A massive struggle session has appeared in the UK left with arguments over defending the BBC or not now that it has been announced that the tv license might be gone by 2027.
The factions seem to be:
A "But it makes good entertainment and documentaries and music and puts lgbt people in shows"
B "Yeah but none of that has anything to do with the extreme political harm it clearly does".
I am in faction B and have no idea how to get through to the first faction. Libs obviously also support the first faction.
I assume Hexbear being anti-treats lately would also be in faction B but could be wrong.
What are your thoughts on the topic overall?
idk that's the situation in the US and that fight is so utterly and totally lost in the broadcasting space. what passes for news here -- especially local news -- is horrifying. you know the situation there better than I do but my 2c are that the media situation here is nothing to envy. the private institutions rapidly give themselves respectability and the authoritative voice.
to put this in perspective, a lot of anti-vaxx sentiment in the US is being driven by our local news stations, both to help sell people scams and to convince them that they ought to go back to work. private media has the blood of its own consumer base on its hands and it will never face consequences for it.
Over here there is basically no such thing as local news. Different places have their own local papers but they have very little material impact. The national picture is where the political battle occurs.
I'm not saying that the same set up will replicate. the conditions there are different. but the main difference between a public institution that can't ever broadcast anything radical because it would offend the oligarchs and private institutions that serve directly as their voices is the immediacy of the control they offer to those oligarchs. "local news" is something of misnomer here -- it's not that we have thousands of independent news organizations. they're all owned by a single broadcasting company -- a business that directly profits on selling scams to people by lending them their voice of authority. and people are utterly blind to this -- if you point it out to them, you get swept up in their narratives about their commitment to fighting you in the "culture war", a narrative constructed and sold by the same entities that want eyeballs to sell them scams.
our media has helped polarize people, sure. but I'm not sure it's had much impact on radicalization -- polarization here refers to the growing divide between camps of liberals that mostly agree with each other but that hate each other because of said manufactured culture war.
What about local cable news channels? I know Sinclair owns all of them, but they do have an impact, albeit an awful one.
We need union rags again