Tonight I was accused of bias watching Al Jazeera news too much however is the BBC et al totally impartial by design or part-lazy news-line reporting.

The Syrian Government dropped barrrl bombs onto the oppositions front lines partly as their munitions arent as advanced as drone strikes but also proportional reporting?

How many drone strikes, Isil etc kill civilians in the bigger picture?

An old mate is an Al Jazeera reporter, he used to be a anchor at Granada Reports.
Hope that helps.

They are all at it so don’t trust anyone of them too much coz they are just another form of political voice box.

They need to stir things up otherwise they would be out of jobs.

They are all at it. That includes prontagonists. War is shades of grey.

My view on the BBC has changed since Corbyn’s election. They pander far too much to the government, showing a jingoistic viewpoint despite nominally being impartial.

I do look at Al Jazeera from time to time as well for balance.

I didn’t accuse you of bias!!! I just said make sure you balance your news input, challenge what they’re saying, their sources and their motives.

Reactionary much? Fox News would suit you down to to the ground

My view on the BBC has changed since Corbyn’s election. They pander far too much to the government

Although it’s fashionable to blame the Tories with regards to attacks on the BBC it’s New Labour that you can thank for that ^

The only person to lose their job due to the feckup that was the Iraq War was the BBC’s Director-General……for allowing the BBC to tell the truth.

It is propaganda, but so is Al Jazeera that does the bidding of the Qatari dictatorship. I have no idea where to get unbiased news, I just treat it all as a work of fiction.

Surely your own viewpoint colours what you see on the news?
Also it’s very hard to be impartial. Just selecting one word over another to describe something can put a different, unintended spin on it.

I’m afraid most news outlets in the UK are biased, having witnessed a load of rollocks reported about one of companies I work for.
Then what has been a massive piece of one sided and under informed reporting by local and national media, concerning my wife’s work which has lead to abuse and a lack of trust, even once the facts where out in the public domain the reporting has continued to be one sided, but when the media have paid lots of money to get there stories there not going to want to report the truth.

Then you get the political situation most papers support one party and the BBC seems very slanted towards them as well meaning the public don’t get a balanced view.

I’ve stopped buying newspaper and don’t really watch the news anymore, as I became disillusioned with it all.

Al Jazeera has always struck me as impartial as any other respectable news source.
Russia Today, or Press TV seem as about impartial as Fox news.

That’s the problem with propaganda, it does seem reasonable and unbiased to those who prefer to believe it over other information they are being provided, but often all you’ve got to choose from are other accounts of varying biases. Considering Al jazeera is Qatari then they should have a myriad of issues to campaign about regarding the ruling Qatari family and government, but they are surprisingly silent on a lot of issues – bribery, corruption, human rights, support and sympathy for extreme muslim groups and the establishment of a caliphate. It’s a country that if you say the wrong thing to the wrong person you get given 24hrs to get out of the country….if you’re lucky, so I can’t imagine many Al-Jazeera journalists taking a particularly critical stance regarding the state of Qatar or it’s foreign policy. So ultimately they are just offering another form of bias.

It’s not until something kicks off in the news that you personally have intimate knowledge of so you can compare the real facts to what the reported facts are. This has happened to me twice and none of the elements of the press come out very well regarding accuracy of facts, and in fact seem hell bent on fanning the flames of public paranoia with no attempt at reporting a balanced and informed view. Like the politics in this country, and no doubt the world, it’s very dumbed down and tries to distill complicated issues to a binary black or white situation when in actual fact things are usually not that simple and there are shades of grey. It’s politics and media for the lowest common denominator.

It’s worth noting how quickly the US airstrike against a hospital run by a charity in which 22 aid workers and patients, including children, died, appears to have dropped from the news.

The US government strategy seems to keep quiet while it blows over, which isn’t very long apparently – just a few hours, and Afghan government strategy seems to be to justify the air strike against a hospital despite the fact that such actions constitutes war crimes.

Meanwhile attention has been diverted to allegations that a Russian warplane operating over Syria briefly entered Turkish airspace, not a wholly surprising incident but apparently one that has caused outrage because in violates international law (US, UK, and French airstrikes in Syria also violate international law as they aren’t authorised by the internationally recognised Syrian gov)

Would our media have been so quick to drop a news story concerning a Russian war crime in Syria in which a large well-established charity run hospital was targeted and attacked for 30 minutes, despite the Russians having the hospital’s GPS co-ordinates and being informed during the attack, and after which the Syrian government attempted to justify ?

I think most people would agree that the answer to that question is no.

The bias, double-standards, and hypocrisy, is fairly obvious.

It’s worth noting how quickly the US air strike against a hospital run by a charity in which 22 aid workers and patients, including children, appears to have dropped from the news.

really? I heard about it on Radio 4 at about 8am this morning.

It is one of the last news items on BBC News 24 bulletins and it’s dropped out of google news altogether. It only happened hours ago not days ago. Would a Russian war crime against a targeted charity run hospital be dropping out of the news so quickly?

No of course not, we would be still hearing endless condemnations from Cameron, Obama, etc, and talk of “exerting pressure” on Russia.

really? I heard about it on Radio 4 at about 8am this morning.

Me too, it’s all over the media.

It’s certainly not “all over the media”. It’s being now treated as a minor news story. Click on the google news page and you won’t even see it mentioned, where’s all the articles by the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail on the incident ?

And the BBC has definitely downgraded the story. The fact that the Afghan government are now justifying the airstrike should be placing it back up at the top of the world news reports. It certainly would be if it was the Syrian government justifying a Russian airstrike against a hospital.

Hardly news (lolz) this, after all it’s long established that you’re allowed to attack a hospital if you’re the IDF so why not their sponsors the US?

Its been interesting watching the coverage of the unfolding refugee crisis and how its reported in various countries.

Hungary has been vilified by large parts of the UK press for how they have dealt with the crisis, my wife is Hungarian so she see both the UK and Hungarian coverage of it.

In the UK we get pictures of crying children huddled at the border. Nasty Hungarians tear gas the refugees.

In Hungary we see pictures of refugees throwing stones at the Hungarian police. We hear stories and see pictures of nasty refugees trashing villages as the pass through Hungary.

Both of these are true (there are crying children, there are some refugees throwing stones) But reporting one rather than the other inevitably presents a biased view of the situation