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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

France 24 and Al Jazeera manage to do well with continuous non-partisan news. Yes, I understand every news publisher has their editorial discretion. The problem with CNN, MSNBC, and Fox is that they are American news. There is only so much American news at the national level to report. France 24 supplements its news content with a tremendous amount of content from Africa and other sources internationally. Al Jazeera is more focused on the Middle East than France 24 but is otherwise a more bit balanced with its content as far as geographic source but is also extremely international.

In other words the way out of partisan stupidity is to increase the diversity of material published. There is plenty of news to report on.

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I like Al Jazeera a lot, but it pretty clearly has it's own slant for many topics. I even like Sky News, despite the obvious right leaning which doesn't match my personal politics...because for example, their military analysts that report on Ukraine seem knowledgeable and insightful.

Basically saying I'm fine with the non-neutral reporting, provided it's obvious enough for me to compensate mentally with. And more importantly, that there's high quality content despite any slant.

Have to agree to that second point... I'm perfectly fine with bias, as long as it's obvious, clear and the reporting is relatively complete and accurate, even if I don't agree with the conclusions or opinion in the end.

Al Jazeera (international) itself doesn't have any incentive to be biased, bias may obviously occur via journalist's opinions etc that creep in.

But as I understand, Al Jazeera is run as an means to show Qatar's importance/relevance.

I use to watch Al Jazeera America all the time but it only lasted a few years on TV here.

It was totally non-partisan from what I remember. Focused so much on the world outside America too.

I would imagine that is exactly why it closed.

France24 and Al Jazeera are both state owned and subsidized - the Govt of France owns France 24 and Al Jazeera is owned by the State of Qatar.

It's a bit easier to create international news when your capital expenses are subsidized by a nation state. Hence why Deutsche Welle also makes very compelling English language news media (Govt of Germany).

> France 24 and Al Jazeera manage to do well with continuous non-partisan news.

Al Jazeera English might be somewhat non-partisan, but Al Jazeera Arabic is stupendously partisan.

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