The requirements of quality, fairness, honesty, transparency and bias-minimization of their process for a “trust gatekeeper” such as MBFC claims to be should be far higher that those for mere newspapers, not the other way around - the former wants to control your interpretation of everything you read on the Internet whilst the latter only controls what you read in their site.
One thing is when a guy you’ve seen a lot in your local pub asks you to “lend me a fiver”, a whole different thing is when a some random guy down the pub whom you don’t really know well keeps unpromptedly telling you “go talk to this guy, he is a great investment advisor” and then the second guys asks you to “give me all your life savings and I’ll make sure you’ll be rich”.
Not only is the level of proof any half way intelligent would demand to trust somebody with “a fiver” totally different from that to trust somebody with all of one’s life savings, but the second setup even stinks of funny business due to the whole hard-push by a 3rd party whom I don’t even know well enough to trust.
Just because you’re seeing more of the “complete total bollocks” style of propaganda from places like Russia and China in communities without MBFC doesn’t mean what you see in those that have MBFC is not propaganda-heavy: I actually lived in Britain for over a decade and also in other countries in Europe (and speak those languages so can follow their news) and certainly the BBC and The Guardian systematically - as exemplified here - spin their reporting, a far more subtle style of propaganda which is based in Marketing, PR and Politics methods to shape people’s impressions of specific actors (unlike the outright lying of the newsmedia from authoritarian countries) and which is especially common in Anglo-Saxon countries.
They’re just as much out to make up your mind for you rather than merely inform you (and at least the guys at The Guardian have very openly stated they’re “opinion formers”) as the Russian and Chinese media - they just use different techniques for their manipulation of people’s opinions.
MBFC activelly re-inforces the “spin” style of propaganda of very specific news outlets with specific politican biases by claiming they are highly trustworthy and even (laughably) left-of-center, and yet compared to the newsmedia from many European non-English Speaking countries this stuff is clearly and consistently massaged to manipulate the reader into feeling in a certain way towards one side and a different way towards another side.
News reporting using the same kind of techniques to manipulate people as Car Adverts, Investing Scams and Politicians isn’t Journalism.
Had I grown up reading and watching on TV all my life this kind of spin portrayed as “news”, I would have trouble noticing it, but I was born in Southern Europe and beyond Britain also lived in Northern Europe, so this style of spin used for “opinion forming” in most mainstream newsmedia in the English-speaking World really stands out for me because it’s always “loaded” in the same direction.
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