No Comment
2025-12-16
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One of the few news outlets I still watch regularly (as opposed to reading or listening only) is Euronews. Though I don't live in Europe, I have several friends and relatives who do, and Euronews covers other global news enough to make it relevant to me. I love their reporting style: they maintain a fairly balanced perspective, and they use almost no editorial language, both of which are increasingly hard to come by these days.
My favorite feature on Euronews is "No Comment." This is a section of their regular programming that features video from somewhere in the world with no music and no voice-over. Whatever event is being captured by the video is presented to the audience as-is, with no additional input. The viewer can then decide for himself what he thinks about what he is seeing.
Features like that are almost impossible to find anywhere else. Every other news organization I can think of only shows video with accompanying commentary of some kind, even if it's just a summary of what the video shows. More often than not, the commentary is analysis and opinion, which by its nature is biased by the thoughts and values of the speaker. When I see such coverage, these outlets hope that I will be swayed into thinking the same way. Social media is even more blatant, imposing moral judgments and hot takes before the video can even play.
The modern state of news is often infuriating to me, which is why I rarely watch it. I can't just see an event and draw my own conclusions about it. Everyone wants to dictate to me what I should know and how I should feel about it. I don't get to hear the words of Trump, Starmer, Macron or Putin directly; the media summarizes their words, and by so doing, puts one form of bias or another on them. Coverage of press conferences or Congressional hearings are cut short. Speeches and rebuttals are interspersed with talking heads. The real events are hidden behind news footage copyrights and licensing agreements, and all I'm allowed to take away is a preformatted worldview with the facts and evidence all sorted out for me.
I don't want anyone telling me what to think. I want to decide for myself what I think is factually correct and morally just. And I certainly don't want to waste my precious cranial power on uncritically absorbing what other people's opinions are, when I could be using that mental capacity to learn and analyze more facts on my own. Too many people, of all walks of life and of all political leanings, are simply spoonfed what to believe by mainstream and social media. That's not the life for me.
We could all benefit from letting our own minds reflect on the information they've been given, rather than constantly relying that someone else will always sort out and deliver the correct information to us. The curse of a hyper-connected world is that we are now expected to consume too much and question too little. As relayed in a Gopherhole I once came across: "Do you need more information, or do you need to think through the information you already have?^"
I hope Euronews never gets rid of "No Comment." More news outlets would do well to follow suit.
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[Last updated: 2025-12-17]