Joe Ess wrote:I understand it is the norm to have a political bend to the news. England has The Guardian for the left and The Daily Telegraph on the right. ...
I haven't really seen Fox News etc, except as excerpts that tend to illustrate their (to me) extreme right-wing bias admirably. But I have to say that my overall impression of the US media is that it's very small-c conservative with relatively few obviously left-of-centre outlets e.g. The Nation is about as far left as I've seen. Of course, I'm not in the USA, and I'm coming from a European perspective here, so US politics also looks that way to me i.e. mainly a debate between two conservative right-of-centre parties. Given the fact that your media are entirely controlled by big money interests, whose natural bias seems to be towards conservative neo-liberal economics, it's hardly surprising if your media/politics might tend to reflect and enforce those biases.
I don't think the UK situation is as evenly balanced as you suggest, either. It's true we have a few obviously (but moderately) left-of-centre mainstream media outlets e.g. The Guardian or The Daily Mirror, plus The Independent and The New Statesman (both of which have a relatively small readership). But most of our mass-market press is dominated by right-of-centre publications, many of them owned by Murdoch and his offshoots. The BBC generally attempts to be reasonably unbiased, and probably many of its editorial staff are more naturally liberal than conservative, but it is hyper-sensitive to criticism which comes mostly from the right e.g. the right-wing Daily Mail has a permanent war on public service broadcasting, so when in doubt the BBC tends to suppress any in-house liberal instincts and tack to the right to keep the press quiet.
One thing I've noticed over the last 30 years is a steady rightward drift of what counts as "moderate" in both politics and the media. These days it's increasingly rare to find a politician or media outlet prepared to stand up for "liberal" values that were once part of the mainstream. In the US and the UK, the political left (I use the term loosely in the US context) has repeatedly tacked to the right in order to grab wavering voters from the conservatives. Each time this happens, they tend to abandon their left flanks, so over time the supposed "middle of the road" keeps moving right and the tone of political debate also shifts right. Nowadays, surveys repeatedly find that UK voters are often to the left of all the main parties on many key issues, but increasingly they have nobody in politics to represent those views. Meanwhile, all our political parties and much of our media continue to promote big business interests, and neo-liberal economic ideas that have been proven disastrously wrong over the last 30 years, while pushing privatisation of public assets to benefit their friends in business, including major media corporations.
I don't know if the same thing is happening in the US, but I find it strange that in the land of the free, where migrants were once welcomed by the Statue of Liberty, the very
word "liberal" is often treated with such contempt, and moderately progressive ideas - like Obamacare - are bizarrely equated with Stalinism instead of being seen as the basic hallmark of a civilised society. But I guess we're still "two nations divided by a common tongue", eh!