Originally posted by treetalkIt used to. Dan Rather and Peter Jennings used to editorialize endlessly when they should have just reported the news.
How many people out there honestly believe that mainstream American media has a liberal bias?
Then along came FOX and others which have a strong conservative bias, so now "on average" there is less bias. But the situation is actually worse because with each side now preaching to a choir that expects to hear certain things, accuracy has gone out the window.
As each side puts a more sensational slant on the news, we end up like the old joke about the guy with his head in an oven and his feet in a block of ice who says on average he is just fine.
Most of the mainstream newspapers in America have a liberal bias. I know this because I read the op-ed pages of many of them daily. You can tell by the headlines because they always find the bad in every story. Also, they run ad nausea columns by writers from the New York Times. For example, the Dallas Morning news is in the eighth largest market in the United States, yet they don't have their own political cartoonists and they continually fill their op-ed page with columns by the NY Times writers. I suspect it's pretty much the same all over. With the exception of the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Investor's Business Daily, Las Vegas Sun, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Tampa Tribune, nearly every newsroom at any big-city daily in America is staffed homogenously with Democrats, liberals and leftists. You would be very hard pressed to find any conservatives or Christians in the newsrooms of America’s largest cities.
If you find the BBC to be left-wing, then you have a very odd notion of what left-wing is. It is politically conservative and awfully deferential to the government. Socially it is quite open, but that's a reasonably accurate reflection of society. There are a few shows which sometimes espouse a left-wing understanding of things (and I wish there were more) but these are far outweighed by the volume of right-of-centre programmes.
The BBC is fine for raw information, but the Guardian and the Independent are the only mainstream news sources I use for intelligent criticism.