What’s a discontinued product or service that you desperately wish would come back?

@dancingtongue It's a product of capitalism, I'm afraid. There's too much emphasis on turning a profit, getting ratings, getting subscribers, and you don't do that by objectively reporting events. You have to shock people, then charge them for the full story.

@LordShadowfire It's an abdication of accountability, personal responsibility, sense of community in today's society, imho. Freedom of the Press was so much on the minds of the Founding Fathers for the above reasons, and a primary reason for creation of the Postal Service was for sharing newspapers between the colonies/states. Not that those newspapers were objective and balanced; au contraire, most were founded to promote their editorial positions and biases. But communities held them accountable for being somewhat factual about their own communities, and there were competing newspapers in communities of any size. And the citizenry felt an obligation to be knowledgeable about their communities and their government, so subscribed to one or more to keep informed.

But the capitalist chase of profits above principle is part of the problem, which is why when "free" broadcast media came into being with radio, TV, this obligation of accountability, objectivity, equal time was spelled out by the FCC in its requirements to use the air waves. There had to be airtime devoted to local news, news had to be separate from entertainment, equal time for political views, time community/public service. Then the lobbyists and politicians managed to gut those FCC requirements, and the days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite were over, and 60 Minutes ushered in the current era of "news" as profitable entertainment.

@dancingtongue Interesting to read the perspective of a professional journalist.

I will say at the start I have never worked anywhere in that profession.


You admit the newspapers had their own biases, and though I don't know the American angle on this in Britain you could, and still can, identify their political leanings and so allow for them. They do not usually lie as that can be revealed nd may vene lead to libel proceedings, but they use careful editing, printing bare fact but omitting key qualifiers or reducing the opposition's defence.

I've noticed percentages are an easy tool for this too: 33.3% Rise In...!!!. Err, yes, but from what base figure - 1000? 10 000? 1 000 000? Technical ignorance too: "Exponential Change In...!!!. Rise or fall? Rapid or slow? Really exponential or arithmetically random?


There is one clue I have found for assessing an organisation's fairness: If the accusations of bias are from both, or all sides, of contentious matters it must be reasonably neutral!

Anrother, in really serious matters like wars and occasional American general-elections, is coverage of both sides of the conflict as far as practicable and safe. So the BBC is able to report from both Russia and Ukraine, but has to use trusted locals and aid-workers for anything Palestinian, due to Israel banning foreign journalists from Gaza. If a journalist is barred from a country of ill repute it is because the host government fears us learning of things it does not want revealing. So journalists do have to tread very carefully, use the correct official euphemisms like "special military operation", and quote accurately the government spokesman, the official line in the State newspaper or TV bulletin. So we know what that country officially thinks, and can judge it for ourselves. Interviewing local people takes a lot of skill and courage because you want an idea of their views but do not want to endanger either the journalist or the interviewee; nor risk losing the coverage.

Two things the BBC does:

- If quoting a source about something it cannot physically examine, it will say something like "the report cannot be verified".

- It has a Verification Department which looks especially at third-party on-line reports to assess their probity. One example is if the third-party report claims an incident in a videoed location, it examines the background details and compares it with other visual information to decide if the allegation is false or might be true.



I think most accusations of bias are really from people upset at the dissemination of opposing opinions as well as those they support; but there is also the unwanted bias caused by those being investigated refusing to give their point of view or explain their actions - basically, refusing to defend themselves.

We hear this all the time in the BBC Radio Four's Today current affairs, and Your and Yours "consumer"-affairs, programmes. Some governmental agency, local-government office or commercial organisation has been caught out in some way, but when invited to defend itself, refuses outright or hides behind "No-one was available for comment" (No I don't believe it either). It might "issue a statement" in the passive tense, as blandly useless as that daft "mission-statement" fad among 1990s businesses with opaque names and purposes. These, written by managers no more literate than they should be, typically state the blindingly obvious but use "we are committed to..." or the curiously double-edged "We strive to..."; admitting they are far from there yet!


The UK does have "Ofcom" (Office of Communications") to ensure as far as possible that broadcast news is as objective, accurate and fair as possible, with a clear separation between news reporting and airing of opinions, along with trying to maintain balance of views. Or as "Nortonsafesearch" puts it:


As a Civil Service office it is independent of broadcasters and government, but also has quite strong regulatory powers and will investigate serious complaints. If it has to investigate, the broadcaster has to report this, including whether the complaint is upheld or dismissed by Ofcom. Many are dismissed, but occasional upholding does happen.

What though it cannot do is regulate the Internet beyond those sites used by the public-service and commercial broadcasters. So it cannot do anything about the fictious "news" magazines intended as seditious material, placed on-line by the likes of Russia. A good clue as to their dishonesty apart from evident bias, is the lack of any apparent office address, and sometimes almost too-perfect English.

@ArishMell Thank you for your detailed description of the British state of journalism which -- from the limited exposure I get from the U.S. version of BBC World News -- sounds pretty close to what we used to have here. There used to be basic editorial policies here as well: contested or unverifiable facts required at least two independent sources before it could be printed or aired; a spokesperson unavailable for comment only allowed after repeated attempts to no avail. Now it is all a rush to be out front "trending" for the ratings so both are mere lip service. And from what I have seen far more often is that both corporations and government use that as a shield. Issue a bland written statement that says nothing, counting on the news cycle to rush on to the next trendy story line, something else going viral. In my day, PR people's jobs would be on the line for hiding behind a written statement. It showed weakness, almost a nolo contendre confession. You earned your money for knowing your journalists -- hard to do these days, the turnover of real journalists is so rapid -- and being able to engage in verbal jousting defending your employer.

We all are human. We all have our biases, whether we recognize them or not. The editorial policies were established to protect the news entity from individual biases as much as possible. But there were still organizational biases, and if you wanted to be informed you read/watched/listened to multiple outlets, as you said. I called it triangulating the news. I used to read 5 different daily newspapers a day. Partially work related, but not entirely. I still read two a day. But try triangulating them. Staffs are so minimal they report the police blotter and use wire service or syndicated major outlets for all the news, so you pretty much wind up with the same stories as they go viral and then disappear in a flash.

Britain's libel laws have largely protected you from this, imho. Winning a libel suit in the U.S. is virtually impossible. In addition to proving falsehood and damage, you have to prove deliberate malice here. Very difficult to do.

@dancingtongue Thankyou!

I wonder if sometimes the evasion is due to fear of civil or criminal litigation. In some cases, that is already under way so no-one can say anything publicly. I can understand silence being necessary then, but too often it is merely organisational cowardice.

@ArishMell All my former colleagues in the PR profession are retired now as well, so I have no one to ask. But imo it is not so much cowardice as it is this sense of it being a 24 hour news cycle -- at least in the U.S. -- with our short attention spans, and don't give them anything more to prolong the story. Something else will go trendy and viral any minute now.

Yes, even the golden days of objective journalism, there were recognized and acceptable reasons for not being able to comment; foremost to not jeopardize ongoing investigations in the case of law enforcement and can't jeopardize legal processes when individuals or organizations have not yet had their opportunity for due process. Privacy restrictions on individual's health care information another, from the field I worked in. Abused occasionally, but generally accepted.

@dancingtongue I suppose with the best will in the world so much is happening everywhere that not all matters can be reported properly and for long, so many of them quickly slip out of public view.

Do any of the news services in the USA have longer, analytical programmes that examine and explain the backgrounds to important stories, or provide long investigations?

We do often hear "We cannot comment on individual cases", which is fair when that would affect an individual's privacy although it also happens when the whole reason for that report is the individual concerned going public in desperation, wanting answers and proper treatment.

A lot of evasion comes from compartmenting: "Not our responsibility", says xxxxx, "you need talk to yyyy"; who would probably say it was xxxx's all along, or blame yet another department, or just deny all knowledge. This is particularly hard in child-cruelty cases, because these reveal so many agencies are involved none seem able to co-operate, nor the staff really know what they are supposed to do or whom to contact.

@ArishMell
Very few any more, and easily identified because they are targeted by Trump and his MAGA supporters as the despised "mainstream media": the N.Y.Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Associated Press. They also are identifiable as having their own syndicates (or being one in the case of AP), so an additional revenue stream to support the staff required.

That is on the national level. Locally, major daily newspapers will still do locally-focused features but they tend to be softer, more human interest focused rather than truly investigative journalism. They no longer can afford the experienced, dedicated staff to do so. I still subscribe to the two dailies in my region: the San Francisco Chronicle and the Bay Area News Group, which is a mashup of what used to be 3 major and 4 minor dailies (far more if you go back a few decades), which puts out two major dailies, but essentially is largely the same only packaged with a slightly different geographical focus. Both have shrunk to about half the size one would have been a decade ago, because the advertising and subscription revenue streams are no longer there to support the editorial and production costs. And what remains is primarily three types of content: very long local features (with lots of photos to make them look even longer and more in-depth) but mostly lacking in-depth significance; a recitation of local police blotters (mostly investigations in progress with few details, the volume projecting the appearance of rampant crime that crime statistics do not support), and then syndicated/AP reports on national stories. Little in the way of real local news coverage.

Let me give you a couple of examples of the changes just during my career, in dealing with the news media covering the non-profit, prepaid health care system I worked for. In the early 70's, our primary labor union went on strike. The reporters we were dealing with were designated medical/health/science reporters on the service issues and dedicated labor union reports on the negotiations side. And every major daily had at least one, sometimes multiple reporters assigned solely to cover those areas so they were knowledgeable. A major message we were trying to get out was that we were still open for urgent care, using our physicians and other professional staff not covered by the union. I got a call from the medical/science reporter of a now defunct daily asking how many patients we actually had seen that day at our San Francisco medical center. Having anticipated the question, I had the count readily available, and gave it to him. There was a long pause. Then he says, "well, I have been sitting in the waiting room the past hours and have seen x number patients called in; multiply that by x hours -- yep, that is about what I calculated". A knowledgeable reporter, only one story to dig into, with the time to sit for an hour in a waiting room to make sure I wasn't blowing smoke.

A decade later, similar situation. The union decided to have a massive picketing of our administrative headquarters in Oakland, blocking the street and egress from our parking garage at the end of the workday. The police responded, said they would clear the street for half an hour to let people leave but that was the only window of opportunity they could guarantee. They proceeded to tell the picketers to disperse, most moved to the sidewalks or left, a couple of leaders symbolically arrested without any struggle. Normal theater for the cameras. The next day the only remaining San Francisco daily had a huge story about how we and the police had brought in a SWAT team to forcibly remove peaceful picketers exercising their rights by a reporter we had never dealt with and who had made no effort to contact us or the police; took the union's version as gospel. The Oakland Tribune, now defunct, ran an accurate version of what happened, again by a reporter we didn't normally deal with and who hadn't contacted us. I asked him how he got it right when the Chronicle got so hoodwinked. He said, "heck, I could watch from my office here in the Tribune Tower, recognized that those cops in leather jackets were motorcycle traffic officers not SWAT team members, and confirmed with the police that they simply cleared the street for traffic as they had no permit."

It takes resources to do an adequate job of reporting. Dedicated resources who have contacts, know their field of expertise, can ask knowledgeable questions, not be snowed by those they are interviewing. Broadcast media (since the FCC requirements were emasculated, turning news into entertainment) and the Internet do not put those resources into reporting. They relied on the print media to provide the content while sucking out the revenue streams, both in terms of advertising and readers/viewers, without paying a dime for it. Legislative proposals to make them pay for the content have been floundering for sometime, going no where.

@dancingtongue A long, slow decline.... Eeventually to no-one's benefit except the companies themselves.

My local newspaper does still report a fair amount of local news, entertainments, sports events and the like but after the group that owned it anfmany other local and regional paper was swallowed by a bigger firm still, the quality dropped markedly; with many pages devoted to massive, syndicated advertising, puzzles and so forth.

It publishes a weekend supplement that holds the forthcoming week's TV programmes but gives little information on them, and ignores radio totally.

I have no TV but as far as I can discern from visiting relatives who do, the News and current affairs are covered fairly well by both the BBC and commercial channels, and they have to be as impartial as they can.

Most of the real in-depth reporting and investigative journalism is on BBC Radio Four but I think there are still some similar programmes on TV.