They also have, or claim to have, a large on-line readership among American ‘progressives’ which is why the paper is starting to run quite a lot of stories which look like they escaped from US domestic papers, e.g. how funny Tina Fey is parodying Sarah Palin when nobody here is sufficiently familiar with Sarah Palin’s voice and personality to think such impressions funny.
I’d say OTT would be an improvement, they start off batshit insane and kind of go downhill from there. Sample sentence: "The BBC must love it when one of their liberal Jewish journalists takes the opportunity to plunge the knife into Israel. " WTF? I’m guessing, Quartz, you don’t take the Guardian on a regular basis. Thanks for corroborating my BBC-political-polarizer argument though.
Ximean has a valid point, there are times when the BBC could do with being bolder, and it does often report on non-stories that were originally whipped up by the tabloids when a spike or a counterpoint would be more appropriate. Still, that’s the price of impartiality I suppose.
Wandering back to the OP, from an American perspective I would say that the British press has fairly low standards of journalism compared to the US press, especially the UK tabloids but also to a lesser extent the broadsheets. US newspaper journalism is to a much higher standard, I’d say, more from the US newspaper journalistic culture than any legislative restrictions. Terrestrial UK TV news (not just the BBC) is, however, impartial by law, the sort of rabid outpourings from a channel like Fox News wouldn’t be allowed. But is is possible to receive any old toss by satellite, and of course there’s always the internet. People do seem to like a news feed that reinforces their own world view.
IMHO the greatest British papery organ is Private Eye, co-founded(ish) in the 60s by satirists Peter Cook, Willie Rushton and Richard Ingrams (plus Auberon Waugh, Gerald Scarfe, Paul Foot and other people of note). It provides much-needed checks and balances on the doings of politicians and newspapers, interspersed with topical humour. Of relevance here is their regular column Street of Shame, a compendium of the more salient outrages committed by the British papers. It’s not all tabloid-fed (that would be like shooting fish in a barrel), the broadsheets get many a dishonourable mention.
Might I take this opportunity again to plug the Daily Mash. It may be a spoof newspipe, but it often contains more truth than the real press.
If by “terrestrial,” you mean traditional, over-the-air wireless broadcasting, then Fox News doesn’t fit into that category.
You guess wrong. I regularly read articles in the Telegraph (I mainly go there for the Alex cartoon), the Times (primary read, good Bridge column), and the Guardian. But my primary source of news is the BBC. Less and less these days, I occasionally look at the Independent. I’m not sure what I’m going to do when the Times paywall goes up.
I wish I could afford Private Eye: I thoroughly agree with you.
BBC t.v. news seems to be aimed at female, child obssessed, hypochondriacs IMO.
Private eye is about £25 a year