[fcantournet]

Historically news outlet run as public service (with sufficient guardrails for autonomy) such as the BBC, PBS, France Television, Arte (naming only those I know well) have produce much better news coverage than the privately owned ones.

OTOH the concept of independent public institution and general checks and balances seems to have been entirely forgotten, so maybe that's not a solution for 21st century.

An alternative would be communally owned media (50/50 by readership and journalists), with simple direct tax incentive to fund them (equal amounts of $ per person)

[CaptainJack]

Having first hand experience of all of the named public services, I beg to differ heavily. These corporations tend to be heavily left-leaning, with no real guardrails preventing this. The consequence is pretty biased coverage, under the guise of a "trust-us, we are here for the greater good".

Look at the handling of Middle-East by BBC, the Zucman tax at France Television, or the current allegations of fraud in some communities in the US.

My current take is that it is really hard to get a fair unbiased coverage, unless you actually state that you will strive to hire and promote both sides. If these corporations had to publish the composition/promotion/pay of their newsroom across the political spectrum (as they do for example by gender), you may start to have fair unbiased coverage. But many journalists working there see it as their job to describe "not the reality as it happens, but rather as it ought to be" (to quote the CEO of France Television). We should acknowledge that people are biased, and measure the balance of biases rather than assert there is no bias because they serve the greater good.

[banannaise]

Public interest stories are left-leaning only in that they tend to oppose the wielders of centralized power, and centralized power is generally a right-leaning construct.

[tehjoker]

This is a very funny take since all of these stations are anti-communist. This is inter-right wing sectarianism.

[zozbot234]

So everyone to the right of tankies gets lumped together as "right wing" in your view of the political spectrum? That's not very helpful.

[tehjoker]

That's objectively true. They're center-left or center-right. They're certainly not democratic socialists (who are the barest left of the left). The parent is complaining that there is some objectivity at all in liberal/center-right media, that it isn't calling for pure repression by force of middle eastern people and recognizes they sometimes suffer from aggression in ways that are understandable to human beings.

None of these outlets object to this repression being meted out, they only care that it is done in a way that is respectable. A left wing take would criticize the imperialist nature of these wars of aggression and genocide and examine the economic, class, and other social dimensions that cause these events to occur and call for a social revolution via means that are electoral or otherwise. A left-leaning liberal take would say something like "man it's crazy they don't respect the UN charter or even US laws". This should give some objective sense for how rightward our discourse has been drawn.