alt Hacker News>Since 2008 the channel has been wholly owned by the French government
Explain to me why reading news from the state is a good thing? Kinda shocked that people here applaud state-owned media (there is no difference between "government-owned" or "state-owned").
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You have to read the news from someone, and each one has its own bias. State news has a well known failure mode as propaganda. But commercial news turns out to have its own failure mode, where emotion inducing content has bigger gains for lower cost.
The best advice I can give here is to mix different sources. As a Belgian, I have a few local newspapers and the VRT news for Belgium, NOS, BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera, which are all checked at least weekly. Each one has its own blatant biases and blind spots. There are still big missing gaps, e.g. a Chinese and an African perspective. There is clearly Gell Mann Amnesia going on. Even so, I started to look very different to the world.
I tend to prefer public media over corporate media. It’s not like the Murdochs are more trustworthy than Macron.
> Explain to me why reading news from the state is a good thing?
When you get your news from RT, BBC, France24, DW, PressTV, NPR, Gulf News, DD, Al-Jazeera etc. you get "official" political propaganda from the respective governments that run these outlets. Political propaganda can be based on falsehood or factual truth(s) with a "biased" analysis on it. Government news outlets have to show some journalistic integrity to earn trust. Thus, most of their propaganda tends to be based on facts than on falsehood. So reading them all or reading about the same subjects from these different outlets really gives you a larger political perspective with some great political insights.
A diversity of media is a good thing. Most of the bad things you could say about state media also apply to sufficiently concentrated private media.
Who are you getting your news from? “Fox quote on quote News”?
Commercial interests tend to progresively degrade the quality of the news if there are no state-funded news channels. They publish more and more unverified "facts", conspiracy theories, tabloid news, AI slop, AI images instead of real news photograpy, intrusive ads, etc.
When there's a news channel funded by the state (instead of ads), most other private news are forced to keep up the quality and they also have the opportunity to call out any bad news and biases published by the state channel. This way no news outlets stray too far from the truth or become unreadable slop. It's better overall.
To me there is, government as "ops", where the media could be more biased, while the state is the more wholistic entity, owned by the tax payer.
Your comment makes only sense if you follow the narrative that state is bad, private companies good. In most European countries, we are rather happy with having a part of the media market owned by the state.