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Comment by zandjager | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remembers something akin to "TV tax" ? It was a tax paid to sustain national TV (media) in a large scale, which provides them the possibility of being independent and not struggle with financing problems. It is simple, and it works, but I guess it's not an option anymore. Without a guaranteed unbiased source of money we cannot claim to have independent news or news that serves global interests (with global meaning the pool of contributors which in this case is close to global). Local news are not interesting. If you want to know what happened in your neighborhood, go out and ask your neighbors, talk to them.

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We have a kind of “TV tax” here in the Czech Republic. (AFAIK the system is more common in Europe.) It mostly works, the “national TV” is much better than the commercial ones overall, in quality journalism. It is also under a constant attack from various politicians and other people, as it’s obviously inconvenient for them.

Regarding local news, I run a local newspaper in a town of about 11 thousand people and I strongly disagree that local news aren’t interesting. Having a good local newspaper is an important catalyst for higher quality local government, for example.

I've experienced both UK and Czech TV/radio tax and can confirm that both are better quality than their commercial counterparts (though the BBC is on a downward trajectory) and are under periodic attacks by the right-leaning parties.

They're surprisingly cheap too - it works out something like 2160 CZK/year (US$100) for Ceska televize/rozhlas, and 150 GBP/year (US$200) for the UK TV license.

Yeah, we have something similar in the UK for the BBC, where we pay for a TV license for the service and its programming. Not quite a TV tax (since it sustains all parts of the BBC rather than just their TV programming), but it works well none the less.

(Though it'd be nice if something similar funded other TV networks and media organisations too, since everyone's struggling in today's economic climate and a good media setup can't just be one organisation).

Look up Robert W. McChesney, who's been arguing for similar concepts for decades.

Sounds like the BBC here in UK?

This may not be the proper place to ask - but I'm generally disconnected from the news cycle outside of tech and sports, mainly because I don't know of any good, objective news sources.

Is there anything that you or anyone else on HN can recommend?

There's no such thing as an objective news source, the act of selecting "news" or "not news" is subjective.

But given that, the best strategy is to step outside news targeted at you. Read foreign coverage of your own country. In the UK, I'd suggest the Irish Times as a starting point. The FT is also good as it's targeted at a specialist audience and not the general public.

There is no such thing as an "objective" source of news that is without bias. All publications express bias through their editorial decisions on merely what stories to cover and not cover.

Not that I recommend it, but if you're looking for a relatively neutral way of 'staying informed' about current events, follow a news wire service like Reuters or the AP. Just don't think that either of them is giving you a complete account of anything.

I built an app called Read Across The Aisle that offers a variety of news sources across the political spectrum and has a timer that tracks the aggregate political bias in your news consumption.

The app is free — and provides free access to the WSJ, thanks to a generous partnership they offered us.

http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com

Have you considered collaborating with https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ to expand the list of analyzed sites?

Haven't heard of them before but will check it out. Thanks!

Would love to try it out, but I use FF and Android

We'll probably be on FF soon — it's not a super difficult port from Chrome.

The Economist.

It's classical Liberal. Derided by the left for being pro market. Nicknamed 'The Ecommunist' by bond traders.

The articles are short. Read through it every week and you will get a better understanding of the world for your time than pretty much anything else will give you.

Diversify for viewpoint, and filter aggressively for straight bullshit.

Top-tier US print sources, national news organs, some cross-aisle sampling, and various monitoring of chatter, international media.

NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Streeet Journal, Christian Science Monitor. Good, though all have a net strong institutional bias.

NPR, PBS, CBC, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera, ICIJ.

Bloomberg strikes me as quite good, see also news wires: Rueters, AP, AFP.

Sample headlines out of London, France, Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, etc.

Recognise that some organs are highly propagandistic.

FT, The Guardian, The Economist, Mother Jones, Democracy Today, ProPublica.

Monitor network news headlines: ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox.

Right-wing talk: Hannity, Carlson, Jones, Limbaugh (all nutjobs, but with large audiences and strong influence.)

Metasources include reports on influence or corruption. Sourcewatch and On the Media, groups such as FAIR or Project Censorship are on my list.

I've cut way back on my own news exposure as 1) it's crazy-making and 2) tremendously non-strategic. I periodically monitor the above, though mostly I dive deep into themes of interest, guided by the overarching question "what are the Big Problems?". I've been kicking around the idea of what a true news dashboard or other interface might look like.

Personally, I try to subscribe to subreddits like r/news, r/worldnews, ... and a few subreddits on both sides of the American political spectrum; I find that it's been good enough for me so far.

If you think r/news or r/worldnews are neutral, I've got some bad news for you...

I never said I thought they were neutral; I just use them as one way to get a view of what's going on in the world.

r/NeutralPolitics might interest you, but it's kinda slow in activity.

> Anyone remembers something akin to "TV tax" ? It was a tax paid to sustain national TV (media) in a large scale, which provides them the possibility of being independent and not struggle with financing problems.

Yes, I do. I live in a country that has one.

> It is simple, and it works,

For some value of "works", and only if you're being generous. We don't have an independent publicly financed media, they are PR outlet for a political faction just fine.

You would do much better job by first learning what the world outside your country has to say about those simple ideas of yours.

>You would do much better job by first learning what the world outside your country has to say about those simple ideas of yours.

1. This sounds a bit condescending

2. E.g.: Switzerland just voted to keep theirs. Seems to be seen as desriable

3. OPs problem wasn't that they are an outlet for a political faction, but that they struggle to finance themselves and are almost forced to pander to an audience to attract advertisement

4. Living in a country where the state financed media is heavily status quo biased (germany) but also produces and finances some of the most scathing criticisms of the same (Boehmerman), I feel we need to be wary of false equivalences. State financed media isn't a perfect panacea to political pandering, but it's definitely better than the cesspool that comes from having only private media sources (or depending on the 'good will' of billionaires)

The Swiss voted to keep it but a huge minority voted to scrap it - a much larger chunk of the vote than the Swiss establishment had expected. I think they only won the vote in the end by promising some reforms.

The UK funds the BBC in a similar way. I used to think it led to better results, but frankly I don't see much difference in quality of output between BBC, ITN and Sky News - they all suck in exactly the same ways. It's not surprising given that journalists all a pretty homogenous lot. If the BBC license fee came up for vote I'd be tempted to scrap it.

BBC News Online in particular feels like it's degraded significantly over time. It used to be hard news, all the time. Now half the stories are lightweight human interest stories, and it's absolutely flooded with feminist / identity politics virtue signalling crap. I feel like the last 10 times I went there, probably 8 of them had multiple "why women are wonderful" / "about an inspiring woman" stories on the front page. Maybe they're being driven by click volumes or something, I don't know, but if they are they may as well just be a fully commercial entity.

The BBC was forced to scale back its website(s) because of complaints by the private sector that it was unfair competition. For example,

https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2013/news/bbc-is-unfair-c...

They argued that the BBC was using its guaranteed income from the licence fee (originally for just TV and Radio) to crowd out the competition in the UK, by being too good...

Their website still has just as much content on it as before, it's just differently focused. I don't really believe anyone in the newsrooms there said "hmm we have a lower budget this year, all we can afford is feminism!".

> BBC News Online in particular feels like it's degraded significantly over time. It used to be hard news, all the time.

Last year the BBC had a story about how their own news website has changed over time [0]. It concentrates on the format rather than the content but the screenshots do seem to show a higher density of 'hard' news info per page.

My gut reaction is to agree with your comment about lack of hard news. However, I decided to check for myself, looking at the first screenful of today's front page [1 - unfortunately not a permanent link]. It has 13 distinct topics (on my large monitor), and the main topic (N Korea and Trump) has two pictures, one short sentence, and three sub-story bullets. I was pleasantly surprised to see that most of the headlines are in fact informative statements (e.g. "1,600 skilled workers denied UK visas") although one ("Celebrating mixed-race identity") needs you to click through and isn't news as such. Whether these stories do in fact represent today's real issues, or have been picked to conform to the BBC's own agenda (whatever that may be), though, remains an open question

(Hmmm. I'm accessing the BBC website from the UK (the clue is in the '.co.uk'). What does the rest-of-world facing site (bbb.com) look like? I used Google Translate to check the non-uk version [2] and this seems also to have 'hard' headline statements although there is a different mix of stories.)

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41890165

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news

[2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=en&tl=fr&u=h...

That first link is pretty damning. You're right, the older images are almost all of hard news.

Here are some of the stories I see on BBC News currently:

- N Korea threatens to cancel Trump summit

- Italy's populists plan to defy EU rules

- Body clock linked to mood disorders

- Controversial Russia-Crimea bridge opens

- Row over World Cup flirting manual

- New Girl bids bittersweet farewell

- Bank chief sorry for menopausal gaffe

- Anne Frank's dirty jokes uncovered

- Meghan's dad may miss wedding over surgery

- Celebrating mixed race identity

- Why is Spanish ham so expensive?

- Ghana shoe seller takes on ex-dictator

I'd say that the vast majority of these are lightweight human interest stories, several of them are just ID politics masquerading as news and some are both. Why is stuff about TV show New Girl on the BBC News front page?

The story about the "menopausal" gaffe turns out to be that a Bank of England governor described some economies as "menopausal, past their peak, and no longer so potent". This apparently is a gaffe worthy of being in the business news section. It's not clear to me why it's even a gaffe to begin with. Do feminists now argue the menopause isn't a biological event at all? Apparently they do, according to some random economics professor at some random university (the BBC loves quoting academics) - "It conveys a rather derogatory view of women. I've never thought of the menopause as not productive".

It's really pretty trashy. Very different to how it once was.

> the world outside your country

with respect, do you consider yourself "the world outside [their] country"?

it's certainly worth hearing various opinions, but i'm skeptical as to how much you "speak for the world outside".

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