Mister Bump UK

Fandango’s Provocative Question (14 June 2023)

Prompt image for the Fandango's Provocative Question prompt

Today, Fandango provocatively asks:

What are your primary sources for news? How confident are you that those sources are presenting the news accurately, factually, and without bias?

I don’t think any news is without bias. Any broadcast, radio, tv or web, has an editorial team. They and the presenters will between them decide on which stories I see, which facts I hear about and how they’re presented to me. And they’ll decide what I don’t see, the stories – or facts – I won’t get to hear about because the editor decided something else was more “relevant”.

So I think as soon as you buy into a particular programme, you’re buying into the team behind it. But what you’re seeing is what they, subjectively, want you to see. It’s not objective. Any show.

So you can’t have objectivity. But I think you can have balance. You could, if you’ve the mind, watch one left-leaning programme, then one right-leaning programme, but which of us has the time or the inclination to do that? The news is normally bad enough once! I think the only time I ever did that was to make a point of watching Al Jazeera when Britain and America went into Iraq and Afghanistan.

So I don’t think many of us even see a balanced view of the news, although the option is there if we’re prepared to watch enough of it.

Incidentally I generally watch Channel 4 in the UK. It’s an hour a day, which is enough for me. But they fall exactly into what I’ve just described. They’ll claim to be objective but there is obviously a left-wing, London-centric bias. It suits me because I’m broadly aligned to that flavour of politics. Ish. And we all tend to listen to views we agree with, don’t we?

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Published by Mister Bump UK

Divorced, grown/flown daughter. In life, I designed IT systems, taking a career break as a bicycle mechanic, until interrupted by a stroke in 2016, aged 48. As I convalesced, I combined the development of health-related apps with voluntary work, and began writing. After a stint working again in IT, I now write full-time, and use my blog space to let my hair down.

14 comments

  3. I read the papers (sometimes all I can take are the headlines) and usually listen to All Things Considered because they cover a story longer than 30 seconds. I avoid the nightly news like the plague; with only about 20 minutes of actual news time, after subtracting the commercials and flashy graphics, I find it mind blowing that even one second of this time would be devoted to Taylor Swift’s remarks at a concert.

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  4. I read the local newspaper which also covers world news, to try to keep on top of what’s going on. Sometimes I can barely get beyond the headlines, let alone the articles, without becoming angry. While not as blatantly in-you-face-biased as the NYT, for example, it still fails to give a fair, accurate and honest report. I do not believe a completely unbiased news source exists anywhere and TV coverage is worse than any written newspaper or online news.
    Here is an example that infuriated me when I first learned of it. My son is a freelance cameraman and teleprompter for the Tri-State area (NY, NJ, & CT). I emphasize freelance because it’s important for you to know he is not employed by any TV or radio station, newspaper or online news service. His assignments are varied and he goes where his assignments take him. He does not report the news; he operates the camera for TV viewers at home.
    During the early days of the pandemic, one of our local governors held a 1/2 hour televised “update” every day at noon. My son was assigned to cover those gubernatorial updates many times. He witnessed only certain reporters whose names were on a list being allowed entry and they were given a list of prepared, pre-approved questions to ask. No ‘spontaneous’ questions were allowed. The answers to the questions were not spontaneous. They were presented to the TV viewers in the form of graphs, charts, etc. Very impressive but nothing was left to chance and what we saw was pre-planned, discussed and approved before the show. To say these updates provided us with live, accurate information is false. In fact, the public was lied to every day, day after day, for months. It was a very sad joke; the governor acted like a pompous blowhard and the reporters were nothing more than fear-mongering puppets.
    I already answered the question about my news sources. In answer to today’s provocative question “How confident are you that those sources are presenting the news accurately, factually, and without bias?” … my answer is not confident at all.
    Unfortunately, I do not believe a single word. What we see is what we get? I don’t think so! (Sorry for hogging your space, Pete!)

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