[raxxorrax]

There is. You can try to give a neutral perspective. It won't be perfect, but you can read a staunch difference between those who try and those who do not. And the information gain is vastly better if you read the former. It isn't even comparable, it is a whole other league. I cannot comment on PBS here.

Sure, the topics picked can very well be political, although that has degraded somewhat to topics that generate clicks. But that is nevertheless a huge problem and I believe correlated to the low trust in media overall.

Or look at elections. A press staunchly favoring a candidate wouldn't be able to hold that candidate accountable. That is another huge problem, because that is their primary raison d'être.

Some even go that far that a worse candidate is preferable in that situation if it means the press as representatives of the public reports critically. Could explain some things.

[StuffedParrot]

Neutral... between what? The financing and your reporters? That is the neutrality I am aware of.

[raxxorrax]

We could discuss what it means to give a neutral perspective, but I don't think that would get us anywhere to be honest.

The last discussion about that has been with fundamentalists that had a similar critique about neutrality.

We could also talk about how feasible it is to achieve neutrality. But that wouldn't be the point in most cases.

In secular education for example neutrality has a specific meaning. That pupils are to be empowered to make choices and that views are not imposed on them. End of story.

It isn't that hard to transfer these principles to journalism. Does journalism try to inform as best as possible so people can make better decisions? Or should they be nudged towards certain perspectives.

The former variant would be the neutral approach. Pretty simple if you think about it.

[StuffedParrot]

If PBS were trying to empower voters, they could easily report different news. You need to actually analyze their coverage to make any assertion about to what extent they empower their viewers with their news coverage. If I were to suggest stories, I would inevitably be labeled and discarded for the exact same reasons PBS refuses to cover the stories.

And btw, I agree with your definition of neutrality. I just don’t think PBS markedly improves in this respect (empowering viewers) from any other cable news station, they simply have less obnoxious production value and are therefore a more palatable, or at best equally palatable, version of the other center to center left publications I listed.