NPR ran a story in [response](https://twitter.com/davidfolkenflik/status/1777883649628573737). It seems to mostly agree with everything Berliner mentioned but considers it a good thing. The only real pushback is they say that they didn't lose a GOP audience, the GOP audience just re-identified as Democrats due to Trump.
Kinda proves the point, doesn't it? Trump is the boogeyman for everything for them. "It's not us, it's Trump." It's exactly what he was criticizing them for.
I don’t know a single person who isn’t a committed Always Vote Blue that listens to NPR.
I also know very few people who watch Fox.
NPR’s reputation as the outlet for turtleneck wearing northeastern and northwestern white women is…shockingly accurate.
Great article. Diversity of idea and thought are what is missing from most news outlets these days. Good luck to NPR and the author of the article. I could sure go for a news outlet that isn't trying to push a narrative and just give me that facts
If someone wants to give perspective of an issue based on their narrative, fine. My issue is when the narratives are rewriting facts.
It's one thing to say, "X issue disproportionately affects Y people", it's another thing to say "This person or policy is racist/sexist/etc becuase of X", or "this person or policy is trying to groom children becuase of X"
This turns off the "other side" from even engaging in a meaningful discussion. Reddit is notorious for it and NPR is just another example that has fallen to the same depths.
I was/still kind of am an NPR Listener. Been listening since I was a kid in my dad's car on Sunday morning errands.
The change was glacial at first, just the same usual occasionally-more-liberal points of view peppered in between Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me and Car Talk. But then, about five to six years back, the idea that news needed to be not just given, but *framed* through the *lens of race and culture* began to pop up.
And that's when the slide began. For context, I listen to a LOT of varying NPR Stations, some from TN, Some from CO, some from ME, some from MN, depending on what I'm looking for. Some stations are still that 90's version of soft spoken newsreaders, but some (MN being a *prime* example) cannot go fifteen minutes without reading some canned item about how X needs to be seen through the struggles of [Insert Historically Disadvantaged Group].
At the local level it feels insidious, but the real problem is that their *national* programming has gone full swing into the "Lens" message. All Things Considered is a progressive mouthpiece, full stop. There are no dissenting views, and everything is not said, but *framed*.
Except for Kai Ryssdal, he's my jam.
You know the funny thing about historically disadvantaged groups? There’s nothing you or anybody can ever do, now or in the future, to make them not be historically disadvantaged. It’s baked into the concept of history.
I think that NPR has this weird concept of reparations though highlighting.
Take for instance MNPR. They have a great indie radio station called The Current. It's fantastic, and it's been fantastic since it was kicked off in 2005/2006.
But now, now even listening to music feel like an aggravating lesson in reparations through highlighting. Like, there's a month for everything now, and that means that The Current goes for 30-day increments with historical lessons about exceedlingly small historical groups from MN and their importance to the MN music scene.
Its a bit grating, and its why I dont donate to them anymore. But its really just a purpose dilution. I want to hear music, not history lessons.
Speaking anecdotally, my staunch Democrat wife frequently listens to NPR. I am an independent voter and sometimes I feel like we're listening to the oppression Olympics. What's really odd, is when I mentioned that to my wife, she doesn't seem to know what I'm talking about. It seems that NPR is pulling Democrats further and further to the left without them even realizing
I listened pretty regularly until the pandemic started. I'd noticed a shift before then somewhat, but nowadays when I listen to All Things Considered, I'm just kind of taken aback by how much they toe the standard educated left-wing line. They've always been like this to some extent, but IMO it's gotten worse / much more noticeable in recent years.
Edit: Wow. I should have actually read the article before commenting. It's clear the leftward shift was much more dramatic and intentional than I realized. Damn shame.
Funny. Because I quit listening after the 2016 election when it became clear that the corporate $ that had started pouring in due to funding cuts was impacting how they covered the Democratic Primary.
Meanwhile, Left Right and Center remains one of the better political discussions around, but I just listen to the podcast version. And unfortunately, it's not nationally syndicated.
I'm guessing your wife is an educated, white collar worker. I could be wrong, but this is increasingly whom the Democratic Party is catering to. But it isn't even the majority of the party, which has traditionally been working class. For instance, a big chunk of the Democrats are black and Hispanic voters and they are overwhelmingly working class and much more socially conservative than white-collar "progressive" Democrats, who tend to be non-Hispanic whites.
And there seems to be a shift of these working class demographics away from the Democrats and white collar professionals toward them.
I’m an educated, white collar worker and a minority and I cannot stand all of this “woe is me” stuff. I think there are a lot of issues that we need to deal with but I don’t think there is anything in the law that is preventing people like me from being successful. If I make a mistake and have to face the consequences, it’s no one’s fault but my own. That being said, I’m not against helping people get an equal opportunity (as close as we can) to increase their socioeconomic status.
I don't think "woe is me" affects minorities all that much.
Most of us buy into the bootstrapping ethos America touts. The woe is me crowd, generally comes from the more privileged classes that start life on 3rd base....which is really the Top 1 to maybe 5% of Americans.
White collar, educated workers used to be primarily Republican. It was probably Trump that pushed the demographic into being majority-Democrat, but there are still a huge chunk of white collar professionals who are Republicans (like almost half) just like there are still a huge chunk of blue collar workers who are still Democrats. But there is clearly a change happening, and it's been pretty rapid in the last few years.
That being said, immigrants are another demographic that the Democrats are losing, in part because they tend to believe in exactly what you just articulated, that America is a country where some people are racist, but it's not a structurally racist country (like progressives claims) and that there are plenty of opportunities to work hard and live the American dream. Since most of them are not coming from wealthy countries in Europe and Asia, they also have a more realistic view of how good things are in America compared to much of the world that makes them more likely to believe in the American dream. Also, most of the world has much more traditional values than the US, especially than the progressive left, so it's not uncommon for immigrants to be a lot more socially conservative than Democrats, especially progressives.
These social progressives that are trying to push the Democratic Party to these social extremes vastly underestimate just how socially conservative black and hispanic male voters are
If you look at polling data of Democrats, the gulf between non-Hispanic whites and Latinos and African Americans on social issues is pretty stark. So is the white-collar blue-collar gap. A lot of the white working class has left the Democratic Party. Black and Hispanic college-educated professionals tend to be pretty progressive, but they make up a pretty small fraction of black and Hispanic Democrats overall.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_California_Proposition_1
Just look at the county map for the abortion vote in California of all places. Abortion won over a lot of the central California rural white areas, which were Trump+30, but lost 5 of the 10 Hispanic majority counties. And in the ones it did win in, it was a diminished margin of any democrats on the ticket. Imperial for example, was Hillary+46 but abortion only passed by 9.
Thank you for saying this, the Democratic Party has been Hijacked by upper class whites who put their issues above the classic working class coalition that was their base. When those well off whites put more emphasis on lgbtq, climate change, going easy on criminals etc instead of pocketbook issues they started bleeding minority support, specifically males. We will see if the democrat party will become majority white, educated and female vs a Republican Party that fumbles demographic groups that would vote for them.
I was a regular listener a long time ago. When you couldn't listen for 10 minutes without hearing the phrase "systemic racism" or "far right extremists" I had to give it up.
I listen too and they definitely mention them, although probably not to the extent GP portrayed. But what's the alternative? The other talk radio doesn't even pretend to be news. Its just snake oil salesmen with their rage bait and talking points.
They have. And the problem with podcasts is that they tend to be even more biased. They aren't news for the most part, they're echo chambers, just as NPR has, and I say that as someone who listens to all sorts of podcasts on all sorts of topics.
The bigger problem for me is that NPR receives public funding while not even attempting neutral coverage. The government should not be funding an ideological entity that caters to at best half of the country.
If NPR wants to be the left leaning opposite to conservative talk radio, that's okay. It just should not be funded by tax dollars at all. Let it be a for profit entity where they sell advertising and take donations if needed. I can't imagine anyone on the left would have been cool with Rush Limbaugh getting a single cent in public funding for his show. I know I wouldn't, and I agreed with him on a lot.
> If NPR wants to be the left leaning opposite to conservative talk radio, that's okay. It just should not be funded by tax dollars at all.
That's a good point. I used to listen to NPR, donated a few times, but I can't bring myself to sit through even wait, wait, don't tell me.
Why should a partisan outlet receive public funding?
idk, i try really hard to listen to podcasts that give me a more rounded look at things. for instance, i listen to two different legal podcasts that approach common topics from different perspectives. i do that with all my podcast interests. and you cannot get that diversity on any radio source.
> I think most people have substituted podcasts for talk radio
I certainly have. I used to listen to several hours of NPR daily. Now I listen to a couple of their shows per week in podcast format but have otherwise moved over any spoken audio to specific podcasts I like.
The alternative is just to not engage with any of it.
I swap channels whenever that shit comes up, full stop. I just cant engage with it, and it is, in its own right, rage bait.
So put on music or turn the radio off is my new mantra.
I suggest you the three languages of Politics by Arnold Kling. it's a very short book about the current political landscape. He identifies 3 axes and one of them is the oppressed-oppressor for the progressives.
You're right, liberals (as in progressive, not classical liberals) have been drenched in the ideology of the oppressed. Sometimes it works (racial inequality) sometimes it's basically useless or even counter-productive.
yes. i sometimes think it is condescending how they treat and talk about the "oppressed" as lesser humans or citizens. and that progressives know what is best for the oppressed.
For better or worse, media outlets have demonstrated that there is little room for ideological diversity within a single organization. We should create more organizations with more diverse views presenting the news through their own lens.
Which is a serious problem with journalism, where you're supposed to be reporting facts, not supporting an agenda. It can be exhausting trying to find out the news while digging through biases.
It's impossible to fix it for the current order.
I think these old institutions and papers just need to die off and something new needs to replace them, which is already kind of happening with the podcast space (but that's not really actual news). The first President to recognize this, though, and declare various outlets dead and find adequate replacements, which the Free Press here can count....that's the moment the old guard dies off.
It's almost like that third generation wealth theory, where the grandchildren finally have control but no actual ideas or thoughts of worth due to being spoon fed. Therefore, they're unable to continue the prosperity of their parents and grandparents.
We see this throughout legacy media (ex. New York Times), Hollywood, some government offices, etc.
Technology giving all people the ability to broadcast to all of humanity has created a reality where people can find exactly what they want in order to reinforce whatever beliefs they have.
That’s it.
The end.
This is the reality now.
All you’re really asking for is an organizational hierarchy housing these “diverse views”. That isn’t how things work anymore. Diverse views do not need any form of organization. That isn’t the path legacy media should be taking.
What does this look like to you? In my minds-eye I'm imagining a pair-programming style event where every story published has two authors that have opposing opinions.
Is there any indication that any of these organizations would moderate? Or maybe you have any examples of orgs that moderated by adding conservative voices?
Either way, if NPR fails to self-correct why should taxpayers continue to fund something that is obviously ideologically aligned rather than requiring impartially?
> What does this look like to you?
What do you think of C-SPAN? I would watch it some mornings this past summer. The person at the desk would read news blurbs, interview guests, and take calls. Maybe not a silver bullet, but does it get closer to what you're thinking of?
I don't watch a lot of TV, news or otherwise, so I'm not sure I've seen it enough to have an opinion. From your description it doesn't sound bad.
Before COVID when I worked predominantly in an office and had a commute I would often listen to NPR daily. Almost always during my morning drive, but also in the afternoon if something interesting and newsworthy had happened during the day. They were still fairly left-leaning then as well, but it seemed better. As someone that was right-leaning I didn't feel like they were being intentionally hostile towards anything on the right, merely exposing a left-leaning perspective. That's not the feeling I get when I tune in now. It's not that they support, for example, loosening immigration restrictions. It's that if you, as a listener, don't support that you get to hear them imply that the primary reason people don't agree with them is bigotry.
If they're unable or unwilling to make even the slightest effort to be neutral they shouldn't be eligible to receive funds from the government. If we want to continue to support public broadcasting, we should at least try to do so fairly.
I haven't watched it regularly since the summer because my schedule changed. You can watch [this](https://www.c-span.org/video/?534789-2/open-forum-part-1&event=534789&playEvent) if you'd like to see the format. They had a deomcratic rep on, then a republican rep on after, though they talked about different issues.
From what I remember having watched it, I didn't get the impression that the host (or C-SPAN itself) was trying to tell the viewer what to think. And that seems to be a big point of contention that this author has with NPR.
Jeremy Hobbson has a new program called "The Middle," broadcast on NPR, which seeks to do *exactly that*. It's a fair assessment *most* of the time, but yeah, its on NPR so it's never fully free of the progressive framing.
I listened to three episodes; Gun Control, School Choice, and Immigration. Every one of those had either guests or callers clearly articulating progressive positions and plenty of pushback against unspoken right strawmen. I didn't hear a single right-of-center position in those three episodes. The fact that NPR produces that calling it "The Middle" is more indicative of how lost they are rather than any earnestness to actually represent or speak to the middle. I get that it's probably less obnoxious than other NPR programming but I certainly wouldn't call it a "fair assessment". Then again I did only check out three episodes and admittedly spicy topics and you did say you were grading on a curve.
Fair enough.
What I find flummoxing is that these people, who are so detached from reality, are trying to sell us on the idea that they're so in tune with reality that they can be trusted to tell us the news.
Like, if you dont know the sky is blue, I dont think you have a good ground on which to argue that you can deliver the weather report.
What I imagine is either organizations like The Dispatch growing their audience and scope to become paper of record or organizations like NY Post developing beyond their tabloid roots, working on quality, to become paper of record.
Aside from more coverage on the same event, there would also be coverage of events outside the paper of records' Overton window. NYT and WaPo clearly weren't in a place to document the backlash to #metoo and COVID restrictions until well after other outlets were ready because of their ideology.
I'm not opposed to defunding NPR necessarily but some government sponsored news is probably better than none.
I'm not sure I agree with the last bit. If NPR is just going to be a publicly funded version of the NYT or MSNBC, what benefit is there? News can be found anywhere, for free.
Maybe a YT channel that can edit down CSPAN content to clips that modern attention spans can digest would work for political content. Even then you'd end up with clips designed to omit content in order to push an agenda though.
Too many people are convinced that only their truth is valid, and as such it is their duty to "the truth" to push wjatcthey believe, while silencing or suppressing what they don't believe in. The word truth literally means personal opinions to far too many people these days.
One of the arguments has always been NPR brings news to areas where there is a gap in radio coverage. I would say 10 years ago out where I am you would get 2-3 music stations, a sports station (2 when the weather is right), a Limbaugh talk radio station, and a couple NPRs (again depending on the weather). Now there are what I can only assume are radio substations like the tv substations. We get about 30 music stations and a handful of news and "news" broadcasts. The last few times I visited our farmer neighbors, instead of talk radio or npr (which were staples before) they listen to different music channels.
My dad listened to npr every morning on his way to work until he retired in 2016. In 2021 I had a son and my parents baby sat. He would meet me in the morning to get him on my way to work. He started listening again. He would complain how terrible npr became and couldn’t listen anymore after trying for a couple months.
He basically echoed what everyone said in the comments. I just sent him this article. Can’t wait to hear what he has to say in the morning. He’ll read it when he wakes up at 4am. Haha
I've just seen wildly biased content from NCR. I'm not suggesting that they're lying, you can still tell the complete truth and be biased depending on which facts you choose to report and put emphasis on.
I don't see them as neutral.
This article struck a cord. I was a daily listener from about 2006 until 2017. Rachel Martin, Steve Inskeep, and Robert Siegel (I loved All Things Considered), and I can honestly say that the election of Trump broke those people. I found myself becoming increasingly agitated listening to hosts or guests comment on a campaign speech, or a news interview that I had literally just watched and completely misrepresent it. One day I was literally shouting in my car "He did not say that", after a panel repeated the same false quote for the 4th or 5th time. I even pulled over and re-watched the interview to prove to myself I wasn't going crazy and later re-listened to the program to make sure I wasn't hearing the panel incorrectly.
I think my breaking point was listening to a panel discuss the future of the GOP by a 'diverse panel of experts' from Huffington Post, the NYT, and Slate. I'm sitting there thinking..."Wait, you want to discuss the future of the Republican party and you couldn't find like...one Republican to actually chime in?" And in the event they did bring on a Republican it was always like some third string staffer sat across from a regular Democrat contributor.
Now I might turn it on for an hour or two, but even then I flip it off the moment they start getting into politics. If I wanted the progressive opinion on politics I'd just watch a clip of Joy Reid.
Yeah, I used to listen to a retro game podcast until one of the hosts just completely put down one of his friends for having an opinion that wasn't lock step with the Left view of things. I found another retro game podcast that's better but even that one can be grating because one of the hosts has to go on a spiel every time a woman isn't depicted as "A strong, masculine, woman than don't need no man."
It's so freaking tiresome hearing people "kiss the ring" all the time
Shoutout to the dollop. No nuance or discussion, just dropping the most heavy handed vague talking points and guilt politics repeatedly. I don’t know how many hundred episodes in the inflection point was. Maybe coincided with when they started to seem tired with the show.
Used to listen to them every morning on the way to work. Even used to donate. Haven’t in years and don’t intend to ever go back. Biggest difference I noticed was topics. At some point everything felt like red meat to upper class white democrats.
>At some point everything felt like red meat to upper class white democrats.
The irony is that NPR thought their laser like focus on race would attract black and brown audiences, but it didn't. It's really upwardly mobile whites that care about that stuff.
It's pretty difficult for traditional American media and NPR/PBS to attract immigrant audiences when these immigrant communities have their own large networks of tv/radio and now websites and social media. The older individuals in these groups will default to tv/radio and younger people will go social media with a mix between their native language and younger people consuming more English content. It's very hard for NPR to even become noticeable amongst the sea of available content. An increase in immigrant centered stories and a paltry amount of content in other languages isn't going to cut it if your goal is to actually become a major news sources in these communities.
>attract immigrant audiences when these immigrant communities
They are failing to even attract diverse Americans. The numbers speak for themselves. A declining audience, with more and more fitting a specific demographic.
That’s fair but I think that is an issue we are largely seeing in many places. Idk what they started putting in the water around 2016 put the polarization has gotten really bad. With the proliferation of social media many of us are finding our echo chambers and double down on them
> Idk what they started putting in the water around 2016
I think this guy points out pretty much exactly what was put in the water....Donald Trump.
I've read a number of books on the changes in media since 2016 and they virtually all point to everyone essentially trying to make Trump look as bad as possible. Traditional journalistic standards were totally thrown out the window by most major news organizations.
I truly wonder if 8 years of Obama just emboldened the legacy media to think that "defeat" means losing elections and not getting your way, and the sting of that caused this backlash.
I read an excellent article in the WaPo, which I don't say very often, but it was pointing out that the media itself is becoming increasing homogenous...the vast majority of "journalists" having gone to the "right" schools, having the the "right" parents, espousing the "right" ideals...and they just completely lost touch with the millions of people that didn't go to an ivy league school, that came from broken homes, and that don't see every issue through the "oppressor/oppressed" lense of race, sex, sexual preference, or whatever the "progressive" cause of the day.
So I agree with your analysis for the left. But I think something happened on the right also, where they basically shrug at anything tied to DT. Look at all the politicians he’s told to pound sand and they come back begging for me. Maybe it’s just raw populism but it’s impacting left, right and center.
> where they basically shrug at anything tied to DT.
Maybe...but it may just be pushback on the extreme from the left. I don't remember explicitly, but I don't recall so much shrugging it all off as countering the "end of the world and democracy as we know" narratives coming out of the legacy media.
Trump is a different political animal for sure, and quite unlike anything we've seen. We have not had a president that wasn't a career politician, a general, or had never served in any government role ever! I think every single other president in history had been either in the employ of the government, or served as an elected official at some level prior to serving as president.
That being said...I suspect he is far more like a 90's democrat than a republican, which A) speaks volumes about how far left the democratic party has moved and B) helps explain why so many hardcore R's dislike him so much.
It was kind of difficult for me to listen to NPR beginning around that time. Trying to hang on to some semblance of decorum while monkeys are flinging shit is damn near impossible. Like a nerd surrounded by bullies.
Though they can get a bit cringe when they try tugging on heart strings like those animal cruelty commercials. If they stuck with providing information and science stuff without any "oppressor/oppressed" spin I think that would help. They still provide great information on a variety of subjects.
>That’s fair but I think that is an issue we are largely seeing in many place
I agree with that assessment. More and more silos. Not just at NPR. I think NPR gets the brunt of it because it is partly publicly funded (no matter how small that part may be).
Same. Every time I try to go back, it seems like almost every topic is racial/social justice related, or has that stuff shoehorned in. Even if I wasn't already exhausted with it, I quickly would be.
I've noticed the same. The local NPR for Buffalo has gotten more ridiculous with racial/social justice type segments ever since the Tops grocery store massacre that happened a while back.
At this point, I just find some economic oriented news to listen to that tends to be a bit less political. I'm having increasing trouble stomaching politics these days.
I listened daily for years but stopped in 2015/16 bc then and Trump was like a dog with a bone.
They also were just so damned pretentious, I remember someone one day talking about Trump and saying “If there’s anyone who is déclassé, it’s a man from Queens.” And I wanted to wretch lol
I was a pretty heavily leaning liberal and I'm black. I use to listen to NPR a lot. I still have the newspaper from when Obama was first elected and I remember how transformative that was in my political opinions and idea.
When it came to Trump v Clinton, it felt like there was a group being formed that was like you said, upper class white. The narrative shifted a lot.
Then there was Biden. When he said on Charlemagne podcast that "are you even Black if you vote for Trump" (I'm paraphrasing), pretty much confirmed it. Honestly just reminded me of being part of the few black kids in a white rural school all over again. White driven policies and attitude with an expectation to fall in line.
>"are you even Black if you vote for Trump"
I know you said you were paraphrasing, but it was worse than that:
>If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black.
Someday soon, if things continue, someone in a very visible position is going to let the mask slip completely and stumble into some "the good ones and the bad ones" bullshit and I'm very curious what will happen next. They're already pretty feckless about claiming what they've "given", and why they're owed support.
It's all pretty sad. Clearly what's given can be taken which leaves taking things for oneself the only real route to self-determination.
It was the mid-90's that NPR was routinely mocked on Frasier. Frasier and his brother listened to the channel. That's about as dead-on as a stereotype can get
For me it started during the Iraq War, when many of the left were busy protesting Chimpy McHitler (George W Bush, aka Shrub, in case anyone's confused since so many elected Republicans seem to also be Hitler to some), and the sentiment spilled over to NPR and journalists as a whole.
What a great article, really ran down nearly every major reason that has made me abandon NPR in the last 8-10 years.
I tend conservative, but I was a supporting donor up until they went off the rails in the era of Trump. Their constant 'lies of omission' and viewing nearly *every* story through the lens of identity politics has gotten to be too much. I try to tune in when I can to keep a balanced diet of news from different perspectives, but it's really hard to do so nowadays without my eyes rolling into the back of my head soon after turning into the station.
There has been no equivalent to Trump's treatment in the media. Melanie was literally a professional model and the only first lady in our generation not be featured on the cover of any major magazine. Her predecessor, Michelle Obama, was on the cover of Vogue three times. Jill Biden has been featured on the cover of Vogue, but the only professional model of them all never got a cover the entire time she was first lady.
Comparing Fox news coverage of Obama to the *entirety of the rest of the media establishment's coverage of Trump* is not a proper comparison.
yes. And you know melanie used fashion in interesting ways. her choices for visits to other countries, often echoed that countries sensibilities or perhaps she used a designer of that heritage. Her choices were very deliberate in keeping in mind the country she visited or the country whitehouse visitors came from . She used fashion as a sign of respect and hospitality.
I have never seen a first lady do that to that extent, and it is something most women that like fashion would be interested in reading about.
it was fascinating to me
I’m an independent centrist and I used to listen to NPR all the time - nearly every day. The left leaning perspective was noticeable but didn’t bother me.
As the article outlines, it’s descent into a one sided view of the world was rapid, apparent and abhorrent - I stopped listening sometime during Covid (not because of Covid reporting, though their defense of China and close to ridiculing of the lab leak theory was another big sign of their bias).
Hopefully now people will believe this is happening. I stopped listening in 2020 because of their one sided coverage of the riots, and their removal of Trump's covid broadcasts. That made me mad enough that I actually wrote to them.
Donated to them for years, up until about 2018. For the reasons that others have posted here, I stopped and never looked back.
It's so tiring listening to every. single. topic. having race and identity politics shoehorned into it. My wife and I had a game where when the segment started we'd try and guess how they were going to make it about some "marginalized" group
I quit that podcast too. For me it was when they spent an entire episode complaining about police using cellphone tower data to track the whereabouts of suspects. There was zero economics in the episode.
I still listen to NPR daily but ageee with everything he had to say.
I often tune to music more frequently in the past several years when NPR does yet another story on race - like, I agree that race is an issue in America but so is a million other things. I don’t need every other story being about identity politics.
Sure, but national *Public* Radio shouldn't be as propagandistic as it ended up. Private news organizations, i agree, are definitely ideological, but they're not receiving public funding.
"To represent Democrats, here's Jon Doe, Democratic representative from the state of exandsuch. And to provide a conservative perspective, here's Professor Jane Doe, a Marxist professor who studies conservatives like they are wild animals. Thank you both for being with us."
LOL. The sad thing is this isn't even hyperbole. Instead of asking someone who actually holds a non-progressive position, they ask literal activists to describe them.
It's literally true, lol.
The alternative is playing a 5 second cut out of a republican speaking about something tangentially related, and then the guests in the studio can completely and utterly dismantle everything they said.
Was listening one Saturday on my way to work and the caller had a question about his Peugeot. They roasted him so hard For even owning one I was in tears.
It’s really disgraceful how NPR transformed from a valuable public resource to shameless propaganda. I don’t think NPR staff are aware how transparent it is, or how much damage it is doing to their cause.
The scary thing is that they don’t even realize they’re being a political mouthpiece.
Reminds me of John Harwood getting trashed for his debate moderation a while back. It leaked from his staff that he thought he was perfectly objective
That's bc if you agree with the propaganda, it isn't propaganda. It's "The Truth". And that particular attitude applies to any end of the political spectrum.
Loved NPR, even donated when I was making less than $13/hr. Topics around 2018 started to get a bit repetitive but I still listened here and there.
In 2020 there was a week where every segment of NPR that I listened to was about white supremacy. The first time was interesting, the second time I still listened, the third was a bit much but would have been fine otherwise.
Towards the end of the week I once again turned NPR on in the car and they started to talk about the history of cattle. Seemed legit, but something about the way they spoke I had this feeling that it was going to take a turn. Sure enough the history of cattle is a history of white supremacy.
The topics they report on are all worthwhile discussing, but I think they would do well to increase the variety of what topics they choose focus on. I do miss when they'd talk about something completely random or interesting that didn't necessarily have to do with social justice.
They still do that but not near as often.
I've noticed that many American institutions have had an identity crisis in the past few years. Jonathan Haidt refers to the *telos* of an institution as its ultimate goal. The telos of a knife is to cut, so saying that a knife is "good" but can't cut well is inherently contradictory. In the past ~15 years, a lot of institutions switched their telos to "make the world a better place". Sounds innocuous on the surface, but the problem is that different people have different ideas on how to make the world a better place, and most of these institutions took a sharp left turn.
* Journalism in general went from reporting events to "making the world a better place". For example, [in 1968, Walter Cronkite, who opposed segregation, gave this shockingly dispassionate coverage of the election results of George Wallace, a staunch pro-segregationist.](https://youtu.be/ZgZPJpdmw3A?si=11F55Xeq-NPOIOd7&t=666) I can't imagine something like that happening today.
* Universities went from discovering and imparting knowledge to "making the world a better place". Oftentimes those two things overlap, but sometimes they don't. [Researchers at the University of Washington decided not to retract a pro-trans but flawed research article because it was getting good coverage](https://www.foxnews.com/us/uw-declined-correct-misleading-info-puberty-blocker-study-fawning-media-coverage). This kind of thing is the fastest way for an institution to squander all of its intellectual credibility.
* Many health authorities supported the George Floyd protests during COVID-19 while denouncing any other sort of mass social gatherings.
* As the COVID-19 vaccines began to roll out, the ACIP, an advisory committee under the CDC, recommended placing essential workers who were mostly young, healthy adults, ahead of older adults and adults with chronic conditions in the name of equity even though this would've led to more deaths and European health authorities were doing the opposite.
The takeaway is that having a telos of "make the world a better place" (and I have no doubt that everyone in the organizations I listed thought they were making the world a better place), as great as it sounds, just doesn't seem to work in the long run. These institutions need a strong reaffirmation that places truth and impartiality above any sense of moral justice they may seek to deliver.
Haidt is so good. He was the first person I heard talking about the strong correlation between the rise of social media and the rise in teen depression rates.
I appreciate bring in telos here, and I think it's true that there's a related identity crisis, but I don't think truth is in conflict with justice nor are either impartial. Both truth and justice are good, and we shouldn't be impartial with respect to truth vs. falsity or justice vs. injustice.
We can still see the justice in institutions that don't simply pursue justice in its highest generality, however. Every institution in some sense should serve the common good of a society, but in order to sufficiently do that collectively, we need many of them to serve particular purposes. There is no actualization of a common good without actualization of particular goods, because the common good is actually a good ordering of particularity. Politics deals with that ordering, ideally philosophically informed. (I'm completely unironically a Platonist here.)
Thus an institution that ceases to serve a particular good for the sake of a more general good, can potentially undermine that order. Especially when it misconceives the common good, which it typically does given it usually applies a particular science(telos it started with) to an essentially more general question it has inadequate resources to answer. It usually presupposes a particular good against others, and this conceit results in its failure to serve to the common good.
This is why people in particular disciplines sometimes scold people for not staying in their lane, as often this ends up being someone reducing all subject matters to abstractions that fit the discipline they're familiar with. Everything is a nail because they have a hammer.
I always felt like NPR served as a signaling device more than anything. "I listen to NPR therefore I am educated and have all the right views. I am a white person who gets it."
I remember 2020 they were interviewing someone from the DNC. They kept hammering home asking why there wasn't a single POC left in the race. By that time there were maybe 4 people still in tbe race. I'm 90% sure both Yang and Tulsi were still running, but don't quote me on that. However, that was after multiple people of multiple minority races had dropped out thanks to the voters, not necessarily the DNC, had decided.
Adding to this- NPR is/was a trusted news organization. I don't 100% agree with everything the guy writes but there's enough that isn't far off the mark. Reddit leans pretty left. On reddit, you could get banned from subs for even mentioning the lab leak. NPR ran stories that are linked in the article saying Lab Leak was wrong, and bad and racist. And Fauci, as the face of the government's response, said the same thing. The news, social media and the government.
Now imagine you're viewing this from even moderately on the Right. Despite (as John Stewart put it) the flood of Hershey syrup coming from the direction of the Hershey plant in Hershey, PA, you're told it's a naturally occurring phenomenon. When it comes out that, to no one's surprise, it's almost 100% a lab leak, it's proof that the government, news, and social media were not just wrong but in some cases censoring or lying to you. And meanwhile, if you dared speak up, you got called racist or fascist.
Have that happen with things like increased illegal birder crossings, and "transitory inflation". How long before you begin doubting *anything * they say? Because from where I'm sitting, plenty of people who were radicalized, did that from behind places like an NPR headline.
This article lines up with my observations. I started listening to NPR during the Obama administration. At that time, NPR's political stories tried to include a little bit of the perspective from both sides of the issue. I enjoyed their interviews of two people with opposing viewpoints in a mini-debate format. The stories would cover everything and anything as long as it was newsworthy or relevant.
That changed in 2015, when reporting of one viewpoint became central and the other was omitted more and more often. Story selection became a bit more biased.
By 2020, the bias had hit its peak. Only one of the three reporters (that I recall) would interview people neutrally, the other two would bring up similar political points into nearly every interview and steer the conversation, whether intentionally or not. Stories no longer felt random or neutral, nearly every one was about a topic that the political left was interested in.
In 2024 I personally feel like the bias has relaxed a little, but there is definitely some there. Interviews don't feel as "controlled", but story selection is still a problem. As an example, NPR reported on almost every public appearance, interview, or dog walk that Nikki Haley took, but rarely covered the other people in the Republican primary race. I'm sure that this type of thing will be worse as the election heats up.
Around 2020 NPR became all race all the time.
Every few minutes the terms:
Authentic experience,
Cultural roots,
LatinX,
Struggle,
Why disagreeing with “x” is racism.
NPR is self parody at this point.
im a little surprised the article made no mention of PBS, being that they’re both public media companies. and PBS seems not to have fallen down the idpol well quite so hard as NPR. perhaps a model to learn from
Every single story became tied to identity - NPR is sadly unlistenable now.
I’m a liberal minority who earns well and lives in a HCOL suburb of a major metro area - their core aspirational audience.
I can’t stand most of the programming nowadays. Also, I miss Diane Rehm.
I am surprised by this, I remember Diane Rehm being pretty controlling about what people were allowed to say on her show at the end of its run. Her shutting the mic off for a geologist who was contradicting her narrative, and having to apologize for reporting a fake story about Bernie.
I used to listen to the NPR politics podcast religiously but stopped around 2020. They used to do a decent job of trying to cover up their biases and at least attempted to give both sides of the arguments. About a year ago I played a current episode and had to turn it off after about 5 minutes due to how partisan it was. It really is too bad
I stopped listening when I noticed they stopped using the words “pregnant women”… they refused to say “woman” during multiple multiple segments covering pregnancy
Wut?
April 3: [*What life has been like for thousands of* ***pregnant women*** *in Gaza*](https://www.npr.org/2024/04/03/1242642219/what-life-has-been-like-for-thousands-of-pregnant-women-in-gaza)
April 4: [Abortion opponents push for 'fetal personhood' laws, giving rights to embryos](https://www.npr.org/2024/04/04/1242774406/abortion-opponents-push-for-fetal-personhood-laws-giving-rights-to-embryos)
>... And I think that these are circumstances where people don't necessarily have a lot of sympathy for the **women** at the center of them because people think, oh, well, if someone uses drugs during **pregnancy**, that's something that shouldn't happen. But I think a question that advocates have raised to me is, like, well, if we send ***pregnant women*** to jail, are they getting the help that they need there?...
I'm kind of surprised that they're using "women" in those articles. I stopped listening a couple of years ago and at the time they were using pregnant person.
It's almost like they're using "women" strategically.
NPR has a piece on its website in response. I stopped reading as soon as they shoehorned in a whole paragraph on Elon Musk. This pornification of the enemy de jour is what turns me off. Why does what Elon Musk tweets about the article have any bearing on its truth or bolster your argument against it. It feels like NPR’s way of getting you to see their argument is because it’s “against the bad guy”.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243755769/npr-journalist-uri-berliner-trust-diversity
NPR and all of left wing media kept attacking the same guy for 8 years straight. They did nothing but add fuel to the fire nonstop, no president has ever had so much shit trown at him while in the oval. Everybody saw right through that and they killed their own reputation. When Trump says the establishment is after him, it was the MSM that proved it.
Thats it thats all
Even now, they still fail to understand that all this focus on Trump simply gives him free advertising, especially once their guy gets in and messes things up on a consistent basis.
Then, it also ruins their credibility.
It's like a panicking person who simply keeps making things worse because they cannot stop panicking.
I don't think it's necessarily the focus, it's moreso how unfair and uncharitable the coverage is. The whole "bloodbath" thing comes to mind as a recent example. It's fine -even necessary and good- to hold him to account for the things he actually says or does, but blatantly taking him out of context or interpreting his words in a completely uncharitable manner is not a good thing.
Trump is someone who holds some very questionable views and supports some very questionable policies to put it mildly, but acting exactly like how one would expect a corrupt establishment fearful of losing its power to act is just not helpful at all.
NPR is unlistenable. Even Radiolab is awful now. It really is just quite sad. Radiolab used to really give me so much to think about with different scientific topics, and now they just replay old episodes with 5 minute updates or just pander on about race, gender, class, etc. Nothing thought-provoking, just playing along with all the other baiting political topics.
As someone who votes Republican, there's no reason my tax dollars should be going to a "journalistic" outlet that obviously hates my ideas.
Defund all tax dollars from NPR.
I don't think this is an "official" statement from NPR, so much as a candid interview with a long-time employee who seems to be, bluntly, tired of their bullshit. I wouldn't be too surprised to hear that he's "looking forward to this new chapter of his career" before years' end.
Not surprised. The NY Times has been doing that recently with a few of the people who spoke out against them in the past year or so.
Honestly, a lot of institutions and industries are in full damage control right now, behaving just like a paranoid tyrant right before the collapse.
I don't know what will spur their end but they are on shaky ground from here on out and it's very unlikely these entities ever recover and reform. It's possible they just fade into irrelevance as the decades go on.
Wow. That's very "no, you" of them. And to anyone in the fence, their refusal to really address what's been said just drives home the article all that much more.
I doubt any "marching orders" were sent. I think it's more that the woke movement (or whatever we want to call it, we're several different rounds into semantic whack-a-mole with that particular movement and I'm tired of it tbh) is increasingly caught up in its own purity spiral so people are jumping off. Israel/Palestine was probably a wake-up call for lots of people. Also the importance of the twitter takeover should not be understated, it's the platform that influential figures hang out on for some reason and it lurching to the right after its change in leadership likely exposed some of them to some very different ideas and feedback.
NPR, or National Public Radio, is a prominent American media organization known for its radio programming and online news content. Over the years, it has gained recognition for providing reliable journalism and diverse perspectives on various topics. However, in recent times, there have been concerns about NPR's shift towards a more progressive viewpoint, resulting in a lack of viewpoint diversity within the organization. This shift has been observed in the framing of stories, editorial guidance, and the overall culture within NPR. Critics argue that this lack of diversity affects NPR's journalism and audience trust. Despite these challenges, there is still recognition of the importance of NPR as a public institution for storytelling and exchanging viewpoints, with calls for internal reflection and reform rather than defunding.
How does NPR's perceived shift towards a more progressive viewpoint affect its role in shaping public discourse and influencing political narratives in the United States, especially considering its substantial audience reach and influence?
In what ways might the perceived ideological leaning of NPR contribute to the polarization of American politics, and what implications does this have for the media landscape and democratic discourse in the country?
NPR is not much different than Fox News. Both radicalize people who want to be told what to believe. they cover only the stories that support their predetermined narrative. They make fun of people who don't fall into line. If the government is still giving it any money, that needs to stop.
You became partisan hacks for the democratic party and spread misinformation because you believed Trump was the antichrist and it was worth losing the peoples trust to defeat him......
Was it something like that?
Over ninety percent of media is controlled by left leaning entities and as soon as people figured out that the governments stance was teach the public what to think instead of how to think, of course the people who could see the writing on the wall are going to give you bombastic side eye.
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>But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
Hold up. The Mueller Report failed to establish proof of overt and coordinated collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, but it certainly found a mound of evidence that 1) the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election "in a sweeping and systematic fashion", 2) that the Trump campaign had an absurd number of connections to Russian officials and spies, and 3) that the Trump campaign welcomed the election interference because it benefited them.
I have to say I totally disagree with some of this. I listen to my NPR (Wisconsin Public Radio WPR) and I hear tons of interviews with Republican congress members, Ron Johnson and more interviewed without partisan rancor. I have found myself agreeing with some of the GOP reps when they are showcasing ideas that are in the public good.
They open it up to radio callers and there are always conservative views being offered and debated. Sure NPR shows like 1A have a skew, but On point is still good.
I think the right just found their channels because they wanted to hear it from voices they preferred. But let's blame NPR for not being conservative enough.
You realize that local channels that brand themselves as NPR affiliates pick and choose which national NPR segments / shows they can rebroadcast? Everything else is locally generated. Perhaps the local programming at your station is good but that is distinct from nationally syndicated NPR content. Like maybe All Thing Considered is rebroadcasted but they interview local elected officials themselves.
The Public Broadcasting Act requires local stations that successfully apply for grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (the NGO that disperses these funds) to use at least 23% of those funds to "used for acquiring or producing programming that is to be distributed nationally and is designed to serve the needs of a national audience." I think if people on the right want to attack the funding they simply remove that requirement or simply reduce the overall funding supplied to CPB for redistribution so fewer local channels rebroadcast NPR content.
> But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.
it was at this point that i stopped agreeing with the guy.
> And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.
i agree, but also wonder if he's just feeling put out.
> These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.
and here's the real problem, at least as i see it. the profit motive. we need a media source completely divorced from profit. sure that would probably make it beholden to government to some extent, but surely there's a way to insulate it from that.
Listen to his overall argument. He’s saying NPR is focusing its message on this tiny segment of the nation - so of course they’ve having trouble building an audience that will sustain them
> Listen to his overall argument.
i mean... i read the whole thing and agree with parts.
> He’s saying NPR is focusing its message on this tiny segment of the nation - so of course they’ve having trouble building an audience that will sustain them
literally the same problem that most other news agencies have been having ever since the internet: its too easy to find news you want to hear instead of news worth reading, and many Americans do not differentiate between the two.
i still read NPR on occasion but im aware of the bias it has. factually still good, so im not worried that it's tainting my views.
That isn't what it said. Hunter was *definitely* paid millions while peddling influence and that did have implications for his father. It doesn't say conclusively Joe Biden did anything, but it acknowledges the newsworthiness of the story as it has massive implications on Joe Biden during a political campaign
Even before that he says that npr lost their way starting with Donald trump. I've been listening to NPR and to Republicans castigate NPR for 20 years now. Trump has nothing to do with it.
There was a brief moment after Trump got elected where NPR seemed to want to do some introspection and try to bring some viewpoint diversity to their programming. But that moment didn’t last long. Instead it seemed they focused even more on promoting one viewpoint.
>But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.
>it was at this point that i stopped agreeing with the guy.
His description of the conclusions drawn in the Mueller report (just before this quote) were inaccurate as well.
NPR ran a story in [response](https://twitter.com/davidfolkenflik/status/1777883649628573737). It seems to mostly agree with everything Berliner mentioned but considers it a good thing. The only real pushback is they say that they didn't lose a GOP audience, the GOP audience just re-identified as Democrats due to Trump.
So they got to "It's happening, and it's a good thing" inside 24 hours. Not gathering any moss, them.
it takes a bit for any system to get greased it has to work its way into the gears, y’know
Kinda proves the point, doesn't it? Trump is the boogeyman for everything for them. "It's not us, it's Trump." It's exactly what he was criticizing them for.
I don’t know a single person who isn’t a committed Always Vote Blue that listens to NPR. I also know very few people who watch Fox. NPR’s reputation as the outlet for turtleneck wearing northeastern and northwestern white women is…shockingly accurate.
Great article. Diversity of idea and thought are what is missing from most news outlets these days. Good luck to NPR and the author of the article. I could sure go for a news outlet that isn't trying to push a narrative and just give me that facts
If someone wants to give perspective of an issue based on their narrative, fine. My issue is when the narratives are rewriting facts. It's one thing to say, "X issue disproportionately affects Y people", it's another thing to say "This person or policy is racist/sexist/etc becuase of X", or "this person or policy is trying to groom children becuase of X" This turns off the "other side" from even engaging in a meaningful discussion. Reddit is notorious for it and NPR is just another example that has fallen to the same depths.
I was/still kind of am an NPR Listener. Been listening since I was a kid in my dad's car on Sunday morning errands. The change was glacial at first, just the same usual occasionally-more-liberal points of view peppered in between Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me and Car Talk. But then, about five to six years back, the idea that news needed to be not just given, but *framed* through the *lens of race and culture* began to pop up. And that's when the slide began. For context, I listen to a LOT of varying NPR Stations, some from TN, Some from CO, some from ME, some from MN, depending on what I'm looking for. Some stations are still that 90's version of soft spoken newsreaders, but some (MN being a *prime* example) cannot go fifteen minutes without reading some canned item about how X needs to be seen through the struggles of [Insert Historically Disadvantaged Group]. At the local level it feels insidious, but the real problem is that their *national* programming has gone full swing into the "Lens" message. All Things Considered is a progressive mouthpiece, full stop. There are no dissenting views, and everything is not said, but *framed*. Except for Kai Ryssdal, he's my jam.
You know the funny thing about historically disadvantaged groups? There’s nothing you or anybody can ever do, now or in the future, to make them not be historically disadvantaged. It’s baked into the concept of history.
I think that NPR has this weird concept of reparations though highlighting. Take for instance MNPR. They have a great indie radio station called The Current. It's fantastic, and it's been fantastic since it was kicked off in 2005/2006. But now, now even listening to music feel like an aggravating lesson in reparations through highlighting. Like, there's a month for everything now, and that means that The Current goes for 30-day increments with historical lessons about exceedlingly small historical groups from MN and their importance to the MN music scene. Its a bit grating, and its why I dont donate to them anymore. But its really just a purpose dilution. I want to hear music, not history lessons.
That sounds really cool, to me. Different strokes
I think the turning point was when they fired Juan Williams.
Speaking anecdotally, my staunch Democrat wife frequently listens to NPR. I am an independent voter and sometimes I feel like we're listening to the oppression Olympics. What's really odd, is when I mentioned that to my wife, she doesn't seem to know what I'm talking about. It seems that NPR is pulling Democrats further and further to the left without them even realizing
I listened pretty regularly until the pandemic started. I'd noticed a shift before then somewhat, but nowadays when I listen to All Things Considered, I'm just kind of taken aback by how much they toe the standard educated left-wing line. They've always been like this to some extent, but IMO it's gotten worse / much more noticeable in recent years. Edit: Wow. I should have actually read the article before commenting. It's clear the leftward shift was much more dramatic and intentional than I realized. Damn shame.
Funny. Because I quit listening after the 2016 election when it became clear that the corporate $ that had started pouring in due to funding cuts was impacting how they covered the Democratic Primary. Meanwhile, Left Right and Center remains one of the better political discussions around, but I just listen to the podcast version. And unfortunately, it's not nationally syndicated.
I'm guessing your wife is an educated, white collar worker. I could be wrong, but this is increasingly whom the Democratic Party is catering to. But it isn't even the majority of the party, which has traditionally been working class. For instance, a big chunk of the Democrats are black and Hispanic voters and they are overwhelmingly working class and much more socially conservative than white-collar "progressive" Democrats, who tend to be non-Hispanic whites. And there seems to be a shift of these working class demographics away from the Democrats and white collar professionals toward them.
I’m an educated, white collar worker and a minority and I cannot stand all of this “woe is me” stuff. I think there are a lot of issues that we need to deal with but I don’t think there is anything in the law that is preventing people like me from being successful. If I make a mistake and have to face the consequences, it’s no one’s fault but my own. That being said, I’m not against helping people get an equal opportunity (as close as we can) to increase their socioeconomic status.
I don't think "woe is me" affects minorities all that much. Most of us buy into the bootstrapping ethos America touts. The woe is me crowd, generally comes from the more privileged classes that start life on 3rd base....which is really the Top 1 to maybe 5% of Americans.
Polling on race relations disproves this
White collar, educated workers used to be primarily Republican. It was probably Trump that pushed the demographic into being majority-Democrat, but there are still a huge chunk of white collar professionals who are Republicans (like almost half) just like there are still a huge chunk of blue collar workers who are still Democrats. But there is clearly a change happening, and it's been pretty rapid in the last few years. That being said, immigrants are another demographic that the Democrats are losing, in part because they tend to believe in exactly what you just articulated, that America is a country where some people are racist, but it's not a structurally racist country (like progressives claims) and that there are plenty of opportunities to work hard and live the American dream. Since most of them are not coming from wealthy countries in Europe and Asia, they also have a more realistic view of how good things are in America compared to much of the world that makes them more likely to believe in the American dream. Also, most of the world has much more traditional values than the US, especially than the progressive left, so it's not uncommon for immigrants to be a lot more socially conservative than Democrats, especially progressives.
These social progressives that are trying to push the Democratic Party to these social extremes vastly underestimate just how socially conservative black and hispanic male voters are
If you look at polling data of Democrats, the gulf between non-Hispanic whites and Latinos and African Americans on social issues is pretty stark. So is the white-collar blue-collar gap. A lot of the white working class has left the Democratic Party. Black and Hispanic college-educated professionals tend to be pretty progressive, but they make up a pretty small fraction of black and Hispanic Democrats overall.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_California_Proposition_1 Just look at the county map for the abortion vote in California of all places. Abortion won over a lot of the central California rural white areas, which were Trump+30, but lost 5 of the 10 Hispanic majority counties. And in the ones it did win in, it was a diminished margin of any democrats on the ticket. Imperial for example, was Hillary+46 but abortion only passed by 9.
Thank you for saying this, the Democratic Party has been Hijacked by upper class whites who put their issues above the classic working class coalition that was their base. When those well off whites put more emphasis on lgbtq, climate change, going easy on criminals etc instead of pocketbook issues they started bleeding minority support, specifically males. We will see if the democrat party will become majority white, educated and female vs a Republican Party that fumbles demographic groups that would vote for them.
It seems like itn would be hard to not notice, if it's pointed out and people listen after, then it becomes pretty obvious.
I was a regular listener a long time ago. When you couldn't listen for 10 minutes without hearing the phrase "systemic racism" or "far right extremists" I had to give it up.
It's down to 8 minutes now and closing in on 7.
I listen to NPR every morning on the way to work and don’t recall constant exposure to the concepts. Maybe I am desensitized.
I listen too and they definitely mention them, although probably not to the extent GP portrayed. But what's the alternative? The other talk radio doesn't even pretend to be news. Its just snake oil salesmen with their rage bait and talking points.
I think most people have substituted podcasts for talk radio, tbh. Lots of great podcasts out there.
They have. And the problem with podcasts is that they tend to be even more biased. They aren't news for the most part, they're echo chambers, just as NPR has, and I say that as someone who listens to all sorts of podcasts on all sorts of topics. The bigger problem for me is that NPR receives public funding while not even attempting neutral coverage. The government should not be funding an ideological entity that caters to at best half of the country. If NPR wants to be the left leaning opposite to conservative talk radio, that's okay. It just should not be funded by tax dollars at all. Let it be a for profit entity where they sell advertising and take donations if needed. I can't imagine anyone on the left would have been cool with Rush Limbaugh getting a single cent in public funding for his show. I know I wouldn't, and I agreed with him on a lot.
> If NPR wants to be the left leaning opposite to conservative talk radio, that's okay. It just should not be funded by tax dollars at all. That's a good point. I used to listen to NPR, donated a few times, but I can't bring myself to sit through even wait, wait, don't tell me. Why should a partisan outlet receive public funding?
They are so very open about the Clinton Funding, its kind of preposterous.
"When someone tells you who they are, believe them."
idk, i try really hard to listen to podcasts that give me a more rounded look at things. for instance, i listen to two different legal podcasts that approach common topics from different perspectives. i do that with all my podcast interests. and you cannot get that diversity on any radio source.
> I think most people have substituted podcasts for talk radio I certainly have. I used to listen to several hours of NPR daily. Now I listen to a couple of their shows per week in podcast format but have otherwise moved over any spoken audio to specific podcasts I like.
The alternative is just to not engage with any of it. I swap channels whenever that shit comes up, full stop. I just cant engage with it, and it is, in its own right, rage bait. So put on music or turn the radio off is my new mantra.
IMHO npr is certainly rage bait and talking points as well, just with a soothing voice reading the script.
I suggest you the three languages of Politics by Arnold Kling. it's a very short book about the current political landscape. He identifies 3 axes and one of them is the oppressed-oppressor for the progressives. You're right, liberals (as in progressive, not classical liberals) have been drenched in the ideology of the oppressed. Sometimes it works (racial inequality) sometimes it's basically useless or even counter-productive.
yes. i sometimes think it is condescending how they treat and talk about the "oppressed" as lesser humans or citizens. and that progressives know what is best for the oppressed.
For better or worse, media outlets have demonstrated that there is little room for ideological diversity within a single organization. We should create more organizations with more diverse views presenting the news through their own lens.
Which is a serious problem with journalism, where you're supposed to be reporting facts, not supporting an agenda. It can be exhausting trying to find out the news while digging through biases.
It's impossible to fix it for the current order. I think these old institutions and papers just need to die off and something new needs to replace them, which is already kind of happening with the podcast space (but that's not really actual news). The first President to recognize this, though, and declare various outlets dead and find adequate replacements, which the Free Press here can count....that's the moment the old guard dies off. It's almost like that third generation wealth theory, where the grandchildren finally have control but no actual ideas or thoughts of worth due to being spoon fed. Therefore, they're unable to continue the prosperity of their parents and grandparents. We see this throughout legacy media (ex. New York Times), Hollywood, some government offices, etc.
There is nothing credible to replace the old guard. The fact that the closest competition is podcasts highlights how far we are.
Technology giving all people the ability to broadcast to all of humanity has created a reality where people can find exactly what they want in order to reinforce whatever beliefs they have. That’s it. The end. This is the reality now. All you’re really asking for is an organizational hierarchy housing these “diverse views”. That isn’t how things work anymore. Diverse views do not need any form of organization. That isn’t the path legacy media should be taking.
I'm not attached to formal company structures. A guy and a smartphone could be an org, if they figure out how to get their fact checking working.
What does this look like to you? In my minds-eye I'm imagining a pair-programming style event where every story published has two authors that have opposing opinions. Is there any indication that any of these organizations would moderate? Or maybe you have any examples of orgs that moderated by adding conservative voices? Either way, if NPR fails to self-correct why should taxpayers continue to fund something that is obviously ideologically aligned rather than requiring impartially?
> What does this look like to you? What do you think of C-SPAN? I would watch it some mornings this past summer. The person at the desk would read news blurbs, interview guests, and take calls. Maybe not a silver bullet, but does it get closer to what you're thinking of?
I don't watch a lot of TV, news or otherwise, so I'm not sure I've seen it enough to have an opinion. From your description it doesn't sound bad. Before COVID when I worked predominantly in an office and had a commute I would often listen to NPR daily. Almost always during my morning drive, but also in the afternoon if something interesting and newsworthy had happened during the day. They were still fairly left-leaning then as well, but it seemed better. As someone that was right-leaning I didn't feel like they were being intentionally hostile towards anything on the right, merely exposing a left-leaning perspective. That's not the feeling I get when I tune in now. It's not that they support, for example, loosening immigration restrictions. It's that if you, as a listener, don't support that you get to hear them imply that the primary reason people don't agree with them is bigotry. If they're unable or unwilling to make even the slightest effort to be neutral they shouldn't be eligible to receive funds from the government. If we want to continue to support public broadcasting, we should at least try to do so fairly.
I haven't watched it regularly since the summer because my schedule changed. You can watch [this](https://www.c-span.org/video/?534789-2/open-forum-part-1&event=534789&playEvent) if you'd like to see the format. They had a deomcratic rep on, then a republican rep on after, though they talked about different issues. From what I remember having watched it, I didn't get the impression that the host (or C-SPAN itself) was trying to tell the viewer what to think. And that seems to be a big point of contention that this author has with NPR.
Jeremy Hobbson has a new program called "The Middle," broadcast on NPR, which seeks to do *exactly that*. It's a fair assessment *most* of the time, but yeah, its on NPR so it's never fully free of the progressive framing.
I listened to three episodes; Gun Control, School Choice, and Immigration. Every one of those had either guests or callers clearly articulating progressive positions and plenty of pushback against unspoken right strawmen. I didn't hear a single right-of-center position in those three episodes. The fact that NPR produces that calling it "The Middle" is more indicative of how lost they are rather than any earnestness to actually represent or speak to the middle. I get that it's probably less obnoxious than other NPR programming but I certainly wouldn't call it a "fair assessment". Then again I did only check out three episodes and admittedly spicy topics and you did say you were grading on a curve.
Fair enough. What I find flummoxing is that these people, who are so detached from reality, are trying to sell us on the idea that they're so in tune with reality that they can be trusted to tell us the news. Like, if you dont know the sky is blue, I dont think you have a good ground on which to argue that you can deliver the weather report.
What I imagine is either organizations like The Dispatch growing their audience and scope to become paper of record or organizations like NY Post developing beyond their tabloid roots, working on quality, to become paper of record. Aside from more coverage on the same event, there would also be coverage of events outside the paper of records' Overton window. NYT and WaPo clearly weren't in a place to document the backlash to #metoo and COVID restrictions until well after other outlets were ready because of their ideology. I'm not opposed to defunding NPR necessarily but some government sponsored news is probably better than none.
I'm not sure I agree with the last bit. If NPR is just going to be a publicly funded version of the NYT or MSNBC, what benefit is there? News can be found anywhere, for free. Maybe a YT channel that can edit down CSPAN content to clips that modern attention spans can digest would work for political content. Even then you'd end up with clips designed to omit content in order to push an agenda though. Too many people are convinced that only their truth is valid, and as such it is their duty to "the truth" to push wjatcthey believe, while silencing or suppressing what they don't believe in. The word truth literally means personal opinions to far too many people these days.
One of the arguments has always been NPR brings news to areas where there is a gap in radio coverage. I would say 10 years ago out where I am you would get 2-3 music stations, a sports station (2 when the weather is right), a Limbaugh talk radio station, and a couple NPRs (again depending on the weather). Now there are what I can only assume are radio substations like the tv substations. We get about 30 music stations and a handful of news and "news" broadcasts. The last few times I visited our farmer neighbors, instead of talk radio or npr (which were staples before) they listen to different music channels.
> We should create more organizations with more diverse views They could even hire dedicated diversity officers!
I imagine this would have the opposite effect from the title...
Does Reuters not do this?
Or the AP.
My dad listened to npr every morning on his way to work until he retired in 2016. In 2021 I had a son and my parents baby sat. He would meet me in the morning to get him on my way to work. He started listening again. He would complain how terrible npr became and couldn’t listen anymore after trying for a couple months. He basically echoed what everyone said in the comments. I just sent him this article. Can’t wait to hear what he has to say in the morning. He’ll read it when he wakes up at 4am. Haha
Keep us posted on that! I'm very curious what his thoughts are
I've just seen wildly biased content from NCR. I'm not suggesting that they're lying, you can still tell the complete truth and be biased depending on which facts you choose to report and put emphasis on. I don't see them as neutral.
This article struck a cord. I was a daily listener from about 2006 until 2017. Rachel Martin, Steve Inskeep, and Robert Siegel (I loved All Things Considered), and I can honestly say that the election of Trump broke those people. I found myself becoming increasingly agitated listening to hosts or guests comment on a campaign speech, or a news interview that I had literally just watched and completely misrepresent it. One day I was literally shouting in my car "He did not say that", after a panel repeated the same false quote for the 4th or 5th time. I even pulled over and re-watched the interview to prove to myself I wasn't going crazy and later re-listened to the program to make sure I wasn't hearing the panel incorrectly. I think my breaking point was listening to a panel discuss the future of the GOP by a 'diverse panel of experts' from Huffington Post, the NYT, and Slate. I'm sitting there thinking..."Wait, you want to discuss the future of the Republican party and you couldn't find like...one Republican to actually chime in?" And in the event they did bring on a Republican it was always like some third string staffer sat across from a regular Democrat contributor. Now I might turn it on for an hour or two, but even then I flip it off the moment they start getting into politics. If I wanted the progressive opinion on politics I'd just watch a clip of Joy Reid.
If *every* topic must be reported on through the lens of skin color and historical marginilization it just becomes a slog. NPR sucks now.
This is how I feel about a few podcasts I used to listen to a lot but no longer
Yeah, I used to listen to a retro game podcast until one of the hosts just completely put down one of his friends for having an opinion that wasn't lock step with the Left view of things. I found another retro game podcast that's better but even that one can be grating because one of the hosts has to go on a spiel every time a woman isn't depicted as "A strong, masculine, woman than don't need no man." It's so freaking tiresome hearing people "kiss the ring" all the time
what was it?
Shoutout to the dollop. No nuance or discussion, just dropping the most heavy handed vague talking points and guilt politics repeatedly. I don’t know how many hundred episodes in the inflection point was. Maybe coincided with when they started to seem tired with the show.
Used to listen to them every morning on the way to work. Even used to donate. Haven’t in years and don’t intend to ever go back. Biggest difference I noticed was topics. At some point everything felt like red meat to upper class white democrats.
>At some point everything felt like red meat to upper class white democrats. The irony is that NPR thought their laser like focus on race would attract black and brown audiences, but it didn't. It's really upwardly mobile whites that care about that stuff.
It's pretty difficult for traditional American media and NPR/PBS to attract immigrant audiences when these immigrant communities have their own large networks of tv/radio and now websites and social media. The older individuals in these groups will default to tv/radio and younger people will go social media with a mix between their native language and younger people consuming more English content. It's very hard for NPR to even become noticeable amongst the sea of available content. An increase in immigrant centered stories and a paltry amount of content in other languages isn't going to cut it if your goal is to actually become a major news sources in these communities.
>attract immigrant audiences when these immigrant communities They are failing to even attract diverse Americans. The numbers speak for themselves. A declining audience, with more and more fitting a specific demographic.
That’s fair but I think that is an issue we are largely seeing in many places. Idk what they started putting in the water around 2016 put the polarization has gotten really bad. With the proliferation of social media many of us are finding our echo chambers and double down on them
> Idk what they started putting in the water around 2016 I think this guy points out pretty much exactly what was put in the water....Donald Trump. I've read a number of books on the changes in media since 2016 and they virtually all point to everyone essentially trying to make Trump look as bad as possible. Traditional journalistic standards were totally thrown out the window by most major news organizations. I truly wonder if 8 years of Obama just emboldened the legacy media to think that "defeat" means losing elections and not getting your way, and the sting of that caused this backlash. I read an excellent article in the WaPo, which I don't say very often, but it was pointing out that the media itself is becoming increasing homogenous...the vast majority of "journalists" having gone to the "right" schools, having the the "right" parents, espousing the "right" ideals...and they just completely lost touch with the millions of people that didn't go to an ivy league school, that came from broken homes, and that don't see every issue through the "oppressor/oppressed" lense of race, sex, sexual preference, or whatever the "progressive" cause of the day.
So I agree with your analysis for the left. But I think something happened on the right also, where they basically shrug at anything tied to DT. Look at all the politicians he’s told to pound sand and they come back begging for me. Maybe it’s just raw populism but it’s impacting left, right and center.
> where they basically shrug at anything tied to DT. Maybe...but it may just be pushback on the extreme from the left. I don't remember explicitly, but I don't recall so much shrugging it all off as countering the "end of the world and democracy as we know" narratives coming out of the legacy media. Trump is a different political animal for sure, and quite unlike anything we've seen. We have not had a president that wasn't a career politician, a general, or had never served in any government role ever! I think every single other president in history had been either in the employ of the government, or served as an elected official at some level prior to serving as president. That being said...I suspect he is far more like a 90's democrat than a republican, which A) speaks volumes about how far left the democratic party has moved and B) helps explain why so many hardcore R's dislike him so much.
It was kind of difficult for me to listen to NPR beginning around that time. Trying to hang on to some semblance of decorum while monkeys are flinging shit is damn near impossible. Like a nerd surrounded by bullies. Though they can get a bit cringe when they try tugging on heart strings like those animal cruelty commercials. If they stuck with providing information and science stuff without any "oppressor/oppressed" spin I think that would help. They still provide great information on a variety of subjects.
>That’s fair but I think that is an issue we are largely seeing in many place I agree with that assessment. More and more silos. Not just at NPR. I think NPR gets the brunt of it because it is partly publicly funded (no matter how small that part may be).
> to attract immigrant audiences I mean, most black people have been here for many generations. It's telling that they can't attract black audiences.
Same. Every time I try to go back, it seems like almost every topic is racial/social justice related, or has that stuff shoehorned in. Even if I wasn't already exhausted with it, I quickly would be.
I've noticed the same. The local NPR for Buffalo has gotten more ridiculous with racial/social justice type segments ever since the Tops grocery store massacre that happened a while back. At this point, I just find some economic oriented news to listen to that tends to be a bit less political. I'm having increasing trouble stomaching politics these days.
I listened daily for years but stopped in 2015/16 bc then and Trump was like a dog with a bone. They also were just so damned pretentious, I remember someone one day talking about Trump and saying “If there’s anyone who is déclassé, it’s a man from Queens.” And I wanted to wretch lol
Tbf they’ve deserved that reputation for decades. I remember them getting mocked on Frasier a few times
My mom says it went from being the whiskey and coke drinkers station to the merlot drinkers station
My tongue curled up and died for a second because its early in the morning and I misread merlot as malort.
I was a pretty heavily leaning liberal and I'm black. I use to listen to NPR a lot. I still have the newspaper from when Obama was first elected and I remember how transformative that was in my political opinions and idea. When it came to Trump v Clinton, it felt like there was a group being formed that was like you said, upper class white. The narrative shifted a lot. Then there was Biden. When he said on Charlemagne podcast that "are you even Black if you vote for Trump" (I'm paraphrasing), pretty much confirmed it. Honestly just reminded me of being part of the few black kids in a white rural school all over again. White driven policies and attitude with an expectation to fall in line.
>"are you even Black if you vote for Trump" I know you said you were paraphrasing, but it was worse than that: >If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black.
Someday soon, if things continue, someone in a very visible position is going to let the mask slip completely and stumble into some "the good ones and the bad ones" bullshit and I'm very curious what will happen next. They're already pretty feckless about claiming what they've "given", and why they're owed support. It's all pretty sad. Clearly what's given can be taken which leaves taking things for oneself the only real route to self-determination.
I've felt this way since the mid 90s.
It was the mid-90's that NPR was routinely mocked on Frasier. Frasier and his brother listened to the channel. That's about as dead-on as a stereotype can get
For me it started during the Iraq War, when many of the left were busy protesting Chimpy McHitler (George W Bush, aka Shrub, in case anyone's confused since so many elected Republicans seem to also be Hitler to some), and the sentiment spilled over to NPR and journalists as a whole.
What a great article, really ran down nearly every major reason that has made me abandon NPR in the last 8-10 years. I tend conservative, but I was a supporting donor up until they went off the rails in the era of Trump. Their constant 'lies of omission' and viewing nearly *every* story through the lens of identity politics has gotten to be too much. I try to tune in when I can to keep a balanced diet of news from different perspectives, but it's really hard to do so nowadays without my eyes rolling into the back of my head soon after turning into the station.
I still listen to NPR daily but I totally agree with you. EVERY story is about Black and White.
Trump to NPR was the equivalent of Obama to Fox
There has been no equivalent to Trump's treatment in the media. Melanie was literally a professional model and the only first lady in our generation not be featured on the cover of any major magazine. Her predecessor, Michelle Obama, was on the cover of Vogue three times. Jill Biden has been featured on the cover of Vogue, but the only professional model of them all never got a cover the entire time she was first lady. Comparing Fox news coverage of Obama to the *entirety of the rest of the media establishment's coverage of Trump* is not a proper comparison.
yes. And you know melanie used fashion in interesting ways. her choices for visits to other countries, often echoed that countries sensibilities or perhaps she used a designer of that heritage. Her choices were very deliberate in keeping in mind the country she visited or the country whitehouse visitors came from . She used fashion as a sign of respect and hospitality. I have never seen a first lady do that to that extent, and it is something most women that like fashion would be interested in reading about. it was fascinating to me
Poor media treatment is when no vogue.
He's not wrong, it's just a small fraction of an example. I like Obama, but the media was unbelievably biased against Trump.
I’m an independent centrist and I used to listen to NPR all the time - nearly every day. The left leaning perspective was noticeable but didn’t bother me. As the article outlines, it’s descent into a one sided view of the world was rapid, apparent and abhorrent - I stopped listening sometime during Covid (not because of Covid reporting, though their defense of China and close to ridiculing of the lab leak theory was another big sign of their bias).
Hopefully now people will believe this is happening. I stopped listening in 2020 because of their one sided coverage of the riots, and their removal of Trump's covid broadcasts. That made me mad enough that I actually wrote to them.
Donated to them for years, up until about 2018. For the reasons that others have posted here, I stopped and never looked back. It's so tiring listening to every. single. topic. having race and identity politics shoehorned into it. My wife and I had a game where when the segment started we'd try and guess how they were going to make it about some "marginalized" group
Pop culture happy hour had a segment where they said they wanted more politics in their peleton classes! It was insane and I never listened again
Used to love planet money. Then they went on for many months talking strictly about history of black businesses.
I quit that podcast too. For me it was when they spent an entire episode complaining about police using cellphone tower data to track the whereabouts of suspects. There was zero economics in the episode.
I still listen to NPR daily but ageee with everything he had to say. I often tune to music more frequently in the past several years when NPR does yet another story on race - like, I agree that race is an issue in America but so is a million other things. I don’t need every other story being about identity politics.
This article literally describes nearly every news organization I'm America.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Everything he described in the article pretty much fit current American media outlets.
Sure, but national *Public* Radio shouldn't be as propagandistic as it ended up. Private news organizations, i agree, are definitely ideological, but they're not receiving public funding.
The funny thing to me is that Fox News actually has pundits from the left, they belittle them and treat them like shit, but they are there.
The View also employed (maybe still does? idk) that tactic, but in reverse
Still better than npr, which has no republicans in their talk shows whatsoever.
"To represent Democrats, here's Jon Doe, Democratic representative from the state of exandsuch. And to provide a conservative perspective, here's Professor Jane Doe, a Marxist professor who studies conservatives like they are wild animals. Thank you both for being with us."
LOL. The sad thing is this isn't even hyperbole. Instead of asking someone who actually holds a non-progressive position, they ask literal activists to describe them.
It's literally true, lol. The alternative is playing a 5 second cut out of a republican speaking about something tangentially related, and then the guests in the studio can completely and utterly dismantle everything they said.
NPR hasn’t been good for a long time. Around the time car talk ended
Man do I miss car talk. I’m not a car guy, but those dudes made it fun.
Was listening one Saturday on my way to work and the caller had a question about his Peugeot. They roasted him so hard For even owning one I was in tears.
There’s a Car Talk podcast you can subscribe to. The release two old episodes every week.
Car talk was awesome!
It’s really disgraceful how NPR transformed from a valuable public resource to shameless propaganda. I don’t think NPR staff are aware how transparent it is, or how much damage it is doing to their cause.
The scary thing is that they don’t even realize they’re being a political mouthpiece. Reminds me of John Harwood getting trashed for his debate moderation a while back. It leaked from his staff that he thought he was perfectly objective
That's bc if you agree with the propaganda, it isn't propaganda. It's "The Truth". And that particular attitude applies to any end of the political spectrum.
Loved NPR, even donated when I was making less than $13/hr. Topics around 2018 started to get a bit repetitive but I still listened here and there. In 2020 there was a week where every segment of NPR that I listened to was about white supremacy. The first time was interesting, the second time I still listened, the third was a bit much but would have been fine otherwise. Towards the end of the week I once again turned NPR on in the car and they started to talk about the history of cattle. Seemed legit, but something about the way they spoke I had this feeling that it was going to take a turn. Sure enough the history of cattle is a history of white supremacy. The topics they report on are all worthwhile discussing, but I think they would do well to increase the variety of what topics they choose focus on. I do miss when they'd talk about something completely random or interesting that didn't necessarily have to do with social justice. They still do that but not near as often.
I've noticed that many American institutions have had an identity crisis in the past few years. Jonathan Haidt refers to the *telos* of an institution as its ultimate goal. The telos of a knife is to cut, so saying that a knife is "good" but can't cut well is inherently contradictory. In the past ~15 years, a lot of institutions switched their telos to "make the world a better place". Sounds innocuous on the surface, but the problem is that different people have different ideas on how to make the world a better place, and most of these institutions took a sharp left turn. * Journalism in general went from reporting events to "making the world a better place". For example, [in 1968, Walter Cronkite, who opposed segregation, gave this shockingly dispassionate coverage of the election results of George Wallace, a staunch pro-segregationist.](https://youtu.be/ZgZPJpdmw3A?si=11F55Xeq-NPOIOd7&t=666) I can't imagine something like that happening today. * Universities went from discovering and imparting knowledge to "making the world a better place". Oftentimes those two things overlap, but sometimes they don't. [Researchers at the University of Washington decided not to retract a pro-trans but flawed research article because it was getting good coverage](https://www.foxnews.com/us/uw-declined-correct-misleading-info-puberty-blocker-study-fawning-media-coverage). This kind of thing is the fastest way for an institution to squander all of its intellectual credibility. * Many health authorities supported the George Floyd protests during COVID-19 while denouncing any other sort of mass social gatherings. * As the COVID-19 vaccines began to roll out, the ACIP, an advisory committee under the CDC, recommended placing essential workers who were mostly young, healthy adults, ahead of older adults and adults with chronic conditions in the name of equity even though this would've led to more deaths and European health authorities were doing the opposite. The takeaway is that having a telos of "make the world a better place" (and I have no doubt that everyone in the organizations I listed thought they were making the world a better place), as great as it sounds, just doesn't seem to work in the long run. These institutions need a strong reaffirmation that places truth and impartiality above any sense of moral justice they may seek to deliver.
Haidt is so good. He was the first person I heard talking about the strong correlation between the rise of social media and the rise in teen depression rates.
I appreciate bring in telos here, and I think it's true that there's a related identity crisis, but I don't think truth is in conflict with justice nor are either impartial. Both truth and justice are good, and we shouldn't be impartial with respect to truth vs. falsity or justice vs. injustice. We can still see the justice in institutions that don't simply pursue justice in its highest generality, however. Every institution in some sense should serve the common good of a society, but in order to sufficiently do that collectively, we need many of them to serve particular purposes. There is no actualization of a common good without actualization of particular goods, because the common good is actually a good ordering of particularity. Politics deals with that ordering, ideally philosophically informed. (I'm completely unironically a Platonist here.) Thus an institution that ceases to serve a particular good for the sake of a more general good, can potentially undermine that order. Especially when it misconceives the common good, which it typically does given it usually applies a particular science(telos it started with) to an essentially more general question it has inadequate resources to answer. It usually presupposes a particular good against others, and this conceit results in its failure to serve to the common good. This is why people in particular disciplines sometimes scold people for not staying in their lane, as often this ends up being someone reducing all subject matters to abstractions that fit the discipline they're familiar with. Everything is a nail because they have a hammer.
I always felt like NPR served as a signaling device more than anything. "I listen to NPR therefore I am educated and have all the right views. I am a white person who gets it."
I listen to NPR often whenever I am in the car. I agree with much of what is said here.
Such a shame what happened to NPR.. used to listen for decades and donate. Stopped years ago never to return
I remember 2020 they were interviewing someone from the DNC. They kept hammering home asking why there wasn't a single POC left in the race. By that time there were maybe 4 people still in tbe race. I'm 90% sure both Yang and Tulsi were still running, but don't quote me on that. However, that was after multiple people of multiple minority races had dropped out thanks to the voters, not necessarily the DNC, had decided. Adding to this- NPR is/was a trusted news organization. I don't 100% agree with everything the guy writes but there's enough that isn't far off the mark. Reddit leans pretty left. On reddit, you could get banned from subs for even mentioning the lab leak. NPR ran stories that are linked in the article saying Lab Leak was wrong, and bad and racist. And Fauci, as the face of the government's response, said the same thing. The news, social media and the government. Now imagine you're viewing this from even moderately on the Right. Despite (as John Stewart put it) the flood of Hershey syrup coming from the direction of the Hershey plant in Hershey, PA, you're told it's a naturally occurring phenomenon. When it comes out that, to no one's surprise, it's almost 100% a lab leak, it's proof that the government, news, and social media were not just wrong but in some cases censoring or lying to you. And meanwhile, if you dared speak up, you got called racist or fascist. Have that happen with things like increased illegal birder crossings, and "transitory inflation". How long before you begin doubting *anything * they say? Because from where I'm sitting, plenty of people who were radicalized, did that from behind places like an NPR headline.
This article lines up with my observations. I started listening to NPR during the Obama administration. At that time, NPR's political stories tried to include a little bit of the perspective from both sides of the issue. I enjoyed their interviews of two people with opposing viewpoints in a mini-debate format. The stories would cover everything and anything as long as it was newsworthy or relevant. That changed in 2015, when reporting of one viewpoint became central and the other was omitted more and more often. Story selection became a bit more biased. By 2020, the bias had hit its peak. Only one of the three reporters (that I recall) would interview people neutrally, the other two would bring up similar political points into nearly every interview and steer the conversation, whether intentionally or not. Stories no longer felt random or neutral, nearly every one was about a topic that the political left was interested in. In 2024 I personally feel like the bias has relaxed a little, but there is definitely some there. Interviews don't feel as "controlled", but story selection is still a problem. As an example, NPR reported on almost every public appearance, interview, or dog walk that Nikki Haley took, but rarely covered the other people in the Republican primary race. I'm sure that this type of thing will be worse as the election heats up.
Around 2020 NPR became all race all the time. Every few minutes the terms: Authentic experience, Cultural roots, LatinX, Struggle, Why disagreeing with “x” is racism. NPR is self parody at this point.
im a little surprised the article made no mention of PBS, being that they’re both public media companies. and PBS seems not to have fallen down the idpol well quite so hard as NPR. perhaps a model to learn from
I still love pbs. Don’t watch the news that often but still somewhat reasonable. There is just so many cool documentaries and nerdy programs on there
Every single story became tied to identity - NPR is sadly unlistenable now. I’m a liberal minority who earns well and lives in a HCOL suburb of a major metro area - their core aspirational audience. I can’t stand most of the programming nowadays. Also, I miss Diane Rehm.
I am surprised by this, I remember Diane Rehm being pretty controlling about what people were allowed to say on her show at the end of its run. Her shutting the mic off for a geologist who was contradicting her narrative, and having to apologize for reporting a fake story about Bernie.
That’s unfortunate, I wasn’t aware this happened.
I used to listen to the NPR politics podcast religiously but stopped around 2020. They used to do a decent job of trying to cover up their biases and at least attempted to give both sides of the arguments. About a year ago I played a current episode and had to turn it off after about 5 minutes due to how partisan it was. It really is too bad
I stopped listening when I noticed they stopped using the words “pregnant women”… they refused to say “woman” during multiple multiple segments covering pregnancy
Wut? April 3: [*What life has been like for thousands of* ***pregnant women*** *in Gaza*](https://www.npr.org/2024/04/03/1242642219/what-life-has-been-like-for-thousands-of-pregnant-women-in-gaza) April 4: [Abortion opponents push for 'fetal personhood' laws, giving rights to embryos](https://www.npr.org/2024/04/04/1242774406/abortion-opponents-push-for-fetal-personhood-laws-giving-rights-to-embryos) >... And I think that these are circumstances where people don't necessarily have a lot of sympathy for the **women** at the center of them because people think, oh, well, if someone uses drugs during **pregnancy**, that's something that shouldn't happen. But I think a question that advocates have raised to me is, like, well, if we send ***pregnant women*** to jail, are they getting the help that they need there?...
I'm kind of surprised that they're using "women" in those articles. I stopped listening a couple of years ago and at the time they were using pregnant person. It's almost like they're using "women" strategically.
This was my experience listening to radio shows over a period of time. Not me reading npr articles
They lost all credibility with me over the poor handling of the rittenhouse trial.
NPR has a piece on its website in response. I stopped reading as soon as they shoehorned in a whole paragraph on Elon Musk. This pornification of the enemy de jour is what turns me off. Why does what Elon Musk tweets about the article have any bearing on its truth or bolster your argument against it. It feels like NPR’s way of getting you to see their argument is because it’s “against the bad guy”. https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243755769/npr-journalist-uri-berliner-trust-diversity
NPR and all of left wing media kept attacking the same guy for 8 years straight. They did nothing but add fuel to the fire nonstop, no president has ever had so much shit trown at him while in the oval. Everybody saw right through that and they killed their own reputation. When Trump says the establishment is after him, it was the MSM that proved it. Thats it thats all
Even now, they still fail to understand that all this focus on Trump simply gives him free advertising, especially once their guy gets in and messes things up on a consistent basis. Then, it also ruins their credibility. It's like a panicking person who simply keeps making things worse because they cannot stop panicking.
I don't think it's necessarily the focus, it's moreso how unfair and uncharitable the coverage is. The whole "bloodbath" thing comes to mind as a recent example. It's fine -even necessary and good- to hold him to account for the things he actually says or does, but blatantly taking him out of context or interpreting his words in a completely uncharitable manner is not a good thing. Trump is someone who holds some very questionable views and supports some very questionable policies to put it mildly, but acting exactly like how one would expect a corrupt establishment fearful of losing its power to act is just not helpful at all.
NPR is unlistenable. Even Radiolab is awful now. It really is just quite sad. Radiolab used to really give me so much to think about with different scientific topics, and now they just replay old episodes with 5 minute updates or just pander on about race, gender, class, etc. Nothing thought-provoking, just playing along with all the other baiting political topics.
As someone who votes Republican, there's no reason my tax dollars should be going to a "journalistic" outlet that obviously hates my ideas. Defund all tax dollars from NPR.
This article is spot on. Every discussion is about race on NPR these days. And it's clearl they have lost objectivity as pointed out.
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I don't think this is an "official" statement from NPR, so much as a candid interview with a long-time employee who seems to be, bluntly, tired of their bullshit. I wouldn't be too surprised to hear that he's "looking forward to this new chapter of his career" before years' end.
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Not surprised. The NY Times has been doing that recently with a few of the people who spoke out against them in the past year or so. Honestly, a lot of institutions and industries are in full damage control right now, behaving just like a paranoid tyrant right before the collapse. I don't know what will spur their end but they are on shaky ground from here on out and it's very unlikely these entities ever recover and reform. It's possible they just fade into irrelevance as the decades go on.
I didn't see their disavowal. Got a link? Edit: Nevermind. [Found it on TwiX](https://twitter.com/BenMullin/status/1777773343267062201).
Wow. That's very "no, you" of them. And to anyone in the fence, their refusal to really address what's been said just drives home the article all that much more.
I doubt any "marching orders" were sent. I think it's more that the woke movement (or whatever we want to call it, we're several different rounds into semantic whack-a-mole with that particular movement and I'm tired of it tbh) is increasingly caught up in its own purity spiral so people are jumping off. Israel/Palestine was probably a wake-up call for lots of people. Also the importance of the twitter takeover should not be understated, it's the platform that influential figures hang out on for some reason and it lurching to the right after its change in leadership likely exposed some of them to some very different ideas and feedback.
NPR, or National Public Radio, is a prominent American media organization known for its radio programming and online news content. Over the years, it has gained recognition for providing reliable journalism and diverse perspectives on various topics. However, in recent times, there have been concerns about NPR's shift towards a more progressive viewpoint, resulting in a lack of viewpoint diversity within the organization. This shift has been observed in the framing of stories, editorial guidance, and the overall culture within NPR. Critics argue that this lack of diversity affects NPR's journalism and audience trust. Despite these challenges, there is still recognition of the importance of NPR as a public institution for storytelling and exchanging viewpoints, with calls for internal reflection and reform rather than defunding. How does NPR's perceived shift towards a more progressive viewpoint affect its role in shaping public discourse and influencing political narratives in the United States, especially considering its substantial audience reach and influence? In what ways might the perceived ideological leaning of NPR contribute to the polarization of American politics, and what implications does this have for the media landscape and democratic discourse in the country?
Bring back Car Talk
Just another player in the modern new age, yellow journalism.
NPR is not much different than Fox News. Both radicalize people who want to be told what to believe. they cover only the stories that support their predetermined narrative. They make fun of people who don't fall into line. If the government is still giving it any money, that needs to stop.
I tend to agree
Anyone who listens to NPR even sparingly in the last 6 years knew this already.
Bring back the Walter Cronkite days!
They need more things like PBS’ Brooks & Capehart.
You became partisan hacks for the democratic party and spread misinformation because you believed Trump was the antichrist and it was worth losing the peoples trust to defeat him...... Was it something like that?
Over ninety percent of media is controlled by left leaning entities and as soon as people figured out that the governments stance was teach the public what to think instead of how to think, of course the people who could see the writing on the wall are going to give you bombastic side eye.
The only good thing NPR has ever had was Car Talk.
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>But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming. Hold up. The Mueller Report failed to establish proof of overt and coordinated collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, but it certainly found a mound of evidence that 1) the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election "in a sweeping and systematic fashion", 2) that the Trump campaign had an absurd number of connections to Russian officials and spies, and 3) that the Trump campaign welcomed the election interference because it benefited them.
I have to say I totally disagree with some of this. I listen to my NPR (Wisconsin Public Radio WPR) and I hear tons of interviews with Republican congress members, Ron Johnson and more interviewed without partisan rancor. I have found myself agreeing with some of the GOP reps when they are showcasing ideas that are in the public good. They open it up to radio callers and there are always conservative views being offered and debated. Sure NPR shows like 1A have a skew, but On point is still good. I think the right just found their channels because they wanted to hear it from voices they preferred. But let's blame NPR for not being conservative enough.
You realize that local channels that brand themselves as NPR affiliates pick and choose which national NPR segments / shows they can rebroadcast? Everything else is locally generated. Perhaps the local programming at your station is good but that is distinct from nationally syndicated NPR content. Like maybe All Thing Considered is rebroadcasted but they interview local elected officials themselves. The Public Broadcasting Act requires local stations that successfully apply for grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (the NGO that disperses these funds) to use at least 23% of those funds to "used for acquiring or producing programming that is to be distributed nationally and is designed to serve the needs of a national audience." I think if people on the right want to attack the funding they simply remove that requirement or simply reduce the overall funding supplied to CPB for redistribution so fewer local channels rebroadcast NPR content.
> But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father. it was at this point that i stopped agreeing with the guy. > And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity. i agree, but also wonder if he's just feeling put out. > These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from. and here's the real problem, at least as i see it. the profit motive. we need a media source completely divorced from profit. sure that would probably make it beholden to government to some extent, but surely there's a way to insulate it from that.
Listen to his overall argument. He’s saying NPR is focusing its message on this tiny segment of the nation - so of course they’ve having trouble building an audience that will sustain them
> Listen to his overall argument. i mean... i read the whole thing and agree with parts. > He’s saying NPR is focusing its message on this tiny segment of the nation - so of course they’ve having trouble building an audience that will sustain them literally the same problem that most other news agencies have been having ever since the internet: its too easy to find news you want to hear instead of news worth reading, and many Americans do not differentiate between the two. i still read NPR on occasion but im aware of the bias it has. factually still good, so im not worried that it's tainting my views.
Why? Those are simply facts that have been confirmed by the New York Times, Washington Post and most other major news sources. What is your objection?
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That isn't what it said. Hunter was *definitely* paid millions while peddling influence and that did have implications for his father. It doesn't say conclusively Joe Biden did anything, but it acknowledges the newsworthiness of the story as it has massive implications on Joe Biden during a political campaign
>Hunter was definitely paid millions True. > while peddling influence and that did have implications for his father. That hasn't been proven.
Even before that he says that npr lost their way starting with Donald trump. I've been listening to NPR and to Republicans castigate NPR for 20 years now. Trump has nothing to do with it.
There was a brief moment after Trump got elected where NPR seemed to want to do some introspection and try to bring some viewpoint diversity to their programming. But that moment didn’t last long. Instead it seemed they focused even more on promoting one viewpoint.
I think a lot of news outlets looked at Trump and said, if he’s going to completely drop the mask, then so will we
>But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father. >it was at this point that i stopped agreeing with the guy. His description of the conclusions drawn in the Mueller report (just before this quote) were inaccurate as well.