some editorial in which of many facts you choose to publish.

I agree, getting multiple perspectives on an issue can be extremely time-consuming and challenging. This site shares three different perspectives on current events in one place: http://pxw.news/whos-to-blame-for-the-iran-saudi-dispute/

Thats really interesting, thanks! I'll be following this one :)

Right, but if you take the union of sources you see more new stories total.

In order to do critical thinking on a subject, you first need to know that it exists. Alternate sources can be helpful with being alerted to stuff.

Although with Russia Today, it takes a pretty large effort to filter out the information from between the propaganda. Al Jazeera on the other hand has a fairly high signal-to-noise ratio.

Being able to approach things from many perspectives (even if those perspectives are highly biased, because there does not exist an unbiased perspective in human-gathered news) is very important.

I agree, but getting multiple perspectives on an issue can be extremely time-consuming and challenging. This site shares three different perspectives on current events in one place: http://pxw.news/whos-to-blame-for-the-iran-saudi-dispute/

Ever heard of "there's always three sides to every story"?

Apart from what the others replied(those networks will show stuff that isn't 'interesting' for some demographic), having the 'your' and 'mine' sides of the story is pretty much necessary to approximate the 'true' side.

> RT is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi; I wouldn't trust their weather reports.

So like NBC nightly news? The US is full of what can only be described as US government propaganda, 60 minutes is a prime example. CBS and NBC are no better than RT unfortunately, they just often tell Americans what they want to hear so nobody bats an eyelid.

AJ and BBC have their biases but at least they try.

PS - I moved to the US from abroad and was genuinely shocked not by the obviously ridiculous cable news (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News) but by the "news" pretending to be unbiased while in reality being a US government mouthpiece.

I don't know a good way to prove that US media is not a government mouthpiece, but I don't think there is much evidence to support such a strong claim, whereas it is pretty easy to argue that RT is a government mouthpiece. EG:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/12/the-truth-about-russia-to...

Just to be clear I never said RT wasn't a government mouthpiece. I said that some US news is "as bad as" them.

I have no idea how exactly it works with CBS/NBC/60 minutes. Does the US government literally write the words? Do they just dictate what they should report on? Do they send them pre-produced bottled reports? It is unclear, but what is clear is the ultimate result: pure dripping pro-US government propaganda of the worst kind.

I don't think we are watching the same news at all. CBS and NBC regularly have reports that the government would stop if they could.

>I said that some US news is "as bad as" them.

I've seen plenty of reports on NBC or CBS criticizing Obama (or Bush before him), have you ever seen a report that was critical of Putin on RT?

How would this even work. Do they switch stories depending on who is in power?

> have you ever seen a report that was critical of Putin on RT?

Yes.

Additionally I didn't say Obama was running anything, I was more thinking the DoD. They likely fund, produce, or have produced specific bottled segments.

Which isn't to say they have direct editorial control, just that propaganda is a common sight on US TVs.

Plus I can back up what I am saying, here's a program from 2002:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_military_analyst_prog...

So from 2002 to 2008 I can prove that this occurred. But since then it has definitely continued, I'm sure they renamed it, and retooled it, and involved more private entities to act as legal buffs, but it definitely still goes on to this day.

> How would this even work. Do they switch stories depending on who is in power?

I don't understand the question.

The US isn't run by an autocracy so there are competing interests in the government. It doesn't make sense to claim they are being controlled by the government, because they wouldn't agree with each other on what should be said. That said, there's definitely an implicit bias that America is right and North Korea/Iran/Russia etc are wrong but that's a nationwide problem, hardly evidence of some mass conspiracy.

You're replying to a comment that links to an article on the domestic PsyOps program run by the DoD, officially, since shortly after 9/11. The issue is not that people are patriotic. It is not even that political dissent is not tolerated in mainstream media. It is that propaganda pieces, manufactured with the expressed purpose to manipulate the electorate, are broadcast.

It's not like there is a party line on everything. You are allowed to have differing opinions on benign issues, such as cooking, celebrities, or football.

There is a saying.. We in the USA have one party, the Business Party, with two right wings.

The Democrat-Republican spectrum spans the spectrum of opinion that is fundable by the business community. There is plenty of vigorous debate within that spectrum. But money wins elections and funds advertising-dependent media, so that's how non business friendly perspectives get filtered out.

It's not a conspiracy, it's more "unnatural selection" by money in the media and political systems.

The working class press of a century ago had a much broader spectrum of opinion, for example. But it didn't rely on advertising.

If money wins elections, can you explain why Jeb Bush isn't polling first in the Republican primary process right now? Can you also explain why Bernie Sanders is within single digits of Clinton nationally, and beating her in Iowa and New Hampshire? You'd expect that the candidates who spend the most (and represent the monied establishment) would do the best, right? Is it possible that there are other forces at play (for instance, popular opinion?)

Those are not election wins. We are not even close to the peak of the election cycle where the real money gets spent. There certainly are more forces at play, but money plays the key role.

>There certainly are more forces at play, but money plays the key role.

I don't think money is close to playing the key role. If that were true it would only take a few billion to buy a presidential election.

Money is definitely necessary, but I don't think it's sufficient.

Removed old comment, replaced it with this one:

Here, read this: http://stevedutch.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-are-both-politica...

> "I've seen plenty of reports on NBC or CBS criticizing Obama (or Bush before him), have you ever seen a report that was critical of Putin on RT?"

Here you go:

http://youtu.be/ZolXrjGIBJs

And immediately after she said that RT executives issued statements saying that she was "misled by the American media" and that

“In her comment Ms. Martin also noted that she does not possess a deep knowledge of reality of the situation in Crimea."

RT then used this one piece of dissent against the normal pro Russia coverage of Crimea to parade around as example of their openness.

You'll also notice that less than a year after saying that she was off the network.

> "You'll also notice that less than a year after saying that she was off the network."

Fair point, but I wouldn't say the US networks were much better...

http://youtu.be/ozxzNjRqCiE

http://youtu.be/HrKKkGl3TnY

> Does the US government literally write the words? Do they just dictate what they should report on? Do they send them pre-produced bottled reports? It is unclear, but what is clear is the ultimate result: pure dripping pro-US government propaganda of the worst kind.

They often attack and upset the government, including leaking government secrets and sometimes getting prosecuted for it. I don't think it's at all comparable. Is Fox a mouthpiece for Obama? Was MSNBC a mouthpiece for Bush? The NY Times, to its credit, is criticized by all sides a being on the 'other' side.

When was the last time NBC, CNN, Fox, or CBS leaked government secrets?

There's pretty good evidence that lots of American media outlets are government mouthpieces - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent for example

That book argues that mass media are biased because they are beholden to for-profit corporations, advertisers, and large-entity sourcing. I didn't read it, that's just in the outline that's in the link you provided.

I think Noam would prefer if they were government mouthpieces instead of corporate mouthpieces, as he's socialist.

Regardless, I don't think "Noam Chomsky wrote a book" is an argument with evidence. It's rather an appeal to authority. But if it were, the book should actually be about the argument you're making.

The book is about the argument. One example from the book is the 1984 Nicaraguan general election (Wikipedia notes this), where US media sources took the White House press secretary's words as gospel, ignoring the atrocities on the ground.

Also, thinking that socialists are willing to blindly trust government sources is pretty wrong as well. Far left and far right both share a distrust of the state.

US mass media exhibit both government bias and corporate bias. And it can be hard to distinguish them, because US government is also subject to strong corporate bias. That was very much so during the Regan and Bush years. The Democrats are more subtle, and reflect a power base that's far more covert.

Suggestion: try reading on stuff you want to critique before commenting about them instead spouting malformed ideas that you patched up from internet comments, Facebook posts and other distortion prone medium. People who do read up on stuff can clearly see you don't know what you're talking about.

Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman have done excellent comparative research demonstrating exactly that in great detail. For example by comparing coverage of events by the U.S. and its allies to similar events by enemies, finding consistent and strong bias in the mainstream media.

They also develop a theory, more of an explanation, that this is essentially because mainstream media is funded through advertising which then naturally biases it towards the interests of the business elite. That is how we get thought control in a democratic society.

See Manufacturing Consent and Necessary Illusions for numerous cases. Wonderful books. See also Alex Carey's work on corporate propaganda, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.

Not directly -- but the networks depend on the government to give them all-important access to events (press conferences, interviews, etc). Report something the government doesn't like? Next time, you'll be the one that's shut out from the next White House press briefing.

The news media in the US isn't a "government mouthpiece", but there is definitely East Coast government-media-academia axis which considers itself "elite" and has common goals. To have the wrong opinions is bad for your career.

It's not so much that the news is a government mouthpiece, more that each network tends to report the news in a fashion that supports its political views: CNN, MSNBC, and the traditional alphabet networks on the left, Fox News on the right. (And, of course, these are American definitions of left and right, so feel free to map them to your nation of origin however you please.) If the network is simpatico to the party in power, they'll sound like government propagandists. If not, RT or Al-Jazeera will have nothing on how venomous they get.

To put it another way, imagine the Guardian vs. the Daily Mail, but on television instead. No one, I hope, would pick up a copy of those newspapers expecting the unbiased facts; same deal here.

> CNN, MSNBC, and the traditional alphabet networks on the left

An important point, I think: The propagandists, most prominently today the News Corp outlets such as Fox and the WSJ, want to portray the whole world as ideologically driven. It innoculates their followers against anything anyone else can say (e.g., 'it's all left-wing propaganda, don't even bother') and justifies their own propaganda.

But everyone is not ideological. MSNBC is, at least it was the little I saw of them awhile ago, maybe NPR is, but I disagree that the rest are on the left. They are mostly straight-ahead journalism without significant ideology (though of course nothing is perfect in the world, and I'm omitting the unconcious ideology of the US popular perspective that people like Chomsky observe.)

Eh, for one thing, ideology in journalism can be just as much what you choose to report on as how you report on it. You could find right-wingers who will complain at you all day about how CNN/NBC/whoever spend virtually no time reporting on things which make the current Administration look bad and lots of time reporting on things which make their opponents look bad, and it'll be hard to say they're wrong.

I doubt it's possible for the news to be truly non-ideological for this, and many other, reasons. The best one can hope for is a news organization that is a) straightforward and open about its political viewpoint and b) reports in a sober and accurate manner with a minimum of flinging partisan red meat around. There are a fair number of American news sources that are a), but b) is much harder to come by, especially on television. Given this, I can understand why some Americans flock to the BBC or Al Jazeera or whoever, even if I personally despise their editorial positions.

> "I doubt it's possible for the news to be truly non-ideological for this, and many other, reasons."

It's more straightforward than you might think, you just have to give airtime to conflicting views, and make sure discussion of news stories are conducted respectfully.

I understand what you're saying about it being possible to show bias just by what news stories you choose to cover, but inviting on dissenting voices helps tackle that issue. If you expect intelligent debate from your news sources, you'll spot it when it's absent.

No, not like NBC or anything else you mention.

One is backed by the government and runs propaganda. The other is more pro-US than you like, but can and will be very critical of government officials and practices.

What is propaganda about NBA nightly news or 60 minutes, something that isn't better explained by those shows catering to the values and preconceptions of their viewers?

Remember, there's a special name for the type of reporting journalists do when they aren't just copying & pasting government and corporate press releases in their news stories: "investigative journalism."

Anything else is just reporting publicly-available information from some official source.

Notice that that's also the first line item to get slashed when budget-cuttin' time rolls around.

Perhaps there is a happy middle which doesn't cost an arm and a leg to produce a report, and still isn't straight-up propaganda. It's called reporting publicly-available information from multiple credible sources, and not reporting single-sourced PR releases. Also known as "journalism". I heard somewhere that it was essential to the nature of a free state.

The Al Jazeera that we get in the UK is apparently run by a lot of ex-BBC people, and uses a lot of the BBC house style, which means and news report will instantly look respectable to a big British market segment. Not that I've ever met anyone in the UK who's ever watched it, of course.

This is the best run-down of the BBC house style I've seen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI

BBC is not considered trustworthy in India. We listen to BBC for English language but also recognize that BBC still suffers from colonial-era mindset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Indophobi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Anti-Hind...

"Writing for the 2008 edition of the peer-reviewed Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Alasdair Pinkerton analyses the coverage of India by the BBC since India's independence from British rule in 1947 until 2008. Pinkerton observes a tumultuous history involving allegations of anti-India bias in the BBC's reportage, particularly during the cold war, and concludes that the BBC's coverage of South Asian geopolitics and economics shows a pervasive and hostile anti-India bias due to the BBC's alleged imperialist and neo-colonialist stance.[118]"

The BBC is not seen as a trustworthy news source by all in the UK either, but its biases are harder to spot than some other outlets. Generally speaking, you only get a clear picture of their news manipulation when you're on the opposing side of the messages they put out.

To give a recent example, there was a story a week or two ago where they held back on an interview with a politician they knew was going to resign until just before a parliamentary debate, which appears to have been a move to undermine the leader of this politician's party, which they've been making efforts to discredit.

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?p=81049649

Although there is no such thing as complete objectivity in news reporting, the BBC news department tends to try to give all political parties an equally hard time, with the possible exception of extreme right parties like UKIP, who they are a little harder on.

Thats odd, I distinctly remember a huge liking and trust for the BBC (especially radio) among the older Indian folk - middle class and above.

I think it's more accurate to say that the BBC is disliked by the newer Hindu nationalist types for not pandering to their world view.

I think it's more accurate to say that the BBC is disliked by lots of people are aren't culturally Marxist.

BBC is fine for left-leaning Anglosphere types, but it's not very broad in terms of the views covered.

"culturally Marxist" sounds like a right-wing way of saying "not Marxist." It makes about as much sense as being "culturally vegetarian."

"Cultural Marxism" is a shibboleth used in far-right white nationalist circles to mean "not racist". It's typically paired with claims that "cultural Marxism" is a "Jewish plot" to cause "white genocide".

If you see anyone use it unironically, run away.

Sorry, but you're not going to be able to tag somebody like me with the alt-right label. I'm none of those things. The point is that the BBC isn't only disliked by Indian nationalists. That's what I was responding to.

And actually, that's not what Marxism is or means at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

When you use the word cultural marxist you're outing yourself as a right-extremist conspiracy theorist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...

That's actually not the meaning I was using. It's pretty obvious that BBC is not centrist in content.

BBC is not considered trustworthy by lots of people in the West, too. They're very left-biased, and very poor at presenting opposing viewpoints.

... and most of the left wing considers BBC right-biased.

Do you have anything to back this up? To me, they are biased to the establishment/center right, which seems borne out by at least one study:

http://www.newstatesman.com/broadcast/2013/08/hard-evidence-...

You can question BBC on Impartiality & Diversity of Opinion http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/...

> BBC also is state sponsored, but generally considered to be trustworthy.

Brit here: The BBC is state-funded, but it's output is not state-driven. The news team (IMHO) generally takes an editorial view that is to the left of the current Tory government. For once I think the BBC is to the right of the current Labour opposition, whose new leadership is the furthest left it has been for a generation. And perhaps worryingly non-electable to people who are mildly left-of-centre.

My current approach to getting the UK news is to interpolate between the Guardian (pro-Labour, but less so of its current leadership) and the Telegraph (Torygraph).

> "worryingly non-electable"

I find it baffling that people still believe this rhetoric, especially after Corbyn winning the Labour leadership election by a huge margin. The whole 'unelectable' thing certainly gets repeated enough in the media, but I'd hoped more people would've seen through the concerted effort to attack him by now.

Yes. The BBC isn't pro-govt but it isn't neutral either. IMO

> The BBC is state-funded, but it's output is not state-driven.

It's amazing how many people don't understand this fact. You'll see people on reddit compare the BBC to RussiaToday or Xinhua. The latter two are literally government run agencies that specifically exist to push their country's narrative of world events out to the rest of the world. The BBC is government owned but not government ran, there's a massive difference.

If Western media could not stop the WMD lie, what are they good for? You can find BBC fabrication in faked Madaya media images [1], or see bad stage acting used in BBC Panorama 'Saving Syria's Children.' [2]

[1] https://thewallwillfall.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/madaya-bbc-...

[2] https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/

_______ is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi (INSERT TOP NEWS NETWORK HERE)

> considered to be trustworthy

By who, please, people who don't watch the BBC? The BBC has been in opposition to the UK government once in living memory, back in 2003, and it's still being talked about.

none of the news channels is trustworthy. the difference is in degree of bias. BBC is very biased.

The BBC is not very objective in its coverage of Israel. http://bbcwatch.org is very critical of the BBC in this respect.

Al Jazeera seems to have a problem with Jews in general ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_controversies_and... says so ). They also don't like the Shia - not without editorial bias so to speak.

ironically, the only station not following the old-US media book is going away because they followed their business model.

No, they didn't. Part of the terms of them being able to buy Current and retain broadcast rights with the existing networks was a requirement that AJ stop online streaming. Without the deal, they would have lost all the distribution Current came with.

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