>> |
No. 32614
Anonymous
24th March 2021 Wednesday 1:06 am
32614
Media bias - is there any?
Do you believe the UK media is politically biased?
I get nearly all my news from the BBC. And the BBC is, officially, legally required to be politically impartial. And yet the new head of the BBC since last year, Tim Davie, is a full-blown Conservative politician who has taken several steps to stop the BBC being so critical of the government:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Davie
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/31/exclusive-bbcs-new-boss-threatens-axe-left-wing-comedy-shows/
I'm no fan of sanctimonious wokeness, but I do believe the media has an obligation to challenge the government, which effectively makes it the voice of the opposition. So for as long as we regularly get 15+-year periods of uninterrupted Conservative government, yes, I do want the BBC to criticise the Conservatives, simply because they're the ones in power. If Jeremy Corbyn was Prime Minister, I would expect them to turn on him immediately, but it's hardly the BBC's fault nobody voted for him.
Lately, I've noticed that the BBC tends to get Conservative politicians on to interview them extremely frequently. If you watch the news at precisely 07:30 on a Friday, there's a different blue-ribbon bootlicker every week. And they do the rounds of every news organisation, also having Zoom conversations with ITV News and Sky News, while opposition politicians never get a look in. Is this deliberate? Are Labour MPs just refusing to get up that early, because they are lazy and poor and hungover from smoking crack all night? I know the TV presenters try to take Our Glorious Overlords to task during the weekly brown-nosing, but they never succeed. The Conservatives are just getting free advertising in the end. But for all I know, maybe that's because newsreaders are incompetent rather than some gigantic overarching national conspiracy to fellate God Emperor Boris at every opportunity.
I think we can all accept that tabloid newspapers are openly right-wing, but at the same time, social media is predominantly left-wing, and pretty unabashedly so. Does this cancel out? Is the media all right on the whole? I sometimes watch Russia Today, universally acknowledged as propaganda, just to see what propaganda looks like. They never lie, but every single story is just, "You can't trust the mainstream media, so watch RT instead for your brave daily dose of red pills." The fact that none of the news is actually completely fabricated, not even when it's made by literal foreign agents trying to undermine the fabric of Her Majesty's Great British Society, makes me feel confident that TV news reporting must be pretty tightly regulated. Newspapers, of course, are bollocks and must be ignored.
What do YOU think?
|