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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

As far as I know, it’s in the mission of most of these to give an unbiased report on what is happening in the world and inside the country. In practice, there may be influence by powerful politicians, but for these news outlets to spread government propaganda would constitute corruption.

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.

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> but for these news outlets to spread government propaganda would constitute corruption.

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).

> These political values are not examined neutrally by the media because the political powers have already termed one or other other as "corrupt".

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”.

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