this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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I want to like Al Jazeera, but they are owned by the Qatar government so I am dubious of them.
Its good to be dubious. Its also good to include them to get a different bias into the mix. Only consuming media of the same bias will leave you ignorant without you knowing it, thats the believe I've come to adopt.
And you only realize which part of the bias is shared across a lot of media when you read media from outside the bubble. And a lot are within the bubble. To quote wikipedia:
There is enough reason to be dubious about all mass media. BBC is founded and owned by the UK government and many other publications by a billionaire family.
Previously I had thought media literacy was about chosing "reliable" sources but nowadays I believe its more about reading many of different biases and being dubious of all until their bias emerges.
IDK if that resonates with you at all or not. But I can also recommend Noam Chomskys "Manufacturing Consent", its a classic ofc.
Just a quick correction: the BBC is independent of the government and funded directly by the audience who it is, in theory, answerable to. The government would like to change that.
Thanks for the correction - This still needs clarification though. I'd argue that calling it "government funded" is the better mental model and "financed by the audience it is answerable to" is giving the false impression that the audience has any influence on what they are paying for and consuming - AFAIK they don't
The BBC is publicly funded, yes. The fee is however set by the government and accepted by the parliament, in which ususally the ruling coalition (or party) holds the majority, so its effectively set by the ruling party. This does make it technically different from direct state funding but de-facto the gov still has controll over the amount of funding the BBC will receive.
So while the audience pays directly it does not have the ability to pull or increase funding in approval or disapproval but the government does.
Like you said nominally the BBC is answerable to the audience, de-facto it is answerable to the government only.
Other publicly funded broadcasters have a different system, in Germany for example the federal states decide on the licence fee.
However de-facto this doesn't change anything. Its common knowledge in Germany that the publicly funded broadcasters are quite state affiliated, there have been a couple of court rulings confirming that.
So yeah for a bigger picture looking at funding only isn't sufficient