Ah_Yea says:

#40 jescott418

Very true.

brian t says:

Love all these “the Brits” comments. They make as much sense as comments about “the Americans”. The UK might be a small country geographically, but it includes a wide diversity of opinions and attitudes.

I haven’t watched Charlie Brooker’s show, more of a Marcus Brigstocke fan – look him up for a different view of UK life.

TThor says:

Right title: “How one guy at BBC takes an ironic look at FOX.. at its extreme”. Stupid to claim that this is how Brits look at US media in general…

jccalhoun says:

“slightly smaller than Texas”

according to Wikipedia Texas is nearly twice as large as the UK in terms of area. New Mexico is about the same size as the UK (but a very different shape, of course) It’s population is about equal to California and Texas combined.

furrypotato says:

Now now, can’t we all just agree :
My country[Insert correct country] is great, yours[Insert foreign country] is shit.

greggyx says:

I’d rather “no agenda” as my take on the US and UK news. At least they don’t hide the fact that they are taking the piss.
IN THE MORNING

smittybc says:

I think the basic problem with Western Media is that it operates on two entirely different presumptions. The viewer thinks that the responsibility of media is to make a complex world understandable. Media’s understanding of their objective is to keep your butt in a seat while they play 2 min of commercials for you between stories to make some money.
If you watch mass media I guarantee you will not understand the world. You will know a lot of insignificant things (like what the Queen got for a gift, or what Anna Nicole Smith died of) but an understanding of the world will not be a result of your time invested. There simply isn’t enough time to go through the information completely and still sell advertising/have any sort of an audience (in essence the same thing).
If you really research any story, and get to know it intimately (which in and of itself is time consuming and difficult), you will see that most of the time the story has been “sexed up” to sell. But nobody can take the time to understand the story so it doesn’t matter what context stuff is reported on.
For example with all the hours of coverage of the financial meltdown, if you were to ask a “well informed” viewer what the root cause of the problem is you would get something like “Greedy bankers.” or “Lack of regulation”, when the reality is those bankers lost their companies, and most of their retirement was attached to a stock that went to zero, and regulation has only ever been imposed on banks in order for them to take bigger risk, not to make sure they make a profit and stay solvent. Neither of those answers is very compelling. The answer lies in a balance of trade inequality between export countries and import countries, coupled with a financial system that did not have the tools to handle the degree of imbalance. Bernanke talked about this in one sentence in a 60min interview but the reporter wasn’t the least bit interested. He wanted to talk about how it happened only to know who to blame (because telling someone that they are going to die and it’s xyz’s fault sells). Sadly there is no good media, I suggest you watch the gossip stuff on Hollywood, because media does it really well, and you know what you are getting.