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Recently I bought a car from the early 2000s, no aux jack or BT and I've been having an interesting time just listening to the radio rather than dropping my pho

Recently I bought a car from the early 2000s, no aux jack or BT and I've been having an interesting time just listening to the radio rather than dropping my phone ecosystem into the car. So I'm listening to a lot more NPR than I have for at least a decade. And I have no idea where people who are saying NPR has made some kind of hard partisan shift are coming from. If anything, as far as I can tell, most programming is still trying to walk a middle-of-the-road multiple-perspectives this-side-says-this but that-side-says-that, sometimes annoying so. Of course, there is one group of people that has been casting NPR as particularly partisan for at least 25 years, and a lot of these comments sound like a cross between their rhetoric and NYT Pitchbot.

zzzeek 3y ago
right, "middle of the road" is now "far left", "crazy batshit rightwing BS" is "the truth". This is overton window war stuff. > And I have no idea where people who are saying NPR has made some kind of hard partisan shift are coming from. right wing extremist groups and leaders like Chris Rufo
- decremental 3y ago
  [dead]
- zdragnar 3y ago
  Middle of the road used to be that maybe gay people could have civil unions but not actual marriage. Middle of the road used to be that cross-dressing was fine as a hobby, but trans people had a mental illness that is harmful to enable. Middle of the road used to be "I don't like what you say but I'll defend your right to say it". On most issues, the Overton window in America has and continues to slide left, not right.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    I think the concept of an Overton window doesn't work well with our modern politics. The window hasn't really slid left so much as split in half and slid both left and right. The far right now says and does things that would have been completely out of the Overton window three decades ago, as does the far left in the other extreme. It's like there are two Overton windows depending on which wing you associate with, which is why increasingly people find that they can't engage with those on the other side at all—they're operating with different windows of acceptable expression.
    - jimbob45 3y ago
      The far right now says and does things that would have been completely out of the Overton window three decades ago This just seems like projection by the left who don't want to admit that they're the only extremists doing insane things in America. The left will make an extremist claim - "men can be women" - and then when the other side says "no", they'll claim that the right is being extremist for opposing their own extremist claim.
  - wwweston 3y ago
    "Middle of the road" used to be "separate but equal" aka segregationist. Guess that's part of a "slide left" too?
    - zdragnar 3y ago
      Funny you mention that. There are now "affinity groups" and "POC spaces" and so forth whose entire conceit is to create separate but equal spaces away from white people. Separate student lounges, clubs, meetings, discussions, graduation "celebrations" that totally aren't illegal ceremonies, and so forth. What the segregationists lost, the left has convinced people is for their own benefit. Soon enough, we'll have POC-only schools and drinking fountains and sections on the bus and pretend these are the most progressive of ideas.
      - wwweston 3y ago
        > There are now "affinity groups" Wait until you learn about Meetup.com. Or the importance of carefully policed gender-segregated bathrooms! > graduation "celebrations" that totally aren't illegal ceremonies, OK captain of the party police. WTF is an "illegal ceremony"? Sounds antireligious. > Soon enough, we'll have POC-only schools They're called HBCUs. Lots like Howard, Tuskegee, Morehouse are like 150 years old, so if you're anxiously awaiting the arrival of POC-only schools so that you can make your own entry into the oppression olympics, you don't have to -- the scary future you're imagining arrived before your grandparents were born! It's a wonder any of us who weren't privileged enough to attend scrabbled our way through this oppressive society created by the out-of-control left of the 19th century, but here we are, a credit to our race. > POC-only drinking fountains and sections on the bus If the day were to come when a policy of creating POC-separate public services like drinking fountains and buses, which principles would you appeal to when organizing opposition to that?
        zdragnar 3y ago
        > WTF is an "illegal ceremony"? Sounds antireligious Segregating students by race is a violation of federal anti-discrimination laws. Some schools continue to push the boundaries of what does and does not constitute a violation of this. HBCUs are not race segregated schools; people of any color are lawfully allowed to apply and attend. Hence the "historically" in the name- they were once, by policy, exclusively for black students, but now it is not so. Even today, illegal scholarships, internships and networking opportunities continue to be created and challenged in court as various universities attempt to balance growing diversity without affirmative action. I don't actually foresee us getting to the point of lawfully segregated schools (or drinking fountains) but variations on those old policies do keep making comebacks.
gottorf 3y ago
> having an interesting time just listening to the radio The NPR member station you're listening to is distinct from National Public Radio, Inc. The former controls its own programming. Uri Berliner was employed by the latter.
- dhosek 3y ago
  A large fraction of NPR programming, particularly drive-time programming, comes from NPR. I’m pretty sure OP can distinguish between All Things Considered and What’s Up Spokane.
  - crackercrews 3y ago
    Local NPR affiliates also carry shows from other national organizations like PRI. It's not just ATC versus local programming. Many people think such shows are NPR even though they aren't.
    - dhosek 3y ago
      Yes, I know this quite well. But that’s not really relevant to the point the parent commenter was making. And the larger context of the discussion is news, and other than Marketplace, most public radio news coverage is either locally generated or comes from NPR.
  - wwweston 3y ago
    Yep. But I wonder if some of the people who are characterizing NPR as partisan/ideological can't distinguish between NPR programming and public radio stations carrying, say, Pacifica content.
mywittyname 3y ago
> sometimes annoying so. Agreed. I've been an regular NPR listener for like 15 years now, and if I had a complaint about their reporting, it would be that they shy away from being based if it could potentially alienate the right wing audience. It's good to be empathic to your audience, especially when reporting on sensitive topics. But tiptoeing around the facts because it might give ammo to people who already hate you shows a lack of self-confidence.
- anon291 3y ago
  Tiptoe around the facts like Hunter Biden's laptop? I agree NPR needs to stick to facts, not editorially choose to censor a topic that the public has deemed important.
- crackercrews 3y ago
  > they shy away from being based if it could potentially alienate the right wing audience. Funny typo, considering that "based" means something completely different in the political realm. NPR is most certainly not based...
cyanydeez 3y ago
It's people who want the polarity to be "what we say" and fake news. NPR and other liberal media works really hard to not pierce the facade of conservative arguments even when they consistently create incongruous reasons and end up explicitly stating that they're doing things for political benefit and no other reason. Anyway, like most conservative media, NPR is just a target to chill and try and draw them into producing news that better builds the conservative facade of "rational" discourse they want people to believe is the basis for their decisions. As opposed to the racism and corrupt business practices that is the entire American Republicans.
majormajor 3y ago
It's interesting that the majority of those comments are focused on a single issue. It sounds more like a preconceived notion rather than an informed criticism, where one would also likely be annoyed by discussions of economic injustice, ideas around UBI, taxation discussion, the criminality-or-not-of-Donald-Trump's actions (a primary thing Berliner himself actually mentioned in multiple instances, even!), etc...?
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Also, perhaps this is stating the obvious, but this article is posted on npr.org itself, and it is quite an in-depth treatment and analysis of the situation. While other news orgs my have a short blurb (often buried somewhere on their website), I rarely see them airing their own dirty laundry with such gusto.
- Wolfenstein98k 3y ago
  That's because he forced the issue by going to every outlet he could, mostly liberal ones, and he was right too. He'd be buried if he didn't and wasn't.
- crackercrews 3y ago
  This isn't laudable, it's defensive. The snafu has been covered in the NYT so there's no burying it. They are making sure their side is told by covering it themselves.
  - tasty_freeze 3y ago
    ... and if they hadn't covered it, would you criticize them for burying the story?
    - crackercrews 3y ago
      No. They can't bury a story after it's been in the NYT.
      - tasty_freeze 3y ago
        You have an idiosyncratic definition for what the phrase means. Or maybe I do. When the source about the Biden's bribes in Ukraine turned out to be a Russian asset, it was widely reported, including the NYT. Fox and other right news sources glossed past it. To me, that is burying the story, even though it was widely reported in other outlets.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Alupis 3y ago
When one agrees with content they are much more likely to say it sounds non-partisan, middle ground, common sense, etc. The issues with NPR reporting stem from word choice (inclusions and exclusions), choice of stories to report (crickets about things they disagree with and wall-to-wall on things they want you to be outraged with), etc. NPR is about as partisan as it gets... it's a smoke screen to bill themselves as non-partisan - and some people just eat it up.
- hobs 3y ago
  The GP isn't praising them for their middle ground reporting. The truth often doesn't have a middle ground.
  - mrkstu 3y ago
    They’ve been actively burying true news that doesn’t fit their narrative- that isn’t even reporting, it’s advancing an agenda.
  - Alupis 3y ago
    > The truth often doesn't have a middle ground. There is rarely, if ever, such a thing as objective truth when it comes to politics. There are always multiple perspectives. Make no mistake here - NPR has an agenda to push and they are masterfully skilled in doing so; evidenced by the people who still believe it's a non-partisan "just the truth" journalism outfit.
  - nickff 3y ago
    The “lab leak hypothesis” is one instance where NPR seems to have buried the most plausible explanation; there are many other similar examples.
    - subharmonicon 3y ago
      Buried in what way? Googling “npr lab leak hypothesis” yields dozens of stories published on NPR sites reporting on that theory, primarily quoting WHO and US government reports. I wouldn’t call that burying. You might not like what their sources say and may think there are sources they ignored, but calling that burying without pointing out those omissions doesn’t seem reasonable. [edit: add a question mark]
kernal 3y ago
>I have no idea where people who are saying NPR has made some kind of hard partisan shift are coming from. Perhaps this will help you out: A veteran National Public Radio journalist slammed the left-leaning broadcaster for ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop scandal because it could have helped Donald Trump get re-elected. >Of course, there is one group of people that has been casting NPR as particularly partisan for at least 25 years Congratulations on contradicting yourself.
- dhosek 3y ago
  He’s saying he doesn’t see the basis for the complaints. The Hunter Biden laptop scandal? Even the New York Post (not exactly a left-leaning publication) only ran with the story with the original reporter insisting his byline be omitted and the reporter who was given the byline wasn’t informed of this happening because while the laptop was Biden’s, the validity of the contents could not be verified and had roughly the validity of the Bush National Guard letter.
  - kernal 3y ago
    >He’s saying he doesn’t see the basis for the complaints. Their partisan political coverage is the basis for the complaints. >the validity of the contents could not be verified The contents were verified as authentic. Additionally, the FBI had the contents years before the public release and they knew it was authentic. >Testimony Reveals FBI Employees Who Warned Social Media Companies about Hack and Leak Operation Knew Hunter Biden Laptop Wasn’t Russian Disinformation >DOJ confirms in new court filing it indeed belonged to Hunter Biden
    - astrange 3y ago
      They were not verified as authentic. You and whoever read that filing misunderstood it. (More importantly, if any component was verified that does not mean the whole thing is.) Also, in the same special counsel[0] filing they attached a picture of a table saw covered in sawdust and said it was a picture Hunter Biden had taken of "apparent cocaine". [0] who is a DOJ employee but it's misleading to call him "DOJ", since he's not controlled by them
mrkstu 3y ago
I’m a never-Trumper, came up as a voter in the Reagan era, omnivorous consumer of all news content, listened to NPR prior to the pandemic near daily, and still regularly afterwards, until the bias just completely turned me off. Your take seems wildly off to me. NPRs non-straight news programming has always been left, but the regular news programming at least mildly tried to be viewpoint neutral. That disappeared post-Trump. All programming took a strong PoV, and unless the politician was actively anti-Trump their interactions with non-leftists were adversarial. Again, as a now third party voter because of Trump/Maga this is not because I felt any commonality with the other side of the coin, but purely that I was essentially being fed propaganda rather than news.
- symfoniq 3y ago
  You’re basically me. I was a daily NPR listener until the Trump era. If a never-Trumper can’t handle NPR abandoning all pretense of objectivity, that might be a bad sign.
deleted 3y ago
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anon291 3y ago
This is not a surprising take to find online as it's been well demonstrated that while conservatives mostly understand where liberals are coming from, liberals have a really hard time understanding right wing concerns.
- je_bailey 3y ago
  I haven't seen that demonstrated myself. Could you point me to a study or two that provides the details on that?
  - jonahx 3y ago
    Without vouching for the validity of this source, a quick search on perplexity.ai (which is good for this kind of thing) gives: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01461672231198001 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01461672231198... It also mentions a 2017 article in The Atlantic that I wasn't able to dig up.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Haidt, "The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Spectrum" https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050092 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050092 Jonathan Haidt in his book "Righteous Mind" https://righteousmind.com/ https://righteousmind.com/
    - anon291 3y ago
      These were what I was thinking of. I believe they asked liberals to answer a political question about their own beliefs, and then again to answer for a 'stereotypical' liberal and conservative. The liberals were not accurate for anyone. The conservatives were able to better match the 'average' for those groups. In other words, the study claims that this means they are better able to put themselves in the shoes of the 'other' side
    - lolinder 3y ago
      > The participants were 2,212 visitors (62% female; median age 28; only U.S. residents or citizens) to ProjectImplicit.org, where they were randomly assigned to this study. All participants in the research pool had previously filled out demographic information, including sex, age, and political identity (7-point scale, strongly liberal to strongly conservative). 1,174 participants self-identified using one of the three liberal options, 538 chose the “moderate” midpoint, and 500 chose one of the three conservative options. The strong left-leaning bias in the sample makes me suspicious that this sample isn't representative of the wider population. I can't find the raw data, but given the selection method I strongly suspect that the sample is mostly college students. If so, one hypothesis that might explain the results is that conservatives who go to college of necessity have a stronger understanding of the other side than liberals because they're the minority on campus for many years. If you repeated this study with a more representative sample of conservatives, including conservatives who do not have the opportunity to interact with many liberals, do you get different results?
ars 3y ago
I listen to both NPR and Fox news summary every day, and both of them are virtually identical in how they cover things. Every once in a while you'll hear a slant in how they will frame something, like the context or who they chose to quote. But it's clear that both NPR and Fox try very hard to be neutral. (Note the Fox TV show with "personalities" is not the same as their news show.)
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I only watch Fox News during elections and I find it just as good as any other outlet if not slightly better. Fox Business seems about the same. TheHill seems fairly balanced and surprisingly enough newsmax seems fairly balanced. Redstate on the other hand has a double standard and ignores anything negative about Trump. They kicked out all of thier traditional conservatives.
skywhopper 3y ago
Yeah, the article in question that got this guy suspended was like reading about an alternate mirror reality. If anything has gone wrong at NPR (and similar media orgs) in the past decade it's the willingness to bend over backwards to try to satisfy their harshest bad-faith critics, which is utterly impossible, and results in really terrible coverage. I find the five day suspension thing bizarre... either fire the guy or don't, whatever. But his claims that they didn't give enough credence to the craziest, most pernicious lies out there is the opposite of true.
newZWhoDis 3y ago
Last time I listened to NPR was in an Uber ride in 2020, it sounded like some kind of right wing parody of far-left activists. I couldn’t believe people considered that “middle of the road”. I’m rather disgusted that my tax dollars go to them.
alfor 3y ago
Have you ever voted conservative? Do you have friends that vote conservative? Do you have collegues that vote conservative. Is it possible you are in the bubble? Just here in HN is progressive to ultra progressive. Any mention of the other side is a sure way to get downvoted to oblivion.
- TheEggMan 3y ago
  Completely agree. Being a conservative here is not much fun.
- notabee 3y ago
  HN culture is progressive on some things but very libertarian on others. It's not very left wing because a large portion of the posters here are quite insulated from the plight of blue collar workers.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    blue collar workers have always been populist, and isolated from leftists. Read up on Marxist ideas about the necessity of a revolutionary "vanguard", by which they don't mean workers, they mean activists, agitators, professional revolutionaries, who work to create the conditions for revolution. Blue collar workers are too busy working and supporting their families.
- feoren 3y ago
  This take only works if you tunnel-vision yourself to only looking at the United States. It's all too easy to say "we believe X and you believe Y; who's to say which is right!? From our point of view, you're the one in the bubble!" But if you step back and look at the American political spectrum from a global and historical perspective, it's abundantly clear that it's the conservative side that is in a bubble; nearly even a cult. The rest of us would love to have two rational political parties to pick from. Few people are ideologically beholden to the Democratic Party directly, it's just literally our only option.

zzzeek 3y ago

right, "middle of the road" is now "far left", "crazy batshit rightwing BS" is "the truth". This is overton window war stuff. > And I have no idea where people who are saying NPR has made some kind of hard partisan shift are coming from. right wing extremist groups and leaders like Chris Rufo

decremental 3y ago
[dead]
zdragnar 3y ago
Middle of the road used to be that maybe gay people could have civil unions but not actual marriage. Middle of the road used to be that cross-dressing was fine as a hobby, but trans people had a mental illness that is harmful to enable. Middle of the road used to be "I don't like what you say but I'll defend your right to say it". On most issues, the Overton window in America has and continues to slide left, not right.
- lolinder 3y ago
  I think the concept of an Overton window doesn't work well with our modern politics. The window hasn't really slid left so much as split in half and slid both left and right. The far right now says and does things that would have been completely out of the Overton window three decades ago, as does the far left in the other extreme. It's like there are two Overton windows depending on which wing you associate with, which is why increasingly people find that they can't engage with those on the other side at all—they're operating with different windows of acceptable expression.
  - jimbob45 3y ago
    The far right now says and does things that would have been completely out of the Overton window three decades ago This just seems like projection by the left who don't want to admit that they're the only extremists doing insane things in America. The left will make an extremist claim - "men can be women" - and then when the other side says "no", they'll claim that the right is being extremist for opposing their own extremist claim.
- wwweston 3y ago
  "Middle of the road" used to be "separate but equal" aka segregationist. Guess that's part of a "slide left" too?
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    Funny you mention that. There are now "affinity groups" and "POC spaces" and so forth whose entire conceit is to create separate but equal spaces away from white people. Separate student lounges, clubs, meetings, discussions, graduation "celebrations" that totally aren't illegal ceremonies, and so forth. What the segregationists lost, the left has convinced people is for their own benefit. Soon enough, we'll have POC-only schools and drinking fountains and sections on the bus and pretend these are the most progressive of ideas.
    - wwweston 3y ago
      > There are now "affinity groups" Wait until you learn about Meetup.com. Or the importance of carefully policed gender-segregated bathrooms! > graduation "celebrations" that totally aren't illegal ceremonies, OK captain of the party police. WTF is an "illegal ceremony"? Sounds antireligious. > Soon enough, we'll have POC-only schools They're called HBCUs. Lots like Howard, Tuskegee, Morehouse are like 150 years old, so if you're anxiously awaiting the arrival of POC-only schools so that you can make your own entry into the oppression olympics, you don't have to -- the scary future you're imagining arrived before your grandparents were born! It's a wonder any of us who weren't privileged enough to attend scrabbled our way through this oppressive society created by the out-of-control left of the 19th century, but here we are, a credit to our race. > POC-only drinking fountains and sections on the bus If the day were to come when a policy of creating POC-separate public services like drinking fountains and buses, which principles would you appeal to when organizing opposition to that?
      - zdragnar 3y ago
        > WTF is an "illegal ceremony"? Sounds antireligious Segregating students by race is a violation of federal anti-discrimination laws. Some schools continue to push the boundaries of what does and does not constitute a violation of this. HBCUs are not race segregated schools; people of any color are lawfully allowed to apply and attend. Hence the "historically" in the name- they were once, by policy, exclusively for black students, but now it is not so. Even today, illegal scholarships, internships and networking opportunities continue to be created and challenged in court as various universities attempt to balance growing diversity without affirmative action. I don't actually foresee us getting to the point of lawfully segregated schools (or drinking fountains) but variations on those old policies do keep making comebacks.

gottorf 3y ago

> having an interesting time just listening to the radio The NPR member station you're listening to is distinct from National Public Radio, Inc. The former controls its own programming. Uri Berliner was employed by the latter.

dhosek 3y ago
A large fraction of NPR programming, particularly drive-time programming, comes from NPR. I’m pretty sure OP can distinguish between All Things Considered and What’s Up Spokane.
- crackercrews 3y ago
  Local NPR affiliates also carry shows from other national organizations like PRI. It's not just ATC versus local programming. Many people think such shows are NPR even though they aren't.
  - dhosek 3y ago
    Yes, I know this quite well. But that’s not really relevant to the point the parent commenter was making. And the larger context of the discussion is news, and other than Marketplace, most public radio news coverage is either locally generated or comes from NPR.
- wwweston 3y ago
  Yep. But I wonder if some of the people who are characterizing NPR as partisan/ideological can't distinguish between NPR programming and public radio stations carrying, say, Pacifica content.

mywittyname 3y ago

> sometimes annoying so. Agreed. I've been an regular NPR listener for like 15 years now, and if I had a complaint about their reporting, it would be that they shy away from being based if it could potentially alienate the right wing audience. It's good to be empathic to your audience, especially when reporting on sensitive topics. But tiptoeing around the facts because it might give ammo to people who already hate you shows a lack of self-confidence.

anon291 3y ago
Tiptoe around the facts like Hunter Biden's laptop? I agree NPR needs to stick to facts, not editorially choose to censor a topic that the public has deemed important.
crackercrews 3y ago
> they shy away from being based if it could potentially alienate the right wing audience. Funny typo, considering that "based" means something completely different in the political realm. NPR is most certainly not based...

cyanydeez 3y ago

It's people who want the polarity to be "what we say" and fake news. NPR and other liberal media works really hard to not pierce the facade of conservative arguments even when they consistently create incongruous reasons and end up explicitly stating that they're doing things for political benefit and no other reason. Anyway, like most conservative media, NPR is just a target to chill and try and draw them into producing news that better builds the conservative facade of "rational" discourse they want people to believe is the basis for their decisions. As opposed to the racism and corrupt business practices that is the entire American Republicans.

majormajor 3y ago

It's interesting that the majority of those comments are focused on a single issue. It sounds more like a preconceived notion rather than an informed criticism, where one would also likely be annoyed by discussions of economic injustice, ideas around UBI, taxation discussion, the criminality-or-not-of-Donald-Trump's actions (a primary thing Berliner himself actually mentioned in multiple instances, even!), etc...?

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Also, perhaps this is stating the obvious, but this article is posted on npr.org itself, and it is quite an in-depth treatment and analysis of the situation. While other news orgs my have a short blurb (often buried somewhere on their website), I rarely see them airing their own dirty laundry with such gusto.

Wolfenstein98k 3y ago
That's because he forced the issue by going to every outlet he could, mostly liberal ones, and he was right too. He'd be buried if he didn't and wasn't.
crackercrews 3y ago
This isn't laudable, it's defensive. The snafu has been covered in the NYT so there's no burying it. They are making sure their side is told by covering it themselves.
- tasty_freeze 3y ago
  ... and if they hadn't covered it, would you criticize them for burying the story?
  - crackercrews 3y ago
    No. They can't bury a story after it's been in the NYT.
    - tasty_freeze 3y ago
      You have an idiosyncratic definition for what the phrase means. Or maybe I do. When the source about the Biden's bribes in Ukraine turned out to be a Russian asset, it was widely reported, including the NYT. Fox and other right news sources glossed past it. To me, that is burying the story, even though it was widely reported in other outlets.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Alupis 3y ago

When one agrees with content they are much more likely to say it sounds non-partisan, middle ground, common sense, etc. The issues with NPR reporting stem from word choice (inclusions and exclusions), choice of stories to report (crickets about things they disagree with and wall-to-wall on things they want you to be outraged with), etc. NPR is about as partisan as it gets... it's a smoke screen to bill themselves as non-partisan - and some people just eat it up.

hobs 3y ago
The GP isn't praising them for their middle ground reporting. The truth often doesn't have a middle ground.
- mrkstu 3y ago
  They’ve been actively burying true news that doesn’t fit their narrative- that isn’t even reporting, it’s advancing an agenda.
- Alupis 3y ago
  > The truth often doesn't have a middle ground. There is rarely, if ever, such a thing as objective truth when it comes to politics. There are always multiple perspectives. Make no mistake here - NPR has an agenda to push and they are masterfully skilled in doing so; evidenced by the people who still believe it's a non-partisan "just the truth" journalism outfit.
- nickff 3y ago
  The “lab leak hypothesis” is one instance where NPR seems to have buried the most plausible explanation; there are many other similar examples.
  - subharmonicon 3y ago
    Buried in what way? Googling “npr lab leak hypothesis” yields dozens of stories published on NPR sites reporting on that theory, primarily quoting WHO and US government reports. I wouldn’t call that burying. You might not like what their sources say and may think there are sources they ignored, but calling that burying without pointing out those omissions doesn’t seem reasonable. [edit: add a question mark]

kernal 3y ago

>I have no idea where people who are saying NPR has made some kind of hard partisan shift are coming from. Perhaps this will help you out: A veteran National Public Radio journalist slammed the left-leaning broadcaster for ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop scandal because it could have helped Donald Trump get re-elected. >Of course, there is one group of people that has been casting NPR as particularly partisan for at least 25 years Congratulations on contradicting yourself.

dhosek 3y ago
He’s saying he doesn’t see the basis for the complaints. The Hunter Biden laptop scandal? Even the New York Post (not exactly a left-leaning publication) only ran with the story with the original reporter insisting his byline be omitted and the reporter who was given the byline wasn’t informed of this happening because while the laptop was Biden’s, the validity of the contents could not be verified and had roughly the validity of the Bush National Guard letter.
- kernal 3y ago
  >He’s saying he doesn’t see the basis for the complaints. Their partisan political coverage is the basis for the complaints. >the validity of the contents could not be verified The contents were verified as authentic. Additionally, the FBI had the contents years before the public release and they knew it was authentic. >Testimony Reveals FBI Employees Who Warned Social Media Companies about Hack and Leak Operation Knew Hunter Biden Laptop Wasn’t Russian Disinformation >DOJ confirms in new court filing it indeed belonged to Hunter Biden
  - astrange 3y ago
    They were not verified as authentic. You and whoever read that filing misunderstood it. (More importantly, if any component was verified that does not mean the whole thing is.) Also, in the same special counsel[0] filing they attached a picture of a table saw covered in sawdust and said it was a picture Hunter Biden had taken of "apparent cocaine". [0] who is a DOJ employee but it's misleading to call him "DOJ", since he's not controlled by them

mrkstu 3y ago

I’m a never-Trumper, came up as a voter in the Reagan era, omnivorous consumer of all news content, listened to NPR prior to the pandemic near daily, and still regularly afterwards, until the bias just completely turned me off. Your take seems wildly off to me. NPRs non-straight news programming has always been left, but the regular news programming at least mildly tried to be viewpoint neutral. That disappeared post-Trump. All programming took a strong PoV, and unless the politician was actively anti-Trump their interactions with non-leftists were adversarial. Again, as a now third party voter because of Trump/Maga this is not because I felt any commonality with the other side of the coin, but purely that I was essentially being fed propaganda rather than news.

symfoniq 3y ago
You’re basically me. I was a daily NPR listener until the Trump era. If a never-Trumper can’t handle NPR abandoning all pretense of objectivity, that might be a bad sign.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

anon291 3y ago

This is not a surprising take to find online as it's been well demonstrated that while conservatives mostly understand where liberals are coming from, liberals have a really hard time understanding right wing concerns.

je_bailey 3y ago
I haven't seen that demonstrated myself. Could you point me to a study or two that provides the details on that?
- jonahx 3y ago
  Without vouching for the validity of this source, a quick search on perplexity.ai (which is good for this kind of thing) gives: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01461672231198001 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01461672231198... It also mentions a 2017 article in The Atlantic that I wasn't able to dig up.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Haidt, "The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Spectrum" https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050092 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050092 Jonathan Haidt in his book "Righteous Mind" https://righteousmind.com/ https://righteousmind.com/
  - anon291 3y ago
    These were what I was thinking of. I believe they asked liberals to answer a political question about their own beliefs, and then again to answer for a 'stereotypical' liberal and conservative. The liberals were not accurate for anyone. The conservatives were able to better match the 'average' for those groups. In other words, the study claims that this means they are better able to put themselves in the shoes of the 'other' side
  - lolinder 3y ago
    > The participants were 2,212 visitors (62% female; median age 28; only U.S. residents or citizens) to ProjectImplicit.org, where they were randomly assigned to this study. All participants in the research pool had previously filled out demographic information, including sex, age, and political identity (7-point scale, strongly liberal to strongly conservative). 1,174 participants self-identified using one of the three liberal options, 538 chose the “moderate” midpoint, and 500 chose one of the three conservative options. The strong left-leaning bias in the sample makes me suspicious that this sample isn't representative of the wider population. I can't find the raw data, but given the selection method I strongly suspect that the sample is mostly college students. If so, one hypothesis that might explain the results is that conservatives who go to college of necessity have a stronger understanding of the other side than liberals because they're the minority on campus for many years. If you repeated this study with a more representative sample of conservatives, including conservatives who do not have the opportunity to interact with many liberals, do you get different results?

ars 3y ago

I listen to both NPR and Fox news summary every day, and both of them are virtually identical in how they cover things. Every once in a while you'll hear a slant in how they will frame something, like the context or who they chose to quote. But it's clear that both NPR and Fox try very hard to be neutral. (Note the Fox TV show with "personalities" is not the same as their news show.)

scarface_74 3y ago
I only watch Fox News during elections and I find it just as good as any other outlet if not slightly better. Fox Business seems about the same. TheHill seems fairly balanced and surprisingly enough newsmax seems fairly balanced. Redstate on the other hand has a double standard and ignores anything negative about Trump. They kicked out all of thier traditional conservatives.

skywhopper 3y ago

Yeah, the article in question that got this guy suspended was like reading about an alternate mirror reality. If anything has gone wrong at NPR (and similar media orgs) in the past decade it's the willingness to bend over backwards to try to satisfy their harshest bad-faith critics, which is utterly impossible, and results in really terrible coverage. I find the five day suspension thing bizarre... either fire the guy or don't, whatever. But his claims that they didn't give enough credence to the craziest, most pernicious lies out there is the opposite of true.

newZWhoDis 3y ago

Last time I listened to NPR was in an Uber ride in 2020, it sounded like some kind of right wing parody of far-left activists. I couldn’t believe people considered that “middle of the road”. I’m rather disgusted that my tax dollars go to them.

alfor 3y ago

Have you ever voted conservative? Do you have friends that vote conservative? Do you have collegues that vote conservative. Is it possible you are in the bubble? Just here in HN is progressive to ultra progressive. Any mention of the other side is a sure way to get downvoted to oblivion.

TheEggMan 3y ago
Completely agree. Being a conservative here is not much fun.
notabee 3y ago
HN culture is progressive on some things but very libertarian on others. It's not very left wing because a large portion of the posters here are quite insulated from the plight of blue collar workers.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fsckboy 3y ago
  blue collar workers have always been populist, and isolated from leftists. Read up on Marxist ideas about the necessity of a revolutionary "vanguard", by which they don't mean workers, they mean activists, agitators, professional revolutionaries, who work to create the conditions for revolution. Blue collar workers are too busy working and supporting their families.
feoren 3y ago
This take only works if you tunnel-vision yourself to only looking at the United States. It's all too easy to say "we believe X and you believe Y; who's to say which is right!? From our point of view, you're the one in the bubble!" But if you step back and look at the American political spectrum from a global and historical perspective, it's abundantly clear that it's the conservative side that is in a bubble; nearly even a cult. The rest of us would love to have two rational political parties to pick from. Few people are ideologically beholden to the Democratic Party directly, it's just literally our only option.