Fellow American, asking earnestly - are both examples just products of the media environment of their respective countries? Does the UK still have popular media outlets that aren't solely pushing corporate agendas?
I wonder if district gerrymandering plays a role in the US. When your districts become packed to the extent that it's safely owned by one party, the only risk to an elected official's seat is a primary from a more extreme candidate. So instead of finding compromise to maximize your general appeal, you would be motivated to embrace extreme ideas and promote those on TV/social media. More elected officials doing this gives license to everyone to embrace the extremes, even if they're not very popular.
It typically has no shareholders and its powers are defined by the Act of Parliament which creates it, and may be modified by later legislation. [...] The phrase is not used to describe a company which operates as a conventional shareholder-owned company registered under the Companies Acts.
I think after seeing that all this got worse after Win Red/Act Blue donations displaced corporate support, trying to blame “corporate agendas” for polarization is willful blindness.
I think the BBC still counts, though I left the country in 2018 and most of my subsequent experience of the BBC has been the satirical news quizzes "Have I Got News For You", "Mock The Week" (TV), and "The News Quiz" (radio/podcast).
The BBC, at least in the last few years, has definitely been, if not taken over, strongly guided by the Tories (because they hold the purse strings, control over appointments, etc. and are vocal about this whenever the BBC annoy them.)
> How many right wing comedians get on to panel shows?
I'd counter that with how many right wing comedians could be funny on general-public-friendly panel shows absent the usual "my pronouns are ..." / "I identify as ..." jokes?
The UK doesn't quite have the same level of TV polarization. We can argue exactly how right-wing the BBC is, but the crucial thing is that most people are watching the same news. There isn't really a UK Fox daily hate channel. GBNews was explicitly trying to be that, and has completely died in the ratings.
The UK press is pretty far right and a major element of how we got to this mess, though.
