Ross Miller wrote:None of the media are unbiased but the mainstream media has a statutory obligation to provide balance and equal access; failure to do so can result in censure and law suites. Social media on the other hand is almost entirely unregulated with all the horrors that that allows. Couple that with the gullibility of too many social media users...
I don’t even know what ‘balance’ and ‘equal access’ could mean in a print environment in which 3 companies, commanded by non-dom billionaires, control 83% of national titles. ‘Censure’? You’re having a laugh, surely? The law? See Murdochcorp and phone hacking. The mainsteams can say and not say what they like, true or false, and do. See, e.g. The Guardian’s increasingly baroque inventions around 'the Trump / Russia thing' (‘a big nothing burger’ according to an off-the-record CNN presenter, but a certain ratings bumper), which tells you lots about the paper's neocon, Clintonite bent and zero about anything else. Anyone relying on the mainstreams is simply not even close to what’s going on in this little isle, let alone elsewhere. Popular ‘gullibility’ is an educational-political goal, widespread and not restricted to ‘social media users’. Fortunately mainstream print circulation figures and clicks for their online versions are falling, younger people especially are going elsewhere, and new digital news and investigative journalism sites are doing what the mainstreams gave up on years ago.