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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

while they worked for BBC, they were unbiased; but the moment they started working for AJ

The BBC is generally regarded as being anti-Israel: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/bbc-fights-to-sup...

When people say a news source is "unbiased" they really mean "agrees with me".

But you see, everyone has problems with BBC. Israeli think it's anti-Israel, Putin says it's anti-Russian. In reality though it's simply not pro-Israel or pro-Russian. Just telling the truth infuriates lots of people.

It is possible to be both anti-Israel and anti-Russian, y'know. The idea that the BBC is any more "truthy" than any other news source is laughable; they're all run by humans after all. And the BBC recruits most of its staff through one route, the media section in the Guardian, which no-one would claim is anything other than a left-wing paper. It could, for example, balance it out by recruiting 50% via the Graun's big rival, the Daily Mail, but it doesn't.

So all news sources are equally truthy? There's no such thing as perfect objectivity, but there are shades of gray.

You need to look for a news source that is financially incentivized to do "just the facts". Organization such as Reuters, AP, AFP etc sell "raw news" to TV stations and newspapers, which then put their own editorial on it. The same Reuters feed goes into the BBC as goes into Sky News. So if you really care, just read Reuters and make up your own mind.

But just because analysis implies some point of view or bias doesn't mean it's not valuable. I'd rather get a variety of editorial viewpoints than just straight facts for which I may not have sufficient context.

After all, Reuters would never doctor a photo, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Hajj_photographs_controve...

They caught him and they fired him...

Standard procedure in the industry - the Times have the Educational supplement, the Graun have the MediaGraun (Sky, for example, also pushes the majority of recruitment requests through it. I'd also argue that the T is the more direct competitor.). Much is also put in trade papers like Broadcast.

>It could, for example, balance it out by recruiting 50% via the Graun's big rival, the Daily Mail, but it doesn't.

I don't think hiring through a tabloid newspaper would help the integrity of the company. You could have at least said the Telegraph.

The Mail is as far to the right as the Graun is to the left, the Torygraph is centre-right. Not to mention that the Graun is s tabloid now...

The Guardian is not a tabloid newspaper. The Telegraph is a broadsheet.

The Guardian is also not as far left as the Mail is right, although that is objective and could be debated all day.

I think you mean subjective. Unless like the typical Graun reader you believe that it's everyone else that's biased...

I think it's called a "Berliner"....

Right. They are also taking turns at being anti-Sudanese, anti-Iranian, anti-Indian and anti-US. Just pick your preference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC

How are those mutually exclusive?

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