This. As someone who's probably center-right, I used to listen to NPR a lot because they'd often offer new perspectives on things. But now, they offer the same perspective, over and over and over again - and so I usually turn them off.
I feel like a person who’s been eating only one food group for the past couple of years and has developed a scurvy-like disorder.
My mind is craving thoughtful, non-partisan, deeply intellectual conservative analysis of current events.
Not cult of personality American GOP pop conservatism, not the dumb-dumb outrage machine new media personalities, but rather seriously legitimate academic right wing thought leadership to expand and challenge my thinking about the world. I honestly don’t know where to find it.
I have liberal friends who, before this essay appeared, told me that they'd stopped listening to NPR because of its slide into advocacy rather than reporting news.
It's happening everywhere, people no longer can help themselves in professional situations. They must tell us what to think, rather than help (or teach us) how to think.
For example, I don't remember any overt politics at high school, but ours feeds a steady diet. Entertainment is another area.
That’s the perfect word: exhaustion. Every nth (for some small value of n) segment is on a progressive zeitgeist topic, the vast majority of them are not newsworthy, those that are are mostly unnecessarily projecting on top of a newsworthy story, and they seem designed simply to elicit an emotional response.
Give me less 1A, and more Reveal or Snap Judgement. 1A is probably the poster child for transition from interesting content from marginalized voices that informs listeners into whatever it is today, which is circling around the drain of angry media told through a calming voice.
I still think that the major national shows like Morning Edition and All Things Considered hit just like they did a decade ago - albeit one dimension of our politics is less deserving of air time of the other, and that is reflected in their coverage.
I have had to turn them off numerous times because they play Trump's sound bites too much. I guess they want to exact full impartial coverage but it comes to a point where some swill just doesn't need air time. I'm totally cool with paraphrased coverage but not giving that pig a megaphone.
Same. I still listen because, after all, it is still reporting as opposed to other outlets that are pure entertainment. But David Broncochio needs to go and they are over the top when it comes to actively promoting LGBTQ and race division. It is so bad that you have to call it propaganda and question their motives and sanity.
At the end of the day these people at NPR care, and they are compassionate, but I do not find them credible on a lot of topics because they are only employing people who fit in. Economic and science issues? A joke. Horrible.
It's a bit of a different category in that NPR is public funded and so has kind of an obligation to represent the public. Fox is owned by the Murdochs and so it's a bit down to them. At least they fired Tucker.
Yeah, or the Wash Post or NYT or MSNBC. As for Fox, listen to the Howard Kurtz show on Sunday mornings, he provides a nice, dare I say "fair and balanced", analysis of media coverage of news stories from the previous week.
Self-awareness - let alone analysis! - is not a part of their or their viewership’s culture. May as well ask when Donald Trump will next reflect on an emotional state not his own.
I gave up NPR a few years ago, after four decades of frequent listening. It has become more difficult to recognize the attributes which made it so useful and insightful, for so long. Once in a while, they run something which reinforces my opinion that they've strayed into the weeds. A recent example: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197955833
LUSE: I talked to other professors in preparation for this conversation, and something that came up was, like, it's seen by many as a very extreme form of nonviolent direct action.
WOODLY: Yes. I mean, it is the most extreme form of nonviolent direct action because self-immolation is not meant to hurt others. It's not meant to destroy property. It's really meant to use one's own life to make a statement. It's also on a spectrum - right? - like, you know, sort of on a spectrum from, for example, hunger strike. Some people do things like nail parts of their bodies to buildings. And then sort of self-immolation is, like, on that spectrum of the most extreme kinds of nonviolent direct action.
If you want a real WTF put on the local AM right wing talk shows. It does get worse. They straight up spew lies and dog whistle hate on repeat. I can't accuse NPR of lying.
As a long time NPR listener who cut them off in 2020 because of a change in my worldview, I do think NPR misses facts because of ideological bias but I take this position from a far Left stance. I broadly label myself as an Anarcho-communist and think that NPR, and other more liberal or progressive sources, largely serve the biases of existing institutional structures - that both conservatives and liberals belong to - rather than challenge them with journalistic integrity founded in expansive coverage of factual narratives. The tendency in NPR's coverage of the Palestinian genocide, the ongoing COVID pandemic, and the climate and ecological emergency are demonstrative of their systemic bias.
NPR is not a monolithic media organization. In my experience, local NPR stations are one of the best sources of interesting and relevant local news. In contrast, most local TV/Radio news is borderline a crime blotter ginned up to keep people outraged.
Regarding the national NPR newsroom, I think this story will provoke positive change, as indicated in the article. There is no media which every person would consider unbiased, and very few media organizations take action to even attempt to reign in biases. The fact that editors will start reviewing coverage more closely to remove tilt sets a higher bar than all but a few news organizations.
I chuckle thinking about a reporter stepping out of another random news room in the country and spreading outrage that the coverage has a bias. The response would generally be: “Yes, duh.”
I think as shown by similar scandals at NYT and WSJ, that the media press do not accept feedback, and instead will rally around extending and furthering their ideological anti-liberal (authoritarian) monoculture, and instead get rid of dissenting voices.
see James Bennet at NYT (who was fired for publishing a op-ed from a sitting American senator) or even Kevin D. Williamson at the Athletic.
I can't see why everybody got so worked up about the op-ed you're referring to. The Times has traditionally been a venue for voices that are not in its constituency, and in this particular case, Cotton wrote such a crazy article that it reduced his credibility significantly in front of the nation.
He proposed using the military to quell protests, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protes...
If the numbers Berliner revealed about audience losses are correct, the impact is surely being most felt at the local station level. If fewer people are tuning in, fundraising will suffer and cuts are inevitable.
For instance, Boston has two NPR stations, WGBH and WBUR, and both are in trouble. This article talks about declining numbers of live listeners and resistance to digital transformation, but never mentions the issues brought up by Berliner.
Even if "every news outlet and broadcast media outlet losing audience rapidly", the criticism wasn't about NPR losing audience in general, but about NPR losing audience from a particular side predominantly.
KUOW in Seattle seems to be in trouble too. Their sponsors have been getting increasingly cringeworthy. Just last week I heard a long sponsor message from Christian Science. They seem to scraping deeper into the bottom of the barrel and sponsor message seem to be increasing in quantity.
Are you sure it was from Christian Science and not the Christian Science Monitor which has been a long-time sponsor (and if I recall occasional reporting partner) of NPR.
I definitely listen to KUOW a lot less than I used to. The main reason is that a few years ago they had a lineup on Saturdays that kept me listening most of the day. It included:
• A Prairie Home Companion [1]
• The Vinyl Cafe [2]
• Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! [3]
• Says You! [4]
• The Swing Years and Beyond [5]
Those I'm sure were on Saturday. I know I'm missing 4 other programs from Saturday. I remember the following programs as being on weekends at the time, but can't remember which were Saturday and which were Sunday.
I was a long time listener and donor to KUOW. My intention was to support local radio, hopefully get some more community pieces, and so on ... and that matched the donation drive pitches.
When they decided to use their cash to empire build and buy a Jazz station for $8M, I completely gave up and could no longer even stomach listening. I like Jazz, but it hardly needs the help. It seemed like an utter betrayal.
But Seattle (and Boston) are very blue areas, the issues that Berliner is suggesting wouldn't seem to apply to those areas, they would seem more likely to apply to the hinterlands. The Boston situation probably implies that they just need to combine the two stations into one.
Just to be clear, when it comes to radio audience, the audience is 100% local stations. NPR does not own any radio spectrum. The structure is that local stations have complete editorial control of their programming so long as it adheres to the principles of the NPR mission and in exchange they get access to the network of content produced by NPR and local affiliates. Bigger affiliates like the ones in Boston produce a lot of local content or even sell back to the national network, while smaller ones are mostly running NPR content. They are also all running their own budgets and revenue operations.
Is this really a business model issue? I understood that NPR’s funding primarily comes from corporate sponsors, not listeners or the government. If that’s true, there is less incentive to preserve local affiliates. Consolidation is inevitable, I would imagine.
That's not exactly true. For one, all the local affiliates have their own budgets, their own expenses, revenues and staff. Up until this year, NPR was specifically prohibited from collecting donations from listeners. If you had gone to npr.org and clicked "donate" it would force you to donate to your local affiliate. Affiliates do not give NPR a cut of their donations. Instead they pay (on a sliding scale I think) for the rights to content produced by NPR. If you look at the sources of revenue for any given affiliate, it will probably be mostly donation from listeners. So taken as a whole, public radio is very much paid for by listeners.
It is kind of comical that NPR made racial and gender diversity their main priority…and still have a listener base that’s much whiter than the country as a whole.
No conflict there if you're used to their New England shows like Car Talk and Wait Wait (* pretending Chicago is New England for the moment). They were always woke, as in constantly making identity jokes about ethnic white people like Jews and Italians.
I assume the lost is entirety into the cloud of podcasts.
I don't listen to any radio programs anymore and part of that is work from home. But I do listen to NPR programming via podcasts.
Their business model seems to not survive the move to work from home.
It's got nothing to do with politics. It's entirely the same technologies disrupting all media. We have simply stopped wholesale media consumption for the modern network.
As an aside, I always wondered why conservative radio always dominated liberal radio. Nearly every conservative pundit has a national show and is syndicated far and wide on AM/FM radio stations. Liberal shows you can't find with a search light. Remember Air America? It lasted two years before a host of scandals and a bankruptcy put it into the "where are they now?" bin as it limped along for another 4 years before shuttering.
But I digress.
Just curious why conservatives still love radio after so many decades and liberals have almost nothing comparable to listen to locally or nationally.
There is a podcast miniseries called The Divided Dial[0] that answers the question of why conservative radio dominates in America, but very briefly, based on my understanding of their reporting:
1. The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine meant that radio stations no longer had a legal obligation to provide a fair reflection of differing viewpoints on matters of public importance;
2. The elimination of national ownership caps in the 1996 Telecommunications Act enabled a rapid and extreme consolidation of radio stations;
3. These new national radio conglomerates slashed costs by vertically integrating production, creating fewer shows, and rebroadcasting them to all their owned stations;
4. The concept of “format purity” spilled over from music radio into talk radio, causing commercial talk stations to switch from showcasing a variety of opinions to airing one political perspective all day;
5. The conservative talk radio format was perceived as less risky by radio executives, and so that was the format that commercial talk radio switched to.
Air America may have eventually succeeded despite its many other flaws—except they owned no radio stations of their own, so there was no place for them to go in this hyper-consolidated, format-pure commercial market.
I'm libertarian with blue tribe sympathies. Whenever I try listening to NPR, I literally fall asleep. It's just something about the combination of cadence, intonation, and premium mediocre presentation of ideas that just paralyzes me. I'm powerless to stop it. Meanwhile I can listen to reactionary [0] talk radio just fine, and sometimes do just for cringe entertainment value. The bellowing of indignant righteousness is stimulating regardless of whether one agrees with the ideas. I don't know that this explains the overall popularity per se, but take it as one data point.
[0] it's a grave mistake to refer to the current Republican party as conservatives. If anything, actual conservatism these days means supporting the Democratic party - respect for American institutions, the rule of law, strong foreign policy, gradual change, etc. The Democrats are even checking the box of fiscal conservatism compared with the past two decades of ZIRP.
There is no one true liberal narrative. There are somewhere in the range of 1 to 3 true conservative narratives.
Politics in the US is represented with two parties: the right, and the tent. No one person can represent everyone in the tent. Anyone can represent the right.
I always figured that liberal radio, e.g. Air America, struggled and failed because that point of view had too much competition from other media, e.g. newspapers and television. Back before internet, conservatives only had radio to hear what they considered their point of view taken seriously and the other side derided whereas liberals had lots of other options to hear their points of view taken seriously while the other side was painted as rubes.
Right-wing radio is heavily subsidized by right-wing institutions funded by the billionaires we all know about. It is happy to repeat lies, without shame, at length until they are believed. No non-subsidized radio station can compete, so all AM talk radio is openly right-wing, and is all there is on the dial in most rural settings.
IME a lot of millenials and younger that are "progressive" are too left for what can be considered "acceptable content" on corporate platforms. Tiktok has pretty good content in this area, but I think a lot of it boils down to the biases of liberal broadcast media owners not keeping up with the kind of content people want to hear. Anything further left than liberalism is considered a "national security issue" so you don't get any interesting viewpoints. Even breadtube is pretty milk toast. I'll just stick to my hip hop and punk jams tyvm.
Conservatives are easier to herd. They may argue with what the Republican party is doing at any given moment, but ultimately they will fall in line.
Centralized messaging is simply a better fit for the conservative worldview than it is for those on the liberal/left-leaning side of the spectrum. (Which in reality occupies a bigger tent than the GOP ever pitched.)
The lapse of journalistic objectivity over the past ~10 years is a dead horse.
I do think we've turned a corner for the better. I haven't listened to NPR in years but the Times has improved over the past few years.
One of the themes of Civil War, the new Alex Garland movie, concerns this dynamic. See his interview in the Times: https://archive.is/pzs1a. His theory is that the press is supposed to check polarization by disseminating objective facts (which never fit one faction's worldview perfectly) and this process' failure has led to increasing polarization.
Journalistic objectivity was basically invented by anti-Roosevelt media. Before that newspapers were explicitly partisan. Roosevelt was so dominant that Republicans felt the need to change the script.
FYI, the Civil War was really started by the ridiculously stupid attack on Fort Sumter. If SC hadn't gone off and attacked the fort the US would have split into two or three countries...and everyone would have been OK with that.
Joseph Pulitzer's retirement letter from 1907 (referencing St. Louis's metro paper):
I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.
It was he of course who had previously declared:
Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.
Journalistic objectivity is not real and has never existed.
It is much better when a journalistic outlet acknowledges its plausible biases and lets the reader make up their own mind. This ideal gets further stretched with "citizens journalism" where normies do their own journalism. You expect to some system to emerge that allows for audiences to converge on the "truth".
Anyone that espouses these idealistic ideals of "objectivism" has drank the koolaid. And of course, The Objectivity always somehow accidentally converges to the status quo. Is it because the status quo is? Unlikely.
I grew up listening to NPR, it was always on. Car talk with my dad on the weekends, Prarie home, etc. It's been programed in every car I've owned since I was a teenager. My wife and I have listened together and donated for years. But starting around 2019ish it gotten harder and harder to stay engaged with the programming.
Almost every piece of reporting is now some kind of soft-outrage human-interest pseudo news.
I want to listen but every other story is a tale of victim hood and oppression. It's just too much.
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.
20 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.
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.
Sprinkle 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.
I 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.
> 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.
Hot 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.
A useful heuristic for measuring news quality is to ask yourself, “Am I more informed about what’s happening or about what people are angry about.”
Like you, I was a life-long listener and donater. I stopped both during the pandemic when I noticed NPR was playing the anger game, like every other outlet, for social media points.
> I grew up listening to NPR, it was always on. Car talk with my dad on the weekends, Prarie home, etc.
Note: These are not NPR shows. They're merely shows that your (and most) local NPR affiliates purchased for broadcasting.
If you think your local affiliate doesn't have enough of these types of shows, let them know! Many local affiliates have wide discretion on the programming.
> Note: These are not NPR shows. They're merely shows that your (and most) local NPR affiliates purchased for broadcasting.
That seems like a pretty fine distinction. If nothing else, NPR makes decisions about which externally produced shows to license. In the end, NPR deserves all the credit / responsibility for what it broadcasts.
It reminds me of the distinction NPR makes (used to make?) between "advertising" and "underwriting". Maybe the distinction was relevant for some legal / regulatory things. But it wasn't relevant for e.g. discussions about whether or not they were subject to "advertiser" pressure on their content.
Yep, many years ago NPR was quite eclectic and a great way to satisfy my curiosity on weekends as a kid or later at my factory job.
Incidentally, it now occurs to me that HN is basically my current replacement. Even if I have zero interest in a linked topic, I’ll often find a comment or discussion that’s enlightening and furthers my perspective of something in a meaningful and positive way.
I treasure this site and the insightful comments I read. It’s one of the last places I’ve found on the internet where someone can bring up a controversial topic and get legitimate responses.
I wonder if it has parallels to the Salem Witch Hunt? If they spend x/2% of their time accusing others of being racist, they must expend x/2% "uplifting blacks" so they cannot be accused of it as well.
I don't listen anymore but still like to use text.npr.org for news, its pretty easy to scan the headlines and mentally filter out most of the social justice pieces (and there are a lot of them).
TBF I don't think NPR is really much different then most other mainstream lefty sources. I think axios is way worse than NPR (a lot of their "articles" are just vibes with really poor evidence, at least NPR still tries to do some traditional reporting).
NPR has been downgraded, intellectually. They follow the rest of the news, discussing the same topics with the same framing as the rest of the media, following whatever hot topic there is at the moment, no matter how trivial. News and discussion is often spoon-fed in bite sized chunks that miss nuance and lack the willingness to go past the headlines to the real meat of the issue for fear of boring less sophisticated listeners. Its become boring, repetitive, and uninformative in the vast majority of the stories I hear on NPR One. It is a sad state of affairs.
A lil game I play is to see how long until a pandering buzzword is said from the time I turn on the radio. Usually T < 3 seconds if not the very first word I hear.
I've been thinking about this recently and articles that make cost comparisons of that sort tend to compare only the cost of ingredients and assume you have the equipment to cook it, the skills to cook it and that your time is worth zero.
I don't know how to come up with good metrics for measuring that but I think currently all such articles are seriously bad because most don't even list their set of implicit assumptions concerning the costs that they are bothering to measure.
That's factually correct- it is often cheaper to buy the equivalent of a hamburger, fries, and coke at McDonalds, Burger King, or other similar stores, for less than you can buy the ingredients at the supermarket. This is actually a "known thing" which has been factually verified.
This comment sparked a really good debate - one which I am pretty sure I remember seeing on HN before. But what it makes me think of is seeing the parent issue: that accounting can be abused to spin the truth however you want. I really want to go in the meta direction with this and say I wish accounting shenanigans could be identified and labelled as fallacies or at least sneaky tools used for persuasion, just like people are becoming wise to established fallacies like strawman or relative privation.
Does it "cost more" based on calories/dollar, or weight of food, or cooked-meals-per-dollar? (I'm not asking for an answer, thats what everyone below your comment has been arguing about I assume). Are cigarettes "just as addictive" as heroin? Well, it depends on how you measure/define _____. I keep seeing effort wasted in arguments that all point back to the "well, it depends on how you measure it", but to me, the arguments never actually get anywhere and nobody seems to realize that they are playing with movable goalposts.
Same, used to be my default radio and podcast listening, then a few years ago they had a major jump in their style/producers/journalists and just couldn't keep listening anymore.
I used to love listening to All Things Considered followed by Planet Money every day on my grueling commute home from work. It was my only companion. I haven't turned it on in years.
I mourn the loss. Living in a red area NPR was a much-needed breath of Fresh Air.
There are 8 billion people on the planet. You can fill 24/7 with whatever kinds of stories you wish—-sad, maddening, inspiring, funny, joyful, and outrageous too. It’s pure choice to pick the last one, it’s not in any way forced by reality.
Some years ago I had a deeply weird conversation with a conservative political operative in my area wherein (among other things) they advanced the claim that liberals had demonstrably and totally won the culture wars, and then proceeded to go totally off the rails. I balked at the notion at the time but as the years have gone by I've come to the sullen realization that they had a point.
And Berliner apparently helped to start planet money, which indicator is a spin off of. That’s almost the sum total of real news that’s still available at npr :(
20% of America is outraged, 60% is willing to give woke media a try as long is it’s entertaining and not too preachy, 15% gives extra points for “representation” but still wants a good story, and 5% thinks it doesn’t go far enough.
Part of this is generational.
In the workplace, I suspect “representation” is a proxy for age discrimination.
I’ve seen too many old white men pushed aside for much, much, much younger minorities.
If you think NPR has fallen - and it has - try following The Economist on Instagram. Talk about a once reputable media outlet losing it's way. Nearly every post feels like they fell asleep next to a BuzzFeed pod.
Stick with Consider This and the NPR News. NPR Politics Podcast is great too. I tend to avoid the opinion stuff since, yes, it's definitely got an overly-lefty outrage-bait angle.
I used to listen to NPR quite a bit after moving to the US, mostly during my commutes. Over the last few years, it has gotten worse and worse. The point where I stopped listening to it and switched to podcasts was when they had someone claiming that office breakrooms were "basically white spaces" where non-white people do not belong (and calling for remote work as the alternative). And the interviewer essentially took them at face value.
Have these people not heard of office breakrooms existing outside of white-majority countries? I would bet that having food together in a communal setting is a team-building and fun activity throughout the world regardless of skin-color. Most likely, this was some young, introverted person who was uncomfortable being in a group and wanted to somehow bring in race into that to justify their viewpoint.
As someone who isn't white, this sort of coddling non-sense is simply infuriating. I do not want to be judged based on what I look like, and platforming/pushing these sort of views does exactly that.
They have become the very caricature of what right-wing news makes out liberals to be.
I recall hearing an NPR piece in the past couple months that was discussing how best to handle reparations for slavery. The entire piece clearly came from the conceit that reparations would be good and desirable. All of the expert interviewees supported and spoke favorably of reparations with no counterpoints, the few opponents were extemporaneous "man on the street" interviews. The end effect was an one sided piece almost contemptuously disregarding any opposition. Certainly not a convincing message to the 68% of US adults (including 49% of Democrats) that don't support reparations.
More than the staking a clear political position on the matter, it was the presumption and condescension that was the most off-putting. Far too often their pieces have adopted that tone. With the "right-thinking" guest or guests interviewed by the "right-thinking" host about a issue clearly the listener would agree with too... if they are "right-thinking."
You've always had narcissistic people make everything about themselves or seeing victimhood everywhere.
However what's new is that as long as claims being made are of a certain type, they are not only accepted uncritically, but in fact trying to challenge them can be dangerous for your employment status. So essentially no one can call BS on their ideas because no dissent on these topics is allowed.
I similarly stopped listening to NPR around 2018, because they really leaned into news commentary with a very one-sided bias. I could no longer stand the preachiness of their newer programming, and it seemed that the more established folks like Robert Siegel and Steve Inskeep got roped into toeing the line as well. I think the Trump era really broke a lot of news sources I previously relied on.
Sure. It's a real problen. But that was a verging-on-cover-story part of Berliner's criticism, which was just another crypto-fascist diatribe, of the kind that are currently so depressingly ubiquitious.
It's hard to say how much of that is manufactured outrage and how much is an unsettling new reality. It may not be your reality, but for an increasing number of people quality of life is deteriorating. Not saying you're wrong, just saying that we shouldn't completely tune out everything that doesn't fit our own reality.
> It's hard to say how much of that is manufactured outrage and how much is an unsettling new reality.
There's plenty of unsettling new reality, I'll give you that. And it should be reported on, even if it makes people uncomfortable.
But how is it reported on? There's a difference between "here's the economic reality of 20% of of the population" and "you should be outraged about the economy". And if you listen in order to analyze the way the story is told rather than to hear what the story is about, you can tell which is which fairly reliably.
Much of the left has gone from "we're going to report the stories that happen" to "we're going to report the things we think need to be reported, like poverty" (which is all right, as long as they also report the news), to "we're going to report things so as to make you become politically active on the side that we think you should". That last step is highly problematic. For one thing, once you're that blatantly a cheerleader for one side, can I trust that you're telling the truth about what you're reporting on, or are you distorting it out of all resemblance to reality?
Yeah. There are sooo many good podcasts (so much so that I am still a “sustaining member” of OPB because of all the value they bring me), but if you turn it on in the car at a random time, you’re going to die of boredom.
Is this discomfort with the state of the world? Cause I think the goal is that you feel inclined towards action on that. The state of the world isn't... all good. We've got some serious issues right now. And it seems like a lot of people are complaining that they have to hear about that (I will point out almost no other news station is doing this, so also as a proportion of news this seems kinda reasonable) rather than that others are experiencing the bad things.
It's funny to me because their used to be a conservative take that liberals needed safe spaces to talk about all of this stuff, and when it's actually in the media people don't want to grapple with it. I would bet that the most vocal proponents of changing this dialogue lean conservative as well.
It's true that there's big problems and it's true that things should change.
The issue is that the solution that is proposed to the problem is to have more attention to the problem. This result in a virtuous circle where things have to address the problem more and more.
It does help address the problem though, it's not falling on deaf ears and it is educational.
This then becomes a kind of noise drowning out other signals. It's the signals that listeners want not the noise.
Is anything actually improved, do people benefit? I would say yes!!
But it's a move away from signal and information towards problem education and political or social messaging.
The virtuous circle can get reinforced by objections to the changes. Objections or "discomfort" are often proof that more changes need to be made. The signal is further reduced and those in change become blind in their virtue. Metrics in how good they are doing are perceived in terms of the messages that are put out not in quality productions. A kind of seige mentality makes it hard to determine the difference between criticism of the content or format and political objections of the added messaging to the content. Both positions become opposition and encourage more of the same.
To me, the change to add more unbiased views or thoughts from the other side seem artificial and miss the actual change in content. It makes things more political and less about life.
2. There is a lot more to a radio station than covering the state of the world (news, social issues, etc). There's stuff like entertainment, humor, etc.
A lot of people are arguing about 2 above.
There's always malnutrition somewhere in the world (and yes, in the US). But we don't criticize the existence of movie theaters.
I don't think it's the media's place to make us feel inclined to take action. What action, exactly? Progressive, conservative, green, techno-optimist, religious, etc? It's their job to report on whatever is news-worthy, and it's up to viewers what they want to do with that information. I don't agree with pushing agendas disguised as news. That used to be mainly a Fox News and AM-talk radio thing. It's dissapointing to see the rest of media follow suit.
Even NYT didn't suspend Bari Weiss despite her bringing similar criticisms about NYT.
In all honesty, I never understood the appeal of NPR, and I've been consuming news all the time since I was in elementary school (I even got my elementary school library to get a weekly subscription for The Economist).
I love PBS, but NPR always felt like cultural commentary with no actual in depth reporting. NYT occasionally feels like that as well, but their track record has more than redeemed themselves.
I don't listen to NPR directly, but I think RadioLab and This American Life are generally pretty good. I don't know how much those are NPR as a whole or works by affiliate stations, but they are media that I enjoy, so I kind of see why people would listen.
I will say, though, PBS is generally better. I think Frontline is very consistently excellent.
Older episodes of RadioLab are absolute gems. Around the time Robert Krulwich retired I noticed a palpable shift. The new hosts' motivation shifted from inform to influence. It still has good stories, but the framing is somewhat more manipulative, in a way that's hard to pin down but makes me distinctly uncomfortable and sometimes exhausted.
RadioLab did the same thing. Was science for the first ~10 yrs, then turned politics from a fairly left POV. I finally stopped listening after they passed the torch.
This American Life is also pretty far left. It's still on my podcast list but I only listen when I run out of others. And then, 2 out of 3 times the story a race/identity piece and fast forward to the next part.
Their news programming used to be pretty good (‘00s and earlier, maybe a little into the 20-teens). Now it’s at its best when my local station’s syndicating news from the BBC. :-( It’s markedly better, really highlights how bad NPR has gotten.
On the Media remains good. Their market show’s ok. I like Wait, Wait. That’s a complete list of their programs I’m still happy about listening to.
Not really my thing, but this section suggests he likely has a valid point. Sometimes, being right is the most unforgivable thing you can be.
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
I mean, that data in itself doesn't say much, conservatism in the US changed dramatically in 2015/2016. The people who call themselves conservative now are different to back in 2011. For example the education levels are a lot lower among conservatives and a lot higher among liberals than before.
This is the same NPR that sold it's subscriber list to the Democratic party. In the US, the government has no business paying for speech, especially partisan speech.
Like most of the rest of the media, NPR is no longer liberal (in respect to protecting personal human rights, economic freedom, observable truth and government institutions) but rather Liberal causes (restricting speech against protected classes, skeptical of free markets, relative truths, tearing down government institutions).
To be fair, this was a long time ago - it's a quick reminder that I am a lot older then I remember - in the late 90s, NPR and CPB member stations were caught selling their membership lists. There was a compromise that preserved CPB and NPR funding in 1999 that explicitly forbid them from doing so:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-jul-21-mn-58123...
Readit News
Speaking as a lifelong NPR listener who recently had to cut them off because of ideological exhaustion: yep!
My mind is craving thoughtful, non-partisan, deeply intellectual conservative analysis of current events.
Not cult of personality American GOP pop conservatism, not the dumb-dumb outrage machine new media personalities, but rather seriously legitimate academic right wing thought leadership to expand and challenge my thinking about the world. I honestly don’t know where to find it.
For example, I don't remember any overt politics at high school, but ours feeds a steady diet. Entertainment is another area.
I still think that the major national shows like Morning Edition and All Things Considered hit just like they did a decade ago - albeit one dimension of our politics is less deserving of air time of the other, and that is reflected in their coverage.
At the end of the day these people at NPR care, and they are compassionate, but I do not find them credible on a lot of topics because they are only employing people who fit in. Economic and science issues? A joke. Horrible.
Regarding the national NPR newsroom, I think this story will provoke positive change, as indicated in the article. There is no media which every person would consider unbiased, and very few media organizations take action to even attempt to reign in biases. The fact that editors will start reviewing coverage more closely to remove tilt sets a higher bar than all but a few news organizations.
I chuckle thinking about a reporter stepping out of another random news room in the country and spreading outrage that the coverage has a bias. The response would generally be: “Yes, duh.”
see James Bennet at NYT (who was fired for publishing a op-ed from a sitting American senator) or even Kevin D. Williamson at the Athletic.
NPR receives public money. They should be unbiased and objective.
For instance, Boston has two NPR stations, WGBH and WBUR, and both are in trouble. This article talks about declining numbers of live listeners and resistance to digital transformation, but never mentions the issues brought up by Berliner.
https://www.boston.com/news/the-boston-globe/2024/04/11/two-...
For example, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/04/conserv...
• A Prairie Home Companion [1]
• The Vinyl Cafe [2]
• Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! [3]
• Says You! [4]
• The Swing Years and Beyond [5]
Those I'm sure were on Saturday. I know I'm missing 4 other programs from Saturday. I remember the following programs as being on weekends at the time, but can't remember which were Saturday and which were Sunday.
• This American Life [6]
• The Moth Radio Hour [7]
• Snap Judgement [8]
• Radiolab [9]
• Freakonomics Radio [10]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Prairie_Home_Companion
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vinyl_Cafe
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wait_Wait..._Don%27t_Tell_Me!
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Says_You!
[5] https://archive.kuow.org/show/swing-years-and-beyond
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_American_Life
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moth
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_Judgment_(radio_program)
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiolab
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakonomics_Radio
When they decided to use their cash to empire build and buy a Jazz station for $8M, I completely gave up and could no longer even stomach listening. I like Jazz, but it hardly needs the help. It seemed like an utter betrayal.
I'm sure its hard to compete with so many alternatives to the same content.
I don't listen to any radio programs anymore and part of that is work from home. But I do listen to NPR programming via podcasts.
Their business model seems to not survive the move to work from home.
It's got nothing to do with politics. It's entirely the same technologies disrupting all media. We have simply stopped wholesale media consumption for the modern network.
But I digress.
Just curious why conservatives still love radio after so many decades and liberals have almost nothing comparable to listen to locally or nationally.
1. The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine meant that radio stations no longer had a legal obligation to provide a fair reflection of differing viewpoints on matters of public importance;
2. The elimination of national ownership caps in the 1996 Telecommunications Act enabled a rapid and extreme consolidation of radio stations;
3. These new national radio conglomerates slashed costs by vertically integrating production, creating fewer shows, and rebroadcasting them to all their owned stations;
4. The concept of “format purity” spilled over from music radio into talk radio, causing commercial talk stations to switch from showcasing a variety of opinions to airing one political perspective all day;
5. The conservative talk radio format was perceived as less risky by radio executives, and so that was the format that commercial talk radio switched to.
Air America may have eventually succeeded despite its many other flaws—except they owned no radio stations of their own, so there was no place for them to go in this hyper-consolidated, format-pure commercial market.
[0] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial
[0] it's a grave mistake to refer to the current Republican party as conservatives. If anything, actual conservatism these days means supporting the Democratic party - respect for American institutions, the rule of law, strong foreign policy, gradual change, etc. The Democrats are even checking the box of fiscal conservatism compared with the past two decades of ZIRP.
Whereas progressives seem more likely to listen at a desk, hence the plethora of leftist podcasts.
Politics in the US is represented with two parties: the right, and the tent. No one person can represent everyone in the tent. Anyone can represent the right.
Centralized messaging is simply a better fit for the conservative worldview than it is for those on the liberal/left-leaning side of the spectrum. (Which in reality occupies a bigger tent than the GOP ever pitched.)
I do think we've turned a corner for the better. I haven't listened to NPR in years but the Times has improved over the past few years.
One of the themes of Civil War, the new Alex Garland movie, concerns this dynamic. See his interview in the Times: https://archive.is/pzs1a. His theory is that the press is supposed to check polarization by disseminating objective facts (which never fit one faction's worldview perfectly) and this process' failure has led to increasing polarization.
FYI, the Civil War was really started by the ridiculously stupid attack on Fort Sumter. If SC hadn't gone off and attacked the fort the US would have split into two or three countries...and everyone would have been OK with that.
I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.
It was he of course who had previously declared:
Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.
And how exactly do you think everyone would have been ok with the US splitting into multiple countries?
Hmm
I think it's more like something that was formalized around the turn of the 19th century. Maybe wikipedia isn't accurate here.
It is much better when a journalistic outlet acknowledges its plausible biases and lets the reader make up their own mind. This ideal gets further stretched with "citizens journalism" where normies do their own journalism. You expect to some system to emerge that allows for audiences to converge on the "truth".
Anyone that espouses these idealistic ideals of "objectivism" has drank the koolaid. And of course, The Objectivity always somehow accidentally converges to the status quo. Is it because the status quo is? Unlikely.
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Almost every piece of reporting is now some kind of soft-outrage human-interest pseudo news. I want to listen but every other story is a tale of victim hood and oppression. It's just too much.
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.
I think this is the transcript: 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?
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.
Like you, I was a life-long listener and donater. I stopped both during the pandemic when I noticed NPR was playing the anger game, like every other outlet, for social media points.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Note: These are not NPR shows. They're merely shows that your (and most) local NPR affiliates purchased for broadcasting.
If you think your local affiliate doesn't have enough of these types of shows, let them know! Many local affiliates have wide discretion on the programming.
More details: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178640915/npr-stations-and-pub...
That seems like a pretty fine distinction. If nothing else, NPR makes decisions about which externally produced shows to license. In the end, NPR deserves all the credit / responsibility for what it broadcasts.
It reminds me of the distinction NPR makes (used to make?) between "advertising" and "underwriting". Maybe the distinction was relevant for some legal / regulatory things. But it wasn't relevant for e.g. discussions about whether or not they were subject to "advertiser" pressure on their content.
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Incidentally, it now occurs to me that HN is basically my current replacement. Even if I have zero interest in a linked topic, I’ll often find a comment or discussion that’s enlightening and furthers my perspective of something in a meaningful and positive way.
"25% of stories uplifting Black voices" etc.
It just seems so forced.
TBF I don't think NPR is really much different then most other mainstream lefty sources. I think axios is way worse than NPR (a lot of their "articles" are just vibes with really poor evidence, at least NPR still tries to do some traditional reporting).
God yes I hate it! I can listen for 20 minute and not walk away with a single fact or learn anything new.
It was so wrong, that I never listened to NPR since.
I don't know how to come up with good metrics for measuring that but I think currently all such articles are seriously bad because most don't even list their set of implicit assumptions concerning the costs that they are bothering to measure.
I wouldn't stop listening over that.
Does it "cost more" based on calories/dollar, or weight of food, or cooked-meals-per-dollar? (I'm not asking for an answer, thats what everyone below your comment has been arguing about I assume). Are cigarettes "just as addictive" as heroin? Well, it depends on how you measure/define _____. I keep seeing effort wasted in arguments that all point back to the "well, it depends on how you measure it", but to me, the arguments never actually get anywhere and nobody seems to realize that they are playing with movable goalposts.
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It often is. I can get a burger and fries at McDonalds for far less than the cost in ingredients to make it myself.
I mourn the loss. Living in a red area NPR was a much-needed breath of Fresh Air.
But yes, turning off the news from time to time is, in general, good for your health.
Wokeness is not popular with anybody.
20% of America is outraged, 60% is willing to give woke media a try as long is it’s entertaining and not too preachy, 15% gives extra points for “representation” but still wants a good story, and 5% thinks it doesn’t go far enough.
Part of this is generational.
In the workplace, I suspect “representation” is a proxy for age discrimination.
I’ve seen too many old white men pushed aside for much, much, much younger minorities.
Seems like thats happening at NPR.
Have these people not heard of office breakrooms existing outside of white-majority countries? I would bet that having food together in a communal setting is a team-building and fun activity throughout the world regardless of skin-color. Most likely, this was some young, introverted person who was uncomfortable being in a group and wanted to somehow bring in race into that to justify their viewpoint.
As someone who isn't white, this sort of coddling non-sense is simply infuriating. I do not want to be judged based on what I look like, and platforming/pushing these sort of views does exactly that.
They have become the very caricature of what right-wing news makes out liberals to be.
More than the staking a clear political position on the matter, it was the presumption and condescension that was the most off-putting. Far too often their pieces have adopted that tone. With the "right-thinking" guest or guests interviewed by the "right-thinking" host about a issue clearly the listener would agree with too... if they are "right-thinking."
However what's new is that as long as claims being made are of a certain type, they are not only accepted uncritically, but in fact trying to challenge them can be dangerous for your employment status. So essentially no one can call BS on their ideas because no dissent on these topics is allowed.
There's plenty of unsettling new reality, I'll give you that. And it should be reported on, even if it makes people uncomfortable.
But how is it reported on? There's a difference between "here's the economic reality of 20% of of the population" and "you should be outraged about the economy". And if you listen in order to analyze the way the story is told rather than to hear what the story is about, you can tell which is which fairly reliably.
Much of the left has gone from "we're going to report the stories that happen" to "we're going to report the things we think need to be reported, like poverty" (which is all right, as long as they also report the news), to "we're going to report things so as to make you become politically active on the side that we think you should". That last step is highly problematic. For one thing, once you're that blatantly a cheerleader for one side, can I trust that you're telling the truth about what you're reporting on, or are you distorting it out of all resemblance to reality?
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It's funny to me because their used to be a conservative take that liberals needed safe spaces to talk about all of this stuff, and when it's actually in the media people don't want to grapple with it. I would bet that the most vocal proponents of changing this dialogue lean conservative as well.
The issue is that the solution that is proposed to the problem is to have more attention to the problem. This result in a virtuous circle where things have to address the problem more and more. It does help address the problem though, it's not falling on deaf ears and it is educational.
This then becomes a kind of noise drowning out other signals. It's the signals that listeners want not the noise.
Is anything actually improved, do people benefit? I would say yes!!
But it's a move away from signal and information towards problem education and political or social messaging.
The virtuous circle can get reinforced by objections to the changes. Objections or "discomfort" are often proof that more changes need to be made. The signal is further reduced and those in change become blind in their virtue. Metrics in how good they are doing are perceived in terms of the messages that are put out not in quality productions. A kind of seige mentality makes it hard to determine the difference between criticism of the content or format and political objections of the added messaging to the content. Both positions become opposition and encourage more of the same.
To me, the change to add more unbiased views or thoughts from the other side seem artificial and miss the actual change in content. It makes things more political and less about life.
There are two separate critiques going on:
1. There is a lot of bias in the news coverage.
2. There is a lot more to a radio station than covering the state of the world (news, social issues, etc). There's stuff like entertainment, humor, etc.
A lot of people are arguing about 2 above.
There's always malnutrition somewhere in the world (and yes, in the US). But we don't criticize the existence of movie theaters.
That's true it's fucking amazing! It's so much better then any point in history it's hard to image how far we've come.
In all honesty, I never understood the appeal of NPR, and I've been consuming news all the time since I was in elementary school (I even got my elementary school library to get a weekly subscription for The Economist).
I love PBS, but NPR always felt like cultural commentary with no actual in depth reporting. NYT occasionally feels like that as well, but their track record has more than redeemed themselves.
I will say, though, PBS is generally better. I think Frontline is very consistently excellent.
This American Life is also pretty far left. It's still on my podcast list but I only listen when I run out of others. And then, 2 out of 3 times the story a race/identity piece and fast forward to the next part.
On the Media remains good. Their market show’s ok. I like Wait, Wait. That’s a complete list of their programs I’m still happy about listening to.
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
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Like most of the rest of the media, NPR is no longer liberal (in respect to protecting personal human rights, economic freedom, observable truth and government institutions) but rather Liberal causes (restricting speech against protected classes, skeptical of free markets, relative truths, tearing down government institutions).
Do you have a source for this? This is massive allegation you are giving, and can veer directly into disinformation.
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