I think it is not owned by the government, rather by the state.
In a democracy, how is this a bad thing?
In a democracy, how is this a bad thing?
Explain to me why reading news from the state is a good thing? Kinda shocked that people here applaud state-owned media (there is no difference between "government-owned" or "state-owned").
I’m not saying it’s good or bad, just observing the language.
In a democracy, how would state owned be different from public?
Do you also call libraries state-run?
IMHO both terms are heavy with bias depending on context.
What ever it truly is, America is called a 'democracy', and it had Project Mockingbird, which some, myself included, say never ended. And even being maximally fair, I must question whether democracy has any meaning in the context of media after Ellison buys half of it. Does he not own CNN? No point in mentioning who, or what owns Fox. And Bezos?
I know it comes off offensive, despite being unintended, but 'democracy' means nothing to me. We have some useful principles of it, which I value, but as a thing, I don't see it.
I personally don't know enough about BBC or France 24 to go beyond "government-funded", so I would want more details about their governance before using the terms mentioned before to describe them.
The best advice I can give here is to mix different sources. As a Belgian, I have a few local newspapers and the VRT news for Belgium, NOS, BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera, which are all checked at least weekly. Each one has its own blatant biases and blind spots. There are still big missing gaps, e.g. a Chinese and an African perspective. There is clearly Gell Mann Amnesia going on. Even so, I started to look very different to the world.
Your comment makes only sense if you follow the narrative that state is bad, private companies good. In most European countries, we are rather happy with having a part of the media market owned by the state.
When you get your news from RT, BBC, France24, DW, PressTV, NPR, Gulf News, DD, Al-Jazeera etc. you get "official" political propaganda from the respective governments that run these outlets. Political propaganda can be based on falsehood or factual truth(s) with a "biased" analysis on it. Government news outlets have to show some journalistic integrity to earn trust. Thus, most of their propaganda tends to be based on facts than on falsehood. So reading them all or reading about the same subjects from these different outlets really gives you a larger political perspective with some great political insights.
I know that the BBC in the UK, SVT in Sweden, the ABC in Australia go to great lengths to listen to both sides, whatever they may be, to a fault. They are often criticized for giving minority views too much coverage for this reason, and rarely for saying what the government would want them to say uncritically.
You would think so, but that isn't the reality because journalistic "corruption" is judged on political ideology. Your whole notion of what is "corrupt values" is based on your political ideology. And one of the important roles of government news outlets is to propagate the political values that the country has adopted - that is why western media covers capitalism with a positive biases and disses on communism and socialism with negative biases (and vice-versa in say, Russia and Cuba). These political values are not examined neutrally by the media because the political powers have already termed one or other other as "corrupt".
Just look at the heavily biased (positive) coverage Israel receives in western medias. Western countries were imperialist powers and thus have no problem with Israeli zionism's settler-colonialists policies and the consequent repression of Palestinians. Where as the Global South, especially former colonies still remember what it was to be colonised by foreigners and thus are "biased" towards Palestinians. (Ireland is the exception in the west, with huge sympathy for the Palestinians, because it too remembers its oppression under the British).
I don’t really recognize that when it comes to capitalism, plenty of criticism on the national media I know. Can you give examples of that bias?
I would say there are other examples of this though, for example when it comes to various wars where the country has taken sides: it becomes really difficult for journalists to openly defend the “enemy”.
When there's a news channel funded by the state (instead of ads), most other private news are forced to keep up the quality and they also have the opportunity to call out any bad news and biases published by the state channel. This way no news outlets stray too far from the truth or become unreadable slop. It's better overall.
France is executive heavy democracy similar to US and Latin American States. This is a very big flaw and state owned media might be contribute to.
As for your question, Russia is nominally a democracy but I wouldn't trust the veracity of their state media reports.
In a parliamentary democracy the "government" is the prime minister, president (whatever the titles are), cabinet ministers and the party that happens to be in power at any given time. The "Government" might be a coalition of 2, 3, or 4 medium sized political parties that have come to some sort of arrangement to have enough votes to pass a budget and laws. The "state" are the persons who perform the longer term functions of the state not directly controlled by the whims of any political thing that might happen in a specific year.
For instance when France made a decision to build its previous series of nuclear powered, missile carrying submarines, and the decision to build a new series that will enter service some time in the 2030s, that's implemented by the civil servants who run the state. Various political parties have waxed and waned and leadership has come and gone since the French nuclear program began, but various successor governments have continued it.
Less specific than that program, the state implements other basic services for the people of the country, all the things that have their day to day work done by people who aren't elected members of parliament. The parliamentarians who happen to be occupying various seats at any given time are the government.
In a more specific Canadian example: The government funding that comes to the CBC each year is actually from what would we would call the state. https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/impact-and-accountability/fin...
You'll see terms used like "the government has collapsed as the result of a non confidence vote" or "there's been a leadership challenge inside the government (eg: how Trudeau lost power recently)", it doesn't mean the functions of the state have collapsed.
The State would be the organization that uses governments as the branch of executive power (and also organizes a legislative activity, and a judiciary activity...). The kind and amount of power held by the Head of the State and the Head of the Government can vary.
Because democracy is effectively mob rule, which means minority voices may get shut out.
Which means that everything leads to the status quo, and the majority voices get shut out in favor of the most entrenched minority.
Those clever founders.
There've been many treatments of this: Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (1988), Neil Postman's Amusing OUrselves to Death (1985), Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909) <https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>.
That last is particularly good for a number of reasons, including that it's short and information dense, and lays out the clear conflicts inherent to advertising-driven media just at the time it was first gaining influence, and at a fraction of its present size and influence.
If you prefer video, media critic Isadore F. "I.F." Stone gave an excellent 1973 interview on the PBS series Day at Night on the state of newspaper journalism in the United States, contrasting the relative independence of big-city dailies vs. rural papers. The former were large enough that no single advertiser could threaten editorial independence.
Link will offer a choice of instances to redirect to: <https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g> (video).