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Comment by ggregoire | Hacker News Reader

This is the most shocking part from an outsider POV. In Europe* mainstream media must obviously be neutral about each candidate but also give the same amount of airing time to each candidate. So like if candidate 1 is invited for a 10 min interview, candidate 2 must be invited too and offered the same airing time. Meanwhile here Fox can just call Harris "stupid" (and CNN reciprocally call Trump whatever they want), lie to make them look good/bad and support their candidate all day long while spitting on the other one, and it's fine.

Edit: my bad for generalizing all countries of Europe

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Not in Poland. Before the last election we had 100% partisan media with the public media campaigning for the ruling party and the opposition controling the private media. Both had the Fox News/CNN/Pravda levels of objectivity showing a strange propaganda version of reality.

This is certainly not true for the mainstream media in all of europe. It might be true for public television stations in some countries.

In Spain, public TV must show a list of parties with a minimum same time for even the tiniest craziest parties several times a day. After that, they are free to keep doing their thing.

But the biggest parties can buy more time by several subterfuges. In resume they can pay somehow for receiving a special treatment. Every politician has a market value and TV programs always compete for showing adds to the most eyeballs possible, so they will try to fill their programs with the more popular politicians 'for free'.

If I'm not wrong, private channels, funded without public money, can show people making pancakes all day it they want, but they will also try to maximize their advertising revenues.

How much do they have to be "neutral" when there are multiple candidates with significantly different popularity?

If there are three candidates polling about equal then okay, it's easy to be neutral. But what if they're |40, 35, 25| or |60, 20, 20| or |55, 40, 5|?

When does a minor candidate drop out of their neutrality? I'm not saying the general idea is bad but just pointing out that neutrality is kind of a vague concept. It's a bit like giving climate change deniers equal airtime with serious scientists.

I don't know if I follow you. My point was that TV networks can't do propaganda for a candidate, i.e. they can repeat the policies of each candidate (without giving you their opinion on those policies and trying to convince you if it's good or bad or modify them) and fact check what they say, but they can't tell you who to vote for or blatantly lie about them. Hence they are neutral. Meanwhile here Fox will just tell you to vote for Trump to save America and that if Harris wins she will turn America into communism, and millions of people are watching and believing it.

If that's what the Fox presenters truly believe, should the government be allowed to censor them?

And this is the crux of the issue.

Most countries don’t have the pretense of free speech, and media is heavily regulated to be ‘fair’ (which means different things in each country).

It has pros and cons.

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