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Comment by MortyWaves | Hacker News Reader

I hate that this is the case. It’s been incredibly frustrating over the years seeing perfectly normal and universally accepted things be reported about, but they have to find the absolute dregs of society with whacky and extremely stupid ideas simply so they can say they “are impartial”.

It’s been everything from Brexit to Covid and everything in between.

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That reminds me of a great Dara Ó Briain routine[0] about pseudoscience.

[0] https://youtu.be/YKZN-hBTBUE

Is it because they have to, or they choose to? There are a great many right wing outlets that call themselves impartial.

The BBC being publicly funded has a genuine obligation to be neutral, which sometimes turns into "both sides" weirdness.

I think it's a more recent phenomenon that they go to lengths to find someone to report "both sides".

20 years ago, they didn't need to interview extremists — staying neutral meant reporting on the centre viewpoint.

Having an obligation to be neutral isn't the same as being neutral - people and especially institutions break their obligations all the time, often without penalty.

It's still a choice. They don't do it when there's an article on the dangers of the rise of Neo-Nazism, or on the horrors of IS. "Now we interview Paul (32), who doesn't think it's dangerous at all, in fact he thinks it's pretty great!". Or on new cancer medicine; "Now we go to Mary (55) who isn't a fan of the new medicine, advocating that cancer patients cure it with yoga instead.".

"Neutral" also doesn't have to mean "both sides".

Neutral is kind of a silly concept. Any attempt to even describe the sides, or even to enumerate them, will reveal inherent bias. You see this all over newspapers in the US who try to remain unbiased (between the two political parties), which results in an incredibly nasty feedback loop where parties and the media dictate policy to each other while ignoring every other viewpoint in existence.

Give me reporting with clear polemic any day, please. At least I can adjust for that and consume contrary polemics.

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