>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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yls 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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hyperman1 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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ceejayoz 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I tend to prefer public media over corporate media. It’s not like the Murdochs are more trustworthy than Macron.

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bananamogul 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Interesting how people like it use sympathetic terms (“public media”) while those who don’t use pejorative terms (“state-owned”, “government-run”).

I’m not saying it’s good or bad, just observing the language.

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inigyou 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The former is euphemistic. The latter two are objective.

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entrope 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not in every case. I would call (in the US) National Public Radio "public media", but Voice of America "government-run".

I personally don't know enough about BBC or France 24 to go beyond "government-funded", so I would want more details about their governance before using the terms mentioned before to describe them.

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yls 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sarcasm?

In a democracy, how would state owned be different from public?

Do you also call libraries state-run?

IMHO both terms are heavy with bias depending on context.

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inigyou 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Public means accessible to everyone. State-owned means owned by the state. These are orthogonal axes. X is a public square that is not owned by the state. The CIA situation room is owned by the state but is not public.

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eth0up 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think if certain books happened to not appear in that library, it being state-run might be something to consider.

What ever it truly is, America is called a 'democracy', and it had Project Mockingbird, which some, myself included, say never ended. And even being maximally fair, I must question whether democracy has any meaning in the context of media after Ellison buys half of it. Does he not own CNN? No point in mentioning who, or what owns Fox. And Bezos?

I know it comes off offensive, despite being unintended, but 'democracy' means nothing to me. We have some useful principles of it, which I value, but as a thing, I don't see it.

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inigyou 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Alternative conclusion: democracy means something, but America doesn't have it

	▲	eth0up an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah. And we seem to be missing a Republic too. Thank G0d for Chinese LLMs.

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thisislife2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

	▲	brabel an hour ago \| parent [-]
		As far as I know, it’s in the mission of most of these to give an unbiased report on what is happening in the world and inside the country. In practice, there may be influence by powerful politicians, but for these news outlets to spread government propaganda would constitute corruption. I know that the BBC in the UK, SVT in Sweden, the ABC in Australia go to great lengths to listen to both sides, whatever they may be, to a fault. They are often criticized for giving minority views too much coverage for this reason, and rarely for saying what the government would want them to say uncritically.

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throw1234567891 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Who are you getting your news from? “Fox quote on quote News”?

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bobthepanda 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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M95D an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.