NPR's science reporting has been abysmal for the past few years. Maybe they don't have the click-bait problem (debatable), but they routinely report everything one side of the political spectrum says as scientific fact. They also fall victim to the "experts say..." and "scientific consensus is..." tropes. Their "scientific expert" source list looks suspiciously like a group of the loudest voices on Twitter.
I say this as someone on that side of the political spectrum.
Twitter influence is now a not-insignificant leg up in faculty hiring and academic politics. It’s becoming really hard to take academic science seriously.
And yes it much more complicated - especially it also depends on how much outside pressure NEBR has. I think there is a large pressure not to declare recession since we still have a high inflation and feds needs to continue raising rates.
When the employment outlook changes, and I expect it will, we will be in a traditional recession.