France24 does a lot of very solid work related to one of my particular areas of interest in the Iran/Afghanistan/Pakistan region. It's also a great alternative to any US news sources even for news about what's going on domestically in North America (though the CBC has more breadth of coverage, for sure).
>Since 2008 the channel has been wholly owned by the French government
Explain to me why reading news from the state is a good thing? Kinda shocked that people here applaud state-owned media (there is no difference between "government-owned" or "state-owned").
To me there is, government as "ops", where the media could be more biased, while the state is the more wholistic entity, owned by the tax payer.
Your comment makes only sense if you follow the narrative that state is bad, private companies good. In most European countries, we are rather happy with having a part of the media market owned by the state.
You have to read the news from someone, and each one has its own bias. State news has a well known failure mode as propaganda. But commercial news turns out to have its own failure mode, where emotion inducing content has bigger gains for lower cost.
The best advice I can give here is to mix different sources. As a Belgian, I have a few local newspapers and the VRT news for Belgium, NOS, BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera, which are all checked at least weekly. Each one has its own blatant biases and blind spots. There are still big missing gaps, e.g. a Chinese and an African perspective. There is clearly Gell Mann Amnesia going on. Even so, I started to look very different to the world.
> Explain to me why reading news from the state is a good thing?
When you get your news from RT, BBC, France24, DW, PressTV, NPR, Gulf News, DD, Al-Jazeera etc. you get "official" political propaganda from the respective governments that run these outlets. Political propaganda can be based on falsehood or factual truth(s) with a "biased" analysis on it. Government news outlets have to show some journalistic integrity to earn trust. Thus, most of their propaganda tends to be based on facts than on falsehood. So reading them all or reading about the same subjects from these different outlets really gives you a larger political perspective with some great political insights.
Commercial interests tend to progresively degrade the quality of the news if there are no state-funded news channels. They publish more and more unverified "facts", conspiracy theories, tabloid news, AI slop, AI images instead of real news photograpy, intrusive ads, etc.
When there's a news channel funded by the state (instead of ads), most other private news are forced to keep up the quality and they also have the opportunity to call out any bad news and biases published by the state channel. This way no news outlets stray too far from the truth or become unreadable slop. It's better overall.
> What is the distinction between government and state?
In a parliamentary democracy the "government" is the prime minister, president (whatever the titles are), cabinet ministers and the party that happens to be in power at any given time. The "Government" might be a coalition of 2, 3, or 4 medium sized political parties that have come to some sort of arrangement to have enough votes to pass a budget and laws. The "state" are the persons who perform the longer term functions of the state not directly controlled by the whims of any political thing that might happen in a specific year.
For instance when France made a decision to build its previous series of nuclear powered, missile carrying submarines, and the decision to build a new series that will enter service some time in the 2030s, that's implemented by the civil servants who run the state. Various political parties have waxed and waned and leadership has come and gone since the French nuclear program began, but various successor governments have continued it.
Less specific than that program, the state implements other basic services for the people of the country, all the things that have their day to day work done by people who aren't elected members of parliament. The parliamentarians who happen to be occupying various seats at any given time are the government.
You'll see terms used like "the government has collapsed as the result of a non confidence vote" or "there's been a leadership challenge inside the government (eg: how Trudeau lost power recently)", it doesn't mean the functions of the state have collapsed.
The State would be the organization that uses governments as the branch of executive power (and also organizes a legislative activity, and a judiciary activity...). The kind and amount of power held by the Head of the State and the Head of the Government can vary.
Advertising-funded media is inherently plutocratic, in which those with the most money influence direction. Sometimes more overtly than others.
There've been many treatments of this: Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (1988), Neil Postman's Amusing OUrselves to Death (1985), Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909) <https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>.
That last is particularly good for a number of reasons, including that it's short and information dense, and lays out the clear conflicts inherent to advertising-driven media just at the time it was first gaining influence, and at a fraction of its present size and influence.
If you prefer video, media critic Isadore F. "I.F." Stone gave an excellent 1973 interview on the PBS series Day at Night on the state of newspaper journalism in the United States, contrasting the relative independence of big-city dailies vs. rural papers. The former were large enough that no single advertiser could threaten editorial independence.
Not the only one though: I remember what happened when we 'invaded' Lybia: not one criticism in the French news anywhere, total censorship, even though our media had widely and correctly criticised the US for the Irak war..
So I think the best thing is to get news from everywhere Russia, China, the US, Europe, but that's a lot of work..
Usually the argument is that because a reputable news agency with a history of high quality journalism made once a mistake, it's better to listen to some angry podcaster with a history inviting cooky nutcase, or sketchy Twitter account with history of boosting fake news as jokes.
The home page shows 3 consecutive press releases for the past 3 days each detailing a similar incident.
The first drone on 24.07 took ~80min to intercept and shoot down, well into the country. The other 2 were shot down within kilometers of the border so they’re paying closer attention.
Yes, but it also trains the pilots and everything around them for real action in a non war environment (you cannot just shoot anywhere in civilian airspace).
And they would need to train anyway.
But for a real conflict, sure, more economical solutions are on the way.
I think the idea is that you don't keep sending just one F16, but the problem is long before an age of drones we built up some catch me if you can bullshit where we expect smaller countries to ignore airspace violations.
Like bro... you got a GPS. Get the fuck out of here.