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Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

You've clearly not seen the UK press. The Daily Mail has been around for decades, and has quality standards roughly on par with Fox News at best. The tabloids have spent years posting any old speculation they can find and sometimes even hacking people's phones for information.

And the more respectable papers have generally had their own problems with reporting standards. The likes of the Guardian and the Telegraph should be on the lower end of what's considered journalism, not the upper one.

Honestly, the introduction of online news sources has probably helped in a lot of ways, because it meant people might at last be checking information from sources other than tabloids. There's at least a niche for good quality journalism online now rather than it being an 'occasional' fixture in some newspapers on a good day.

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Ah, the UK press. How did that happen? Why do the British like that sort of thing?

And I'd also add that the Greek press is also garbage. They don't turn a profit at all and are simply propaganda for their owner's point of view. Their owners usually being family-owned conglomerates. It's as if the Kochs started their own newspaper. I get the impression this is actually pretty common in many countries, particularly eastern European ones.

Let's stress – some of the UK press. The Express, Daily Mail, the Sun, and so on. Tabloid journalism is still a thing, and has been present for an awfully long time globally – it's not a new thing, nor particular to the UK.

But then there's also The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist, the FT – all of which have bias and flaws in their own way, but are indisputably higher-quality.

The mistake is in assuming that there can ever really be a realistic, completely-free-from-influence publication. In reality, we have to rely on a diversity of publications, funding models and political viewpoints, and make informed decisions. This needs to be backed by strong FOI laws and a culture of press freedom, which sadly is something which the UK has not been doing well at recently.

South America too

I find LeMondediplomatique (in all it's countries regions) to be a light in the darkness of propaganda. Check it out

Makes you wonder if countries with good quality newspapers and media outlets are the exception rather than the rule.

Maybe the US just kind of lucked out there.

Wait. You think the US has good quality newspapers and media outlets?

I can't think of one "reputable" US news outlet that hasn't knowingly spread misinformation or half-truths at least once over the past year.

The "good" sources are generally the least bad ones that happen to confirm your biases more than the rest.

It's relative. From my point of view as an outsider the US print media scene appears to be dominated by what I'd describe as broadsheets (NYT, Washington Post, WSJ, LA Times etc). These papers can at times be pretty bad and I don't agree with the editorial position of any of them but even something like the WSJ which will publish crazy climate change conspiracy theories is in a different league to the papers that dominate in the UK: The Sun and Daily Mail. Imagine that the most widely read US paper by far was the National Enquirer and that it was treated as a serious and important paper by other media outlets and political parties.

I can't help laughing at your quaint idea that spreading misinformation "at least once over the past year" is a major offence. Dozens of major inaccuracies (with blatant political motivation) per day is the kind of standard we are talking about here.

Not to mention the abhorrent behaviour of journalists towards victims of crime etc in trying to get stories, which is a whole other side to the UK media which probably isn't appreciated from the outside.

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