this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
54 points (95.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43905 readers
1381 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
Very well said. This is precisely why I include sources like Al-Jazeera.