This is very true

Before I worked for the then parent company I never really read the FT. I thought it would be right-wing, bankerspeak-laden and so on. Actually I think it's the nearest thing to unbiased news we have in the UK - it's certainly more searingly and accurately critical of appalling behaviour from left or right and has a much more global view than most of our papers. It's no friend to the Tories, or Labour, or the Liberals and it has some serious heavyweight political and economic analysis.

Newspapers are products. The primary aim of people writing them is not to tell the news but to sell the newspaper, so they will write it to appeal to the demographic their marketing people have identified. The FT's key demographic is high-level business people - this audience doesn't need left or right filters or confirmation bias but an honest appraisal of what the political environment is everywhere they might choose to do business or not to do business. This is why the FT is so unbiased - their key demographic actually needs unbiased, verified, properly sourced data which they can feed into business decisions.

Otherwise I scan Telegraph, Grauniad, BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, Washington Post and New York Times - not in great depth, but every day (takes me maybe half an hour). This is important as when I sell freelance services I need to be on top of all this stuff. If that wasn't the case I'd probably stick to a couple of sources, one right-leaning and one left-leaning.

I hate the fact that the Mail, with its narrow-minded, hateful agenda, sells so well. The fact remains that it does, so they keep producing it. The question for me is not how to do down the Mail but how to change society so that kind of view has less traction. I don't have any answers to that, and I'm too old to come up with any new ones now.

Posted By: Old Man on March 16th 2017 at 10:22:27

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