Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

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You will see people reading a paper on the London tube most days, because The Metro (AM) and Evening Standard (PM) are free papers, with stacks of them left near entrances to stations. The Metro has national distribution as well, so you're just as likely to see it on a bus or tram in Manchester.

There is a slightly weird thing about accuracy and impartiality in news I've noticed to be a major difference in the UK and the US.

In the UK you can print in a newspaper anything that is legal, including non-libellous lies. There is no need to show both sides of the argument, and as a result the paper can come across as an unhinged political mouthpiece of their owner, with editorial pages just dialling it up. The Times and the FT are the only papers that even attempt neutrality, really.

TV news however is very strictly regulated by Ofcom - partisan news channels like GB News are constantly running into issues, because they aren't meeting the regulatory requirements for fairness and impartiality. There are no editorial "entertainment" shows like you would see in the US on BBC or Sky News - if they bring in a pundit from the right wing, sat right next to them is a left wing pundit to call them out, and vice versa.

In the US it seems inverse. TV news is insanely partisan (on all sides, I literally can't watch any of it when I'm travelling in the US, and CNN in the US is atrocious compared to CNN International), but even though the newspaper industry is unregulated and has First Amendment rights, the standards for accuracy and fairness seem much higher than in the UK (supermarket tabloids - staffed for many years by ex-UK tabloid hacks - aside). I wish other nations could learn from that.

I really don't know why this is the case though. The market for newspapers seems to be causing them to regulate more widely towards this, and there's something news on the internet could learn from that: perhaps clickbait isn't the way to go strategically.

Yes, although:

"The Times and the FT are the only papers that even attempt neutrality, really."

... this may be a case of not being able to hear your own accent.

The Times could perhaps be leaning “right”. But the FT is, in my opinion, a legitimately neutral publication. At least through Britain’s default neoliberal lens.

The Times has lurched extremely far right within the last decade. The main difference between it and the Telegraph or Daily Mail is one of tone rather than content.

The FT certainly has its biases but I agree that it is generally the most reliable. Noam Chomsky once said it was the most trustworthy newspaper because of its incentives to tell the truth:

> Those who Adam Smith called ‘the masters of the universe’ have to understand the universe. They have to have a tolerably realistic understanding of the world that they are managing and controlling. That’s true of political elites as well, but the business world particularly.

https://www.ft.com/content/bcdefd38-3beb-3506-b24c-82285ac87...

Also what the article says about the WSJ:

> > Anwar Shaikh, the most left-wing economist in the world, introduced me to “The Wall Street Journal”. I met him in his office as he was writing the monumental “Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises”. He told that he reads the WSJ because it tells the truth about what is happening in the economy. It struck me then by the seeming oddity of the most left-wing economist in the world praising the most right-wing daily in the world. But Anwar was right. An economics daily has, in the part that deals with the real life, to be as objective as possible because if it spreads fairy tales people who believe them will lose money. Then no capitalist will buy it. For they do not like to lose money. In the trade-off between the fairy tales and cash, they chose the latter. Other dailies that appeal to the “pensée unique” do not need to worry about that kind of elemental truth. They can make things up.

Well, to be fair I don't have a huge amount of information about the FT as I'm not a subscriber. I do remember that they did publish at least some Keynesian economists during the 2008 financial crisis, although I think they were still part of the prevailing (and IMO mistaken) bias towards austerity.

But I think no publication is completely neutral. There are areas where they will accept opinions as viable alternatives, and areas where they consider opinions outside the pale and not deserving of consideration. A completely biased publication always picks one side everywhere, but 'neutral' publications usually are biased towards which opinions they will give serious consideration.

They other dimension is that articles written in a neutral 'style' aren't necessarily any less biased than ones written in polemic style.

A note about TV news in the US: what you’re describing is 24/7 cable news, which is distinctly different than traditional nightly news and its offshoot streaming services.

Channels like MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News follow the aggressive style you describe.

However, programs like ABC, NBC, CBS, and ABC evening/nightly news are not like that at all. Unfortunately, you can’t really get those broadcasts abroad.

For a while, CNN’s international broadcast was a much different channel akin to the BBC world service, but I think now it follows the Fox News content formula.

On the bright side, I have noticed some emerging streaming options like the CBS News and ABC News streaming apps that offer a similar style of moderate journalism.

Finally, in the US the local TV news is another half-decent source of information that usually has a moderate slant. Networks are affiliated with the national networks and often mix in major national stories along with local ones. However, it has its own issues especially on locally relevant biases. I think their focus on local crime has a tendency to reinforce stereotypes and promote fear – it can sometimes feel like you’re watching white flight [1] television. Weirdly, one of my biggest problems with local news is weather event sensationalism: if you watch local news you’ll be convinced to cancel your whole life’s plans for big storms that don’t tend not to pan out. Crime and weather, weather, and traffic are basically the only two topics where something is consistently happening, so they get outsized attention.

There’s also some consolidation happening where the local news networks are owned by very opinionated and biased owners, like the Internet-famous Sinclair scripted message that all their regional networks were forced to recite verbatim.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

Thanks for the clarification, but I was also comparing like with like: UK 24/7 cable news is strictly regulated, as per my comment.

Local news is less of a need in the UK (the entire country is half the size of California), and breaks down into two categories: BBC local news which is comprehensive, and basically every region is well covered with TV and radio journalism; and, private sector which is a license requirement for ITV (the main commercial broadcaster), and a dying small newspaper trade.

We don't however have anything like Sinclair which is something to be grateful for.

To be fair, compared to most EU countries, the level of accuracy and fairness of news in the Anglosphere is abysmal. If Die Zeit or Le Monde (Diplomatique) report something, in my opinion they tend to set the standard. In most (large enough) EU countries, people tend to have 1 or 2 decent sources for high quality news. Factual, avoiding emotion, reporting on what happened.

In Dutch, there is a word for English news: "hijgerig". The type of heavy breathing you do after running a sprint.

Unfortunately, that style is increasingly being copied.

Le Monde is toilet paper level. Nobody told you?

This might be because the US video news you likely encountered was Cable News ( CNN, Fox , MSNBC ), which evolved under a different legal tradition than US printed news or US over-the-air broadcast radio and TV news. Sort of like how facebook/twitter have evolved under Section 230 of the DMCA rather than under the legal limitations of traditional broadcasters or publishers.

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