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Comment by noncoml | Hacker News Reader

It takes a lot time to build the reputation of impartiality. To be honest only BBC comes into mind when I think about a somewhat impartial medium.

What I see is a traditionally Democartic leaning newspaper, choosing "impartiality" as an excuse, because they cannot come out and support Republicans. And of course I believe that this is the choice of the owner.

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This has nothing to do with them being unable to support Republicans, it's them choosing not to support a Democratic nominee (which they've done for the past 50 years) because they don't want to anger the possible Republican nominee because the owner is afraid of retribution affecting his other businesses.

As the cancel brigade often says: freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

And why should we be using cancel brigades' definitions? If freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences for your speech, then freedom of speech automatically exists everywhere and the concept is meaningless.

Obvious there is judgement for when consequences rise to the level of being coercive - someone giving you a dirty look is not, the de jure government sanctioning you is. But trying to define rights binary-axiomatically is really just creating lemmas for cryptofascism when the preconditions have been met but yet the rights are still missing (which is exactly what the cancel brigades are pushing).

True, but said consequences are the possibility of a revenge streak of a petty US president called Trump. That is the real problem and story. And nobody really seems to dispute that possibility.

Trump fans boycotting Amazon is a consequence.

The US government punishing Amazon is not.

The first amendments limits the governemt in its actions, not the people.

Not saying the BBC is Fox News or CNN but I wouldn’t really call it impartial.

"somewhat impartial"

I can not really think of any truly impartial news source. Can you? At least no in the countries I have lived in

No public impartial news source, but organisation-internal news sources that work for the reader himself, those probably exist and probably very good. A bank's analysis department can work like one for the traders for short-term things.

Such organisations for the general public are possible. You'd need a group that is interested in correct judgements on some matter and willing to form an organisation to pay for investigations on it.

I believe many of each countries top news papers aren't 'spinning' news. Murdock/Berlusconi-style news agencies do.

FT does much better.

What the BBC does really well is trash itself in reporting after scandals from within break

> To be honest only BBC comes into mind when I think about a somewhat impartial medium.

The BBC is pro-UK government, who fund them.

To me only Reuters (disclaimer: I once worked there) and AP come to mind when I think impartial news.

What do others think? https://www.purevpn.com/blog/unbiased-news-sources/

The Guardian is a great source of news, and it has a curageous team of reporters, but even it has its biases. I recommend reading multipe news outlets and being aware what he individual biases might be.

> The BBC is pro-UK government, who fund them.

You are not British, are you :-)

I'm not sure the BBC is even pro-BBC.

The Guardian was a reasonably good source of news under Rubsbridger, under Viner its biases have worsened and its most courageous reporters, opinion writers and even cartoonists have been either sidelined or fired. Avoid.

The BBC recently wrote a piece on the executives at Harod’s who kept Mo’s pervert behaviour secret. Don’t think they done yet that for the many perverts they have kept secrets for.

The problem for BBC is that it's government-funded. It can't really take a stance without potentially upsetting the next government.

> The problem for BBC is that it's government-funded.

That's not factually accurate. The BBC is principally funded through the licence fee (i.e. directly by the viewers).

It's inherently dependent on the government. The viewers don't get together and voluntarily decide to fund it.

Unfortunately I don't think there's a single such organisation in the world-- controlled-by-members newspaper. Even almost-controlled-by-members newspapers here in Sweden aren't fully subject to member control, with this typically being indirect through some board or similar organisation.

Guardian comes to mind.

The Guardian seems to be seeking money from the foundations of very rich people.

This is the precise opposite of what would be required.

> Guardian comes to mind.

The Guardian's ownership is independent

The Guardian's views are very much not. Very predictable

A lot of that depends upon the government in question. Some want publicly funded news organizations at arms length. Others want to dismantle them. Some want at least the image of impartiality (and will take some criticism). Others want them to be a mouthpiece. It's not terribly different from the private sector. I would go as far as saying it is no different from the private sector given the consolidation of news organizations over the past few decades.

Why is that a problem?

BBC stopped being impartial shortly after start of Iraq's invasion in 2001. It's not as polarizing as Fox News and CNN, but it's _far_ from being impartial.

Their coverage of international events only impartial if those events have no effect on UK.

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