[jariel]

Almost all American outlets are biased.

There are many with 'high integrity' (i.e. fact check, in depth, write well) but there's so much editorialisation, that they are biased.

You almost have to read the news off the wire, or watch local news to get straight news. Almost everything on CNN, Fox, NYT, WSJ etc. is editorialised in some way, even the non-opinion pieces.

Edit: to anyone that doubts this, consider spending a month reading outlets that you might suspect 'have a bias' (i.e. 'the evil other side'). It becomes very clear, very quickly. Some of the most prominent forms of editorialising, even in the more straight news items comes from what they decide is newsworthy, how the headlines are worded, the facts they decided to leave in vs. what they leave out. The kinds of guests, the form of questions. The main evening broadcast news in the US is decent, but almost everything on cable or in print has bias, even when it's 'high quality'. I should add that this is not an American phenom, there are hardly any large 'straight news' agencies in the world; maybe the BBC.

It's also helpful to read/watch the news from a different country, where you don't have a 'stake in the game' so to speak, and it becomes evident. If you use Google Translate on Die Welt, Der Spiegel, and Die Zeit - you can see how the same news is reported differently.

[inapis]

I don’t believe BBC is any better than NYT, WSJ or WaPo. I have seen BBC’s coverage of India at times can be highly slanted and headlines editorialised to the extent, even when the facts are correct, that you walk away with a different impression than what actually happened on the ground. If they can be slanted about one topic, it would be irrational to assume that they won’t be slanted about something else. Just that you’ll never be able to figure out if they were in fact biased or not because of the gell-mann amnesia effect.

[jariel]

The BBC is definitely better than WSJ, WaPo or NYT for straight news.

First - they are substantially bigger and have much wider operations than any of them - by far. They have global correspondents etc. - a much bigger news room.

Second - they are neutral. NYT, WSJ and WaPo are not. Their editors would admit that, clearly. NYT is a left wing American commentary. WSJ is an economically liberal entity. The BBC actually has oversight and scrutiny because it's a public institution.

It's easy to demonstrate: take any contentious news item of the day, and then see the coverage by those outlets. WSJ won't even cover social issues. BBC generally runs straight news, the NYT will have a lot of editorial coverage op-end on it.

As for 'India' - your confusing short (or wrong) coverage with bias.

I'm from Canada - and I see this all the time: US outlets constantly misrepresent Canadian political issues. This is not because they're bad, it's that different nations are hugely different contexts - it's often very difficult to communicate something nuance without spending an hour going over the issues. And sometimes they just get it wrong. Indian political affairs are complicated - it's hard to narrow anything down to a few sound bites without getting some things wrong. I'll also bet $100 that none of the WSJ, Wapo or WSJ even touched on whatever Indian subject the BBC was covering, their readers don't care, and they don't have the budget or correspondents. I should have pointed out obviously the BBC has a national bias - most outlets do.