Hey everyone. Throughout the war i’ve been watching a lot more news from European sources, and been growing to appreciate the coverage of them a lot. However, I don’t know enough about them to know how well respected they are, and how good they are on thinks like accuracy record. I was curious to get the general opinions of the ones I have been watching, and see if there are others that people would recommend. The ones i’ve been watching are:
BBC
DW
France24
​
Thanks in advance!
5 comments
A web site dealing with news from all over Europe (or most of it) is [Euractiv](https://www.euractiv.com/), another popular source is [Euronews](https://www.euronews.com/)
Both have editions in a number of languages
DW is generally quite OK. But as often with German journalists, they tend to be leaning towards green parties. For instance DW’s coverage of nuclear energy is often questionable.
They also had a recent scandle of massive antisemitism amongst their staff but as far as I know mainly the Arabic version was affected by this.
Then there is also Euronews that has news programmes in many different languages including English and sky news from Britain which is also quite good I think.
The Financial Times and Politico.eu are the most prominent media in EU affairs.
The Guardian and The Economist are other British outlets with quite a loyal readership all across Europe.
RFi is a international radio news service financed by France with also an English service.
Der Spiegel (a well-known German weekly) also occasionally publishes stories in English.
For independent news about Russia and Ukraine I can advice reading the now Netherlands-based The Moscow Times or The Kyiv Independent.
Balkan Insight is a reliable website for news from south-eastern Europe.
Social Europe publishes many interesting opinion articles on European politics, economics and social affairs.
An interesting magazine on foreign affairs from my own country is The Clingendael Spectator.
Not so prominent (although increasingly so) but investigative outlet [Bellingcat](https://www.bellingcat.com/) has been a top source for investigations related to the conflict. Their investigations are often referenced by the outlets you mention.
The three you mentioned are widely carried via satellite or cable in Europe, and I regularly watch those too. All are state-owned, but unlike in some countries (ahem, Russia and RT, for example) that is usually a good thing. Less commercial pressure to get viewers by any means being the most important one.
They all have their slight biases, or rather partialities, but for example the coverage of the Ukraine war has been good on all three, with each just focusing a bit more on the viewpoint of their countries in relation to the war.
BBC tends to cover more news from the Americas, while France24 more from at least select parts of Africa. DW might have a bit more coverage on more minor European news. All this makes sense, past colonialism and history, etc.
I like to rotate which of these channels I watch, and I also have Al Jazeera English in that rotation (though obviously not European) among Finnish sources, and I’m not seeing anything obviously bad reporting from any.
Then again of course I’m not constantly fact-checking *everything* I see on them, but I’ve watched them so much that alarm bells would have rung in my head already if there would be some worrisome underlying trends. For example France24’s coverage of the yellow vest movement in France matched those from BBC or AJ pretty well.