Post n. 6 CNN and Fox News

In my opinion both CNN and Fox news are partisan because they are private channels. No journalist would ever say something that goes against the interests of the companies that financially support the channel he or she works for.
In Italy there are three private channels owned by Berlusconi, who is the person who has got all the economical power in Italy. No one has ever heard of a journalist that said something against him on his own channels. They know very well they are going to be fired if they do so.
The journalists who were sued by Berlusconi were working for the public television and, thus, they could not supposedly be fired by anyone. But Berlusconi sued them and send them away unlawfully. Even though the judges sentenced that they had to be restored in their work place they weren’t because Berlusconi treated public television as if it was private once he was elected. And nobody, including me, wondered how it could have happened.

CNN is known as being liberal, whereas Fox News is republican. Both of them are private channels. I don’t know which one I like the most. At least an average person could tell immediately that the very strong critiques that Fox News journalist make are partisan. In Italy Berlusconi copied the idea and called it TG4. And he also copied the idea of CNN which is called TG5, which was meant to look objective. But because he could sack the journalists who worked for both of them, they can be considered partisan. However, because TG5 looks objective it is even more manipulative than TG4.
I believe that any time journalists can be fired as they work for a private channel, then the channel they work for is partisan. This guarantees only an apparent freedom of information, which is based on self-censorship. They will never say something that goes against the interests of the big companies that control the channel.

On the contrary, a public television is usually under the control of the politicians. For this reason it should allow the expression of different opinions. However the problem in Italy is that economical forces have became so powerful to control the whole political scene. Now that Berlusconi is in power, also the public TVs are controlled by him, and because there is no real opposition, as the economical power of Berlusconi guarantees him a general support from the politicians, the members of the opposition who work for the public TVs are not opposing him. Even when he was not in power his money guaranteed him control.