Question of the week: how do you like your TV news?

12 May 2010 Rob Buckley TMINE 3 Comments

Here, in the UK, there is the ostensible legal requirement for broadcast TV news to be impartial. What that actually means and whether it merely favours a centre-left view of the world that doesn’t allow for extremes or which inadvertently backs big business and government (cf any book by John Pilger) is certainly debatable.

But in the US, there’s no such requirement for cable news at least. Hence, Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the relative left. For some that’s horrific – news should impartial. For others it’s the acknowledgement that all news is inherently biased and is filtered by most news editors preconceptions.

So question of the week this week, after Adam Boulton went mental at Alistair Campbell on Sky News, is:

How do you like your TV news: attempting to be impartial or obviously partial?

As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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