An interesting column by Bret Stephens in the Jersualem Post on media bias, in which he claims that the BBC is no better than FOX News, and, in many ways, is even worse. Because FOX has a sort of self-awareness that it is often more of a parody of a news station than an actual news station. But the BBC thinks of itself as serious, and wants to be taken seriously:
According to a study conducted last year by Media Tenor, a Bonn-based media research group, 85% of the BBC’s coverage of Israel was “negative”; another 15% was rated “neutral”; none was “positive.” This has been going on for decades. Nobody noticed in part because Israel is far away, in part because the negative coverage conforms to existing prejudices. With the Kelly story, however, Israel’s once-dismissed complaints about the BBC are beginning to seem like part of a larger pattern of questionable reportage and editorial spinning.
In other words, the journalism on offer from the BBC is often no less tendentious than what you get on Fox. This is not to say that it isn’t better than Fox’s: the breadth of the BBC’s coverage is vastly greater, its biases are not so crudely expressed, and the general tenor of its programming isn’t so sophomoric. But these advantages are offset by the fact that the BBC is so desperately in earnest. It really does see itself as an “independent” and “objective” voice merely because it isn’t governed by considerations of profit. And it also sees itself as a bulwark of decency, duty bound to enlighten the masses and speak truth to power.
[ . . . ]
I’VE DEVOTED this column to Fox News and the BBC because they are often viewed as being the opposite poles of broadcast news: one baldly partisan, the other scrupulously objective; one populist-conservative, the other high-toned and cosmopolitan; one relentlessly profit-driven, the other “in the public interest.” As with most poles, too, they have a great deal in common – political agendas and moral smugness above all. I resent both of them; one for having given a bad name to conservatives, the other for having given it to journalists.
Well worth a read.
Another thing that Fox and BBC have in common — as do most news orgs, which is the point lurking behind the column methinks — is their apparent inability to send journalists to the Middle East who, say, speak any of the local languages.
Or, for that matter, to insure, properly pay, or even credit the local “stringers” who are so critical to shaping the news coverage for which the journalist-stars become known, head home, write a book about it, become local darlings of the well-heeled intellectual classes, etc.
Feh.