Fox News is pretty open about its conservative bias, and CNN is becoming more open about its liberal bias. They’re both reliable.

BBC? I honestly don’t watch it enough to judge. But its status as a public institution funded by an earmarked tax means that it must also assume the public posture that it is impartial. This has to be a bald-faced lie due to the very nature of journalism — bias is inherent in having a viewpoint or evaluating the relative importance of the events of the day.

If the BBC valued its integrity, it would jettison its relationship with the British government. But then again, the BBC is more about money than about integrity. Their tax funding makes them the richest broadcasting organization in the world; and there is NO WAY they are going to give it up for some annoying concerns about integrity.

Right! We got all day and all night… not only to “hear” fragmentary parts of the story (at different times, I presume) but to somehow remember them all and pull them all together, do the analysis and come-up with the balanced whole we were supposed to get in the first place… What are these people *thinking*?

I agree with Gray… it’s hard enough to attain a high level of objectivity even when you are *really* trying… I don’t see how you could look at a blatantly biased source of information and somehow get accurate news. I mean… what is the user supposed to do? Go do his/her own reporting to get to the issues you purposefully avoided? (so she could have a chance to then put it all together and get a balanced view of what’s going on?)

Delia

… reporters and editors in the newsrooms of major newspapers are not motivated by a devotion to any political party or cause. It just isn’t in their DNA.

Peter Horrocks actually admits the obvious,

If you scratch some broadcast journalists of my generation you’ll discover, barely skin deep, that the reason some of them went into broadcasting was to tell the audience what to think.

He then follows this up with,

But, above all, this audience wants an agenda that speaks to its concerns …

Why is it that journalists always have to frame information transfer into an agenda? Why can’t they just get all the relevant facts they can find by digging into the story and talking to the people involved in the story? At that point they just pass on the information they have gathered to the public in an intelligent concise manner. A story will then grow or disappear based on its relevance to both the public and the media as all the facts get sorted out.

As soon as an agenda becomes the basis for composing their story, certain items are maximized, certain items are minimized, and some items are omitted. Completely presenting the information for the public to examine seems to be what the public is now requesting from them.

I very much doubt that. That would only be true it by ‘fair reporting’ you mean the outlet really reports ALL relevant news, whether they support their agenda or not. Then the reader can get a clear picture when he takes the known bias into account.

But that’s NOT the ‘fair’ reporting that Fox conducts. They very often simply don’t report about news that doesn’t fit into their worldview. That the reader/viewer knows about their bias is useless when he doesn’t even get to know the information. That’s the real problem with biased outlets.

If a media outlet has a consistent, understandable editorial persona, and its reporting is fair, then objectivity is irrelevant. Knowing an outlet’s biases enable a user to get accurate news in spite of them.

The BBC’s challenge is that it has to report the news as a public institution partially funded by a compulsory tax. It has to select and report the events of the day while avoiding any position that could be construed as even remotely political; denying or downplaying that it has any institutional viewpoint at all. What a nightmare.

But there are a whole bunch of services which have embraced those pavement-level or parish-pump issues - they’re the BBC services in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the English regions. Listen to some of their radio output - it is ultra-granular - detailed discussions of things like bus routes are not uncommon.

In the part of the UK where I live the BBC Radio 4 (which hosts the flagship Today programme) has a tiny audience with the rolling news service of BBC Radio 5 is not much further ahead. Meanwhile the local radio station gets an enormous share of listening.

There are lots people in the BBC already doing what Horrocks is talking about - why isn’t he aware of them?

That’s the problem with universality- it’s the view from nowhere, as Jay Rosen often says. That’s a particular problem for an org like the BBC, which, because of its funding, has to have some sort of national mission. It’s not possible to do both.

“This leaves the NY Times.” Right. WaPo doesn’t count anymore since Don Graham is at the helm. When you’re visiting a WaPo office and you hear a whizzing sound, that Kate Graham rotating in her grave.

“Is this what we want - explicitly biased media which states its objectives, or “impartial” media which is imperfect but is trying at least?”

Exactly. This leaves the Question: Is it possible to stop the trend towards even more biased media enterprises?

I think the objectivity theme is the result of just three cases: Paley at CBS, Sarnoff at NBC and the controlling dynasty at the NY Times. Since all basically owned the outlets they could set the tone. They chose a vaguely socially liberal, but pro-business outlook. Then they mostly kept their hands off the news operation. There may have been (and may still be) biases from individuals doing the reporting, but it was not the same sort of effort as imposed by Hearst and Luce.

Now that Paley and Sarnoff are gone and the networks are owned by giant industrial firms the news is regarded as another profit center. In fact GE makes sure that nothing appears which will reflect badly on their role as a major beneficiary of the military sector that it profits from.

This leaves the NY Times. It seems to me that there is more opinion slipping into straight news than thirty years ago, but perhaps we are just getting better at recognizing it.

There is a difference between bias by individuals and an explicit agenda as at Fox or the Daily Worker. Did anyone ever read the Daily Worker to get an impartial view of the news? It was biased and therefore of almost no value as a source of real news. Is this what we want - explicitly biased media which states its objectives, or “impartial” media which is imperfect but is trying at least?

As to the BBC they are starting to use the web more and thus may be able to appeal to diverse audiences which the limits on broadcast time don’t allow. So maybe they will have the touchy-feely news feed and the school marmish feed. Viewers online will be able to chose.

Gray: This is the first time I have seen the argument that state-owned media is a desirable counterweight to private media outlets that don’t hew to the official line. Consumers of media in Cuba and North Korea must be relieved.

However, one point caught my eye:
“As an American without a BBC and with a prejudice toward independence, I believe the open marketplace of media and ideas will better do that.”

Hmm. Are open markets always the answer? Depends on how ‘open’ you want them to be. Without any mechanisms to prevent extrme media conglomeration, you might end up with a situation where one giant corporation controls nearly all channels (See Italy) or where there’s really no diversification of views and opinions (Russia). In the case of Venezuela, don’t you think that state owned TV is actually a good think, when all privately owned TV corporations are exclusively spreading the opposition’s view?