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Comment by macksd | Hacker News Reader

Not that it's any consolation, but it's definitely not a flaw unique to Britain. I think this is just increasingly the universal norm in our society. Mainstream news in the US is, as I'm sure you know, also pretty much entirely slanted one way or the other and appealing to emotion. Headlines that make value judgments, the choice in what to emphasize and what to ignore, etc. And I say mainstream news like the alternative media is any better, but it doesn't seem that way to me.

World news always seems very refreshing to me in this regard: BBC World, Al Jazeera, Reuters. But yes, national and local news just seems to be a cesspool in many places and spreading.

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"World news" is more often slanted by what is reported rather than how.

BBC world news seems to focus quite a lot on Russia, for instance, maybe in response to RT's focus on UK.

Al jazeera also cant be trusted on anything involving qatar, assuming it even reports the story.

I think your takes on BBC World News and Al Jazeera don't really count for much unless they're based on analysis of the full content of these organizations. I listen to a moderate amount of BBC World News, and I've almost never heard Russia come up. However, my listening habits barely cover 10% of their output. Maybe you just happen to tune into some subsection that does indeed focus on Russia, which seems entirely possible.

Today's Russia story seems to be https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59299101

It's a bit lower down the front page than usual.

IIRC yesterday their top story had a bit about putin being accused of orchestrating the migrant crisis in belarus.

There's almost always something every day. Often they're not really very newsworthy which made me think that there might be a quota or something.

Other times it's registering an official US/UK disapproval of something they did as above.

I'm not sure this is what you're making it out to be. Russia is one of nine countries that have nuclear weapons, and has one of the two largest stockpiles. For a "world news" site, does it not make sense to focus on this major power which is also geographically close to the UK?

The thing that first made me start to wonder was seeing a few somewhat obscure domestic issues like something about a Russian instagrammer I think, maybe a feminist writer or something hit the 4th slot. This was the 4th most important story in the world that day? Because... they have nukes?

I could understand if the stories were all internationally relevant but they're often oddly specific Russian domestic news (e.g. like https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58315926).

RT seems to do a similar thing. I remember walking around London one day and seeing a lot of protestors, although I couldn't make out their signs. I learned what was up from /r/london (they were antivaxxers). The BBC reported on it but buried the story while RT had it prominently displayed at like #4 on their world news page / #1 on their UK news page.

That's fair, but I will say that my experience with cable news is that every time I see it, not only does it feel extremely manipulative and emotion-based, but it's like, "oh - we're all still obsessing over this one court case instead of literally anything else that happened yesterday". Every time I look at world news, it seems to at least be covering a much greater variety of things that don't seem so predictable and click-baity and that do seem like they're actually of consequence to a larger selection of the population.

edit: Some of this unavoidable - you have to make judgments on what to cover and what makes the front page, and you're never going to eliminate people's biases or agendas completely. Not that it makes that acceptable, but I don't read World News and feel like the whole institution is beyond recovery and worthless. Cable news in the US? Yeah - I do feel that way.

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