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Every time I tune in, I measure the time-to-race, which is the amount of time that passes before race becomes the main topic of discussion. Usually it’s less th
by wumeow 3y ago
Every time I tune in, I measure the time-to-race, which is the amount of time that passes before race becomes the main topic of discussion. Usually it’s less than 15 minutes.
- unethical_ban 3y agoSimilar! I think some of the flagship programs talk nonstop about LGBT and minority issues, but this has been a thing for some years. I remember pre COVID driving to work chuckling at how every time I turned on the radio, it was a story on those topics. There is a lot more going on in the world that can also be discussed. I like Weekend edition and All Things Considered, and their hourly news updates. Finally: there is a distinction between a faux "both sides" centrism and constant focus on identity. Having a liberal bias can exist while providing a wide range of coverage and de-emphasizing identity politics.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoIf my local affiliate talked about LGBTQ stuff I would probably start turning the radio on again.
- superb_dev 3y agoIf we could solve these issues, maybe we could stop talking about them
- willis936 3y agoDoes force feeding develop an appetite?
- hackable_sand 3y ago[flagged]
- chris_wot 3y agoIt was a bad thing. Not sure how this negates the argument. It was bad back then, and it's bad now?
- willis936 3y agoForce feeding. NPR's stated goals are to tell stories with equitable representation but then take actions consistently contrary to that.
- lurking15 3y ago> What would you call a century of heteronormative, white media? Much better than whatever activist garbage we have now.
- p_j_w 3y ago[flagged]
- jimbokun 3y agoEven minorities sometimes want to hear about something other than being a minority.
- rayiner 3y agoEspecially minorities. Listening to liberal white people talk to other liberal white people about race is the eye-gougingly terrible.
- jimbokun 3y agoI’m white, but I often notice all white panels discussing how awful white people are, but somehow neglected to invite a non-white person to participate in the discussion.
- rayiner 3y agoAnd when they do, it’s someone they hand-picked to say the things they want to hear. I’ll note this though: I think the people who do this don’t really identify as “white.” It’s become a class marker. Your plumber is “white.” NPR listeners aren’t “white.”
- Loughla 3y agoWhat are you talking about? Honestly what weird strawman are you trying to set up? NPR listeners aren't white? What are you trying to say here?
- rayiner 3y ago“White” is a socially and culturally constructed label, not an ethnic group. For example, Germans and French people in those countries don’t identify as “white”—they identify as German and French. It’s a label created in the context of racial politics. My theory is that NPR listeners no longer really identify with the label “white.” They might acknowledge the label applies to them. But when they complain about “white people” they are referring to other white people.
- subsistence234 3y agoWhen progressive "solutions" are implemented, if their success is measured empirically at all, they usually just make things worse. See e.g. the outcome of most educational reforms of the past 20 years, or the attempts in America's most progressive cities to solve homelessness by incentivizing and rewarding homelessness. Not surprising, a lot of profitable rackets depend on those issues remaining unsolved. What would e.g. all the homelessness experts do, who collect billions annually to hold conferences where they agree with each other on settler-colonialism and the newest genders, if they were to actually solve homelessness? Climate change is being solved, but it's being solved through technological innovation, not masturbatory discourse.
- brightball 3y agoVirtually every person I talk to who remembers will tell you that the 90s were the peak of just about everybody in the country getting along and feeling good about the future. Then widespread internet and social media happened, which shortly led people into echo chambers while simultaneously gutting the institution of journalism.
- mr_toad 3y agoWe didn’t light the fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots “the most destructive period of local unrest in U.S. history”
- Loughla 3y ago>90s were the peak of just about everybody in the country getting along and feeling good about the future. What? All joking aside, what the Fuck? Rodney King. LA riots. NAFTA protests. Branch Davidians. Presidential sex scandals. First desert storm. Political correctness. Women's movements. Bosnia et.al. Rwanda. HIV/AIDS epidemic. Ruby Ridge. Wage stagnation. The final death of small town commerce due to Wal-Marts. And these are just the things I thought of in the last minute. I'm sure there are a ton more issues I'm missing. The people you talk to are doing what people have done since the beginning of time. They're remembering the past fondly while forgetting the bad.
- everdrive 3y ago"Do you ever buy eggs at the super market? Well, here's how eggs are secretly racist, and the facts of egg economics disproportionally affects minorities."
- xracy 3y agoHot take... How many other news sources discuss race? I think this is an under-discussed topic for how pervasive a problem it is in our country. And I think we do ourselves a disservice by trying to hide from it. The more we talk about it, the easier it is to pick up a discussion where we left off. And my guess here is that the proportion of news about this relative to proportion of people affected by that news is way off.
- johndhi 3y agois listening to people talk about it on the radio the 'discussion' we need to make progress on an issue like this? compare to Car Talk - a show that entertains you and teaches you about engineering. different value propositions of these two things
- akira2501 3y ago> The more we talk about it, the easier it is to pick up a discussion where we left off. Sure.. but.. does it lead to problems actually being fixed?
- TheSoftwareGuy 3y agoNot by itself. But if we don't talk about it, how could there possibly be hop of fixing anything?
- onemoresoop 3y agoI think it's a question of measure. When things are talked about fairly and equally then progress is made - there are serious pressing issues right not and they're not only about identity/race/gender, that these things are ignored is a big problem. When things turn full on on one direction they don't accelerate any progress, it may actually do more harm than good.
- rurp 3y agoBy focusing less on race and other identity issues, and working to remove racist policies across the board regardless of which group they benefit or harm. The 20th century saw immense improvements for almost all underserved groups, without any talking heads bickering about intersectionality or identity. Now that kind of coverage is everywhere and progress has stalled or even reversed in many areas. My impression is that a huge portion of identity politics and coverage is more about picking fights where each side can feel smug and superior, rather than actually changing things for the better.
- jiscariot 3y ago20 year listener here. I now listen until they force identity politics in to the subject at hand, then change the channel. In my experience it's much less than 10m, but could be my market too.
- gosub100 3y agoI play this game with my XM radio. On First Wave, I listen until they play The Police, then I switch to Lithium and listen until they play Foo Fighters. I cycle back and forth constantly.
- LVB 3y agoSprinkle in climate change, and you'll be down to 5! I may be grading them too critically at this point, but in recent years, it feels like that XKCD about Wikipedia and how all roads lead to "Philosophy." Sometimes, I'll sit there wondering how the leap will be made from some benign story to these anchor topics, but they usually manage. I don't like that predictability at all.
- sobellian 3y agoI once tuned in to NPR when they were talking about artificial intelligence, and they were talking about how the seminal figures in the field (e.g. McCarthy) were white men. I reflected that if I had to pick the least interesting possible topic on AI, it would probably be how white the AI researchers were in the 1950s. I think this is the transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1161883646 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1161883646. > The Dartmouth conference has become an origin myth... Of course, the origin myth served to empower these men to tell their own story. And it's a story full of erasure... We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationship that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserving reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking. (later, same show): > White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine. I mean, seriously?
- jimbokun 3y agoIt’s just odd that they feel the need to explain to their audience most professors, and especially mathematics and computer science professors, in the 1950s were white men. Or that a lot of the funds for the research came from industry or the military. It’s just not interesting or newsworthy.
- ForHackernews 3y ago> Or that a lot of the funds for the research came from industry or the military. I think that's interesting and newsworthy. Maybe because we know it already it seems obvious, but a younger generation might not understand how deeply enmeshed the military-industrial complex was (and to some extent still is) in academia.
- dumbo-octopus 3y ago> to some extent To every extent, I would counter. It's incredibly rare that a person is currently involved in STEM research at a university and some sort of US Military grant isn't providing at least some amount of funding to it/them. My university for one allowed students to view comprehensive data about grants provided to research groups (after much internal campaigning), but absolutely refused allowing that data to be accessed by the general public. The reason was obvious when you looked at the data: 70%+ of the bucks came directly from various militaries.