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0 pointsberntb14y ago0 comments

>>until recently, throughout much of the west

You should see my local Swedish media...

The reason I follow this is not that I care about Middle East politics -- it is because I am shocked about my local media. I have compared Swedish media with BBC and NY Times since 7-8 years.

Some subjects are more or less censored in Sweden. Things like torture between Palestinian groups have been cut out since the 1990s, Pallywood has never been mentioned, etc.

Translation of Reuters/AP/etc telegrams are slanted.

And so on. Sweden is probably an extreme case. I am seriously thinking of Swedish as the language of lies.

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srl14y ago· 1 in thread

Now very OT, but:

_I have compared Swedish media with BBC and NY Times since 7-8 years_

Neither of which is, in my experience, particularly reliable (although there's less of the blatant bias/censorship that you described). Comparing them against AJE (which has had it's own issues of late, in the /same/ direction) reveals that their reporting is severely biased toward sensational stories - every article needs a good guy, and bad guy, a winner, and a looser. And the good guy is then implied to be aligned with American interests, even if they're Al Qaeda-backed "islamists"[1] (not to say that said folk aren't aligned with American interests at times).

[1] Which can be interpreted anywhere from "Muslim" to "what Glenn Beck said".

berntbOP14y ago

OT? Well, I talked about different standards and why I came to read about them in the media. So I really started the tangent before you. :-)

Sensationalism and jingoism comes with times of war/terror. That excuse is not relevant for my local Swedish media.

(Even democracies do realpolitik and lie about it. Foreigners don't have votes at home. This is a built in disadvantage of democracies, I guess.)

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