[sunaookami]

>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").

[yls]

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.

[hyperman1]

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.

[ceejayoz]

I tend to prefer public media over corporate media. It’s not like the Murdochs are more trustworthy than Macron.

[bananamogul]

Interesting how people like it use sympathetic terms (“public media”) while those who don’t use pejorative terms (“state-owned”, “government-run”).

I’m not saying it’s good or bad, just observing the language.

[inigyou]

The former is euphemistic. The latter two are objective.

[entrope]

Not in every case. I would call (in the US) National Public Radio "public media", but Voice of America "government-run".

I personally don't know enough about BBC or France 24 to go beyond "government-funded", so I would want more details about their governance before using the terms mentioned before to describe them.

[yls]

Sarcasm?

In a democracy, how would state owned be different from public?

Do you also call libraries state-run?

IMHO both terms are heavy with bias depending on context.

[eth0up]

I think if certain books happened to not appear in that library, it being state-run might be something to consider.

What ever it truly is, America is called a 'democracy', and it had Project Mockingbird, which some, myself included, say never ended. And even being maximally fair, I must question whether democracy has any meaning in the context of media after Ellison buys half of it. Does he not own CNN? No point in mentioning who, or what owns Fox. And Bezos?

I know it comes off offensive, despite being unintended, but 'democracy' means nothing to me. We have some useful principles of it, which I value, but as a thing, I don't see it.

[inigyou]

Alternative conclusion: democracy means something, but America doesn't have it

[inigyou]

Public means accessible to everyone. State-owned means owned by the state. These are orthogonal axes. X is a public square that is not owned by the state. The CIA situation room is owned by the state but is not public.

[thisislife2]

> 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.

[brabel]

As far as I know, it’s in the mission of most of these to give an unbiased report on what is happening in the world and inside the country. In practice, there may be influence by powerful politicians, but for these news outlets to spread government propaganda would constitute corruption.

I know that the BBC in the UK, SVT in Sweden, the ABC in Australia go to great lengths to listen to both sides, whatever they may be, to a fault. They are often criticized for giving minority views too much coverage for this reason, and rarely for saying what the government would want them to say uncritically.

[thisislife2]

> but for these news outlets to spread government propaganda would constitute corruption.

You would think so, but that isn't the reality because journalistic "corruption" is judged on political ideology. Your whole notion of what is "corrupt values" is based on your political ideology. And one of the important roles of government news outlets is to propagate the political values that the country has adopted - that is why western media covers capitalism with a positive biases and disses on communism and socialism with negative biases (and vice-versa in say, Russia and Cuba). These political values are not examined neutrally by the media because the political powers have already termed one or other other as "corrupt".

Just look at the heavily biased (positive) coverage Israel receives in western medias. Western countries were imperialist powers and thus have no problem with Israeli zionism's settler-colonialists policies and the consequent repression of Palestinians. Where as the Global South, especially former colonies still remember what it was to be colonised by foreigners and thus are "biased" towards Palestinians. (Ireland is the exception in the west, with huge sympathy for the Palestinians, because it too remembers its oppression under the British).

[brabel]

> These political values are not examined neutrally by the media because the political powers have already termed one or other other as "corrupt".

I don’t really recognize that when it comes to capitalism, plenty of criticism on the national media I know. Can you give examples of that bias?

I would say there are other examples of this though, for example when it comes to various wars where the country has taken sides: it becomes really difficult for journalists to openly defend the “enemy”.

[throw1234567891]

Who are you getting your news from? “Fox quote on quote News”?

[sunaookami]

Stop making up strawmen.

[bobthepanda]

A diversity of media is a good thing. Most of the bad things you could say about state media also apply to sufficiently concentrated private media.

[sunaookami]

Of course but that was not my argument.

[M95D]

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.