When I was there in the 80s, British newspapers were incredibly biased. But predictably so. They weren't really pretending to be fair or balanced, so you knew up front. The reporting that I remember the clearest was the day after the first black MP was voted into parliament. On the Tory papers, a large picture of her powdering her nose was above the fold. On the Labour it was all about celebration of the brave new world that was sure to follow.
Coverage of union disputes, South Africa, etc, was similarly split. You knew to read both to get a hope of the news, and one if you wanted to be comfy in your little bubble.
I wonder if it's evened out any.
But predictably so. They weren't really pretending to be fair or balanced, so you knew up front.
That was true of papers in the Czech Republic in the 1990s as well.
ita, the sad part is, that sounds like an improvement over the U.S. mainstream media. Here, the mainstream media seem divided between outlets with an unapologetic hard-right-wing bias and those that try to pretend they don't have a right-wing bias.
Must be nicer to live where you can choose the bias of your media sources.
the sad part is, that sounds like an improvement over the U.S. mainstream media
I think it takes way more work to discover which outlets in the US are biased in which ways. And if people don't know they have to do that work?
Where does BBC fall on the scale, ita?
Where does BBC fall on the scale, ita?
Their "News for Wombats" is pretty liberal....
I know I
now
prefer BBC News to any US news other than The Daily Show.
At the time, though, I couldn't have told you about the bias. BBC and ITV seemed to have about the same sort of coverage -- my parents balanced this out themselves, since there weren't any other TV stations to do so.
I suspect
that
is much different now.
What's also odd is I have a friend who has no clue who Terri Schaivo is (was?). Hubby and I were talking about it, and he looked utterly blank. He doesn't watch much TV, but he goes on the internet and there are always newspaper and magazine displays about. I'm amazed at the level of inattention one has to have to avoid things like this.
I expect the bias varies by department within a newspaper, rather than the whole newspaper. The Wall Street Journal tends to have very good, fair investigative reporters, and an incredibly right-wing Op-Ed page. The Times's political coverage can sometimes be laughably timid, just as Krugman and Herbert are ranting wildly in the Op-Eds.
I do think that the real problems tend to be laziness and timidity; outright bias is obvious and avowed and is easy to take into account. Although outright bias is no excuse for promulgating lies.
With the Terri Schiavo case, it's just a more dramatic headline to speak of "saving" her and of her "desperate hours" and stuff like that. I can see the appeal, from a newspaper-selling standpoint. But it sets a biased tone, even among people who would swear ferociously that they're not biased.
when did we and they start buying the idea that "he said/she said" is an adequate substitute for an evaluation of the merits of the claims on both sides?
One of the blogs I read recently the sports page as the last bastion of reality-based journalism.
Imagine trying to update your brackets for the NCAAs if your only source of information were, say, members of the White House Press Corps: "Texas Tech supporters were claiming victory Sunday after their regional quarterfinal game against Gonzaga. In Spokane, however, proponents of Gonzaga disputed this claim, noting that their team's point total was equal to that of Kentucky's and greater than that of Utah's, and that both of these teams are advancing to the next round."
