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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

It's not an interview if a spokesman is allowed to say whatever they like without being challenged. It's not an interview if you broadcast a pre-recorded speech without comment. Ben Gvir is awful, but that doesn't change the fact that Al Jazeera's Arabic service is not impartial and is not acting as a legitimate journalistic outlet.

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99+% of interviews in American media aren't trying to challenge the interviewee. They're just trying to gather information from one side, and then they generally try to get a token representative quote from the other side at the very end of an article, but sometimes not even that.

So you seem to be trying to hold Al Jazeera to a vastly higher standard than mainstream US media, at least in this particular regard.

Simply reporting without comment on what important/influential individuals and groups are saying, and adding basic objective context, is a large part of mainstream journalism.

Pushback is often limited to the opinion pages.

>So you seem to be trying to hold Al Jazeera to a vastly higher standard than mainstream US media, at least in this particular regard.

The mainstream US news media would fall foul of broadcasting standards laws in a lot of liberal Western democracies. Here in the UK, due impartiality is a legal duty of news broadcasters. The First Amendment is not the norm globally and the US is exceptionally laissez-faire when it comes to the regulation of broadcast news.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/broadcast-co...

> It's not an interview if a spokesman is allowed to say whatever they like without being challenged.

This describes most interviews I've seen with Israeli government officials in the American press, although it's starting to change over the last few months.

Wait, impartial is the measure now?

The most-read newspaper in Israel, Israel Hayom, is owned by a friend of Bibi. Is it impartial? Should it be shut down?

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