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.
The group is composed of former National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, an economist and a historian, so you get diverse intellectual conservative perspectives.
National Review is further right but still pretty good.
there’s your problem, academia skews overwhelmingly leftist
This theory explains why there are not a lot of conservative academics or scientists. Those careers are often low earning and more for the public good, so are more cooperative overall (even if they might be quite cutthroat in their own way).
It also begs the question that perhaps studying something deeply enough to get a PhD leaves a person with a perspective that is less compatible with certain viewpoints. Also, lower taxes for a college professor probably would be a net negative, as their college would be getting less government funding.
I gave up working in the tech industry to pursue a PhD with the hopes of becoming a professor. Considering I research NLP, I could be making top dollar in industry, but have opted for the academia route. My family mostly don't understand and view the PhD as a diversion. Despite securing a postdoc at Cornell, they still ask me to reconsider working in industry so I can become rich and powerful, which they equate with fulfillment in life.
Says a lot about modern conservatisme doesnt it?
Lies and propaganda usualy lean right.
Not an ad, just a happy reader.
One thing I have noticed again and again since reading the news letter is how often the GOP and Dems just talk completely past each other. They will have their own talking points about an issue that shoot completely over the other talking points from the other side. Quite interesting to see it happen in near real time.
you won't find it, because there is none. it's ultimately "fuck you pay me", and it's a great deal if you're in the side saying "pay me". Or a rehash of the same Christian virtues that have have been repeated for centuries.
The point of conservative-ism is that it doesn't change. by definition you're not going to get expansion and growth and new.
They do it all:
1) libertarians accepting (reasonably) big government is good
https://www.niskanencenter.org/freedom-government-part-one/
2) why ideology and utopia should not be part of your vocabulary:
https://www.niskanencenter.org/public-policy-utopia/
3) arguments for conservative pro-welfare policy
https://www.niskanencenter.org/libertarians-conservatives-st...
https://time.com/6258610/niskanen-center-bipartisanship-thin...
4) Income guarantees (UBI) and means-testing
https://www.niskanencenter.org/guaranteed-income-for-the-21s...
5) their philosophy in a nutshell: the free market welfare state
https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-free-market-welfare-state...
Butnthe current conservative right is actively working to destroy thr Is, not making it run.
That's democrats and centrists that are trying to make the country work.
Look up the John Birch Society and George Wallace for example. National Review was able to discredit that similar level of discourse back in the day.
No offense, but I just don't see how I can believe you, to believe any statement like this in this technological era. When I felt the same way when I started becoming politically active in my teenage years two decades ago, I went to this cool not-actually-new thing called an internet search engine, looked up right-(and left)-wing thought leaders/authors, think tanks, columnists/commentators, university researchers and etc. These people, just like all other political persuasions of public intellectual, have made website pages, books, papers and journals, conferences and expos, broadcasts of roundtables and interviews, and introductory infotainment pieces specifically for people like you, all in every format and length you can imagine.
All of this at least hundreds of hours of content put together over time is either directly accessible online for free or as easily purchasable as any other product on the web today. If it is true that your teeth are falling out because of low vitamin c, it's because you keep trading the orange in your rations for more hardtack. They're not any more difficult to get than whatever else you're reading right now, you just choose to put something else into your url/search field whenever you are in the mood to read. Right-wing intellectuals even happen to have terms for this phenomenon: "Stated preference" and "revealed preference". You state that you'd prefer to read a balance of political media, but someone observing you would reveal you only ever put the thirty seconds of effort it takes to open media on your computer into material that echoes what you've already read in the past. They point out that, as someone with a stated preference is observed over and over to act differently than it, the odds that the stated preference is a better description of their general mentality due to experimental variation than the preference that seems to be revealed by the observation approaches zero.
If you ever change this preference, though, the mentioned thirty seconds of googling got me these pages of Wikipedia's articles on ideology and activism groups in the united states (where I live, since I don't know where you do) categotized by general philosophy [1] [2]. Whenever I want to know what some corner of the political landscape thinks about current events, I follow some of these articles to their orgs' home page and read their recent materials.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Political_advocacy_gr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Political_organizatio...
For example, I don't remember any overt politics at high school, but ours feeds a steady diet. Entertainment is another area.
These days, though, the social engineering seems front and center.
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.
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.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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/tom-cotton...
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...
Can NPR go too woke? Sure, anything is possible. And maybe they have on radio–I wouldn't know. It certainly doesn't seem to be that way from their website though.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/04/conserv...
Firstly, as they say themselves, their data is misleading because it's comparing with Feb 2020 which was the start of the COVID crisis. Of course news outlets are going to have less traffic in Feb 2024 vs Feb 2020. And although they start by saying there's a bloodbath specifically in right-wing publications, later they admit their dataset yields huge drops also for left-wing publications as well e.g. Slate and The Washington Post are both down ~40%.
Secondly, when they do a quick reality check by asking the owners of one of the sites whether the number for his site is true (a 90% drop!), he tells them it's "laughably inaccurate", feedback they then just ignore rather than trying to work out why there's disagreement.
And although the authors assert that the drop is worse on the right, they don't really show that with data.
They also point out that (assuming they effect they're talking about really does exist) it's probably driven by Facebook and Google manipulating their news feeds to suppress conservative news, not an actual drop in organic demand.
So I think the article can't lead to many conclusions about market strategy other than don't trust Facebook or Google, which everyone on the right knew already.
either we allow speculation and trust individual anecdotes or we don’t.
all i see is that yes, media across all political spectrums are seeing downturns. the rest of the speculation is just copium by people who believe they know more than insiders who have decades of experience and institutional knowledge.
No, but we don't need any for the main complaint of the "veteran editor": not that NPR loses listeners period, but that it specifically loses listeners from one side of the political spectrum much more.
So it's not about "why listeners leave?" as much as "why the listenership got as skewed?". For the latter question, "because there has been an increased liberal and Dem partisan and viewpoint bias" can both be factually verified, and seems like an adequate answer.
Are Christians not also listeners?
It sounds to me like you are disappointed that the liberal bubble isn’t as thick as it could be. That even accepting supporting money from the bad people is compromising.
It seems that you are implying that the sponsors of NPR get a say in their programming and reporting? Seems like that is the thing I would be upset about, not that the “wrong people” are supplying the money.
The Christian Science Monitor is a well-respected newspaper associated with the church. The few times I've read a paper copy, there was usually one editorial with a religious theme. Their religion did not otherwise color their reporting.
I am not the least bit suprised that the Christian Science church might support NPR. Demographically, Christian Science members probably have very high overlap with NPR listeners. And they are, after all, a church which is best known for being associated with a newspaper. I would not be the least bit surprised if they donate to NPR mostly because they want to support public radio.
They were founded by the same woman, Mary Baker Eddy, like a century ago, but today they just have one specifically-cited Christian Science article in each print.
It seems they may have the same owner still, but seems like they very much have editorial independence, judging by the things I read.
• 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)
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 listen to a lot of NPR podcasts and contribute to WHYY monthly but I don't think i ever tuned into WHYY, i don't even know the frequency they use :P
Reality is that all media is pretty much toast unless you're some big name like the NYT and this is really sad because i really love the NPR podcasts, but not sure how they can survive long term without the local radios.
I hope they survive though, hard to find content with the same quality and consistency elsewhere.
I agree that I really want NPR to thrive!
There probably is no org more emblematic of the backslide of journalism into “reporting facts, not taking perspectives” than NPR. They are simply craven, they have no perspective or spine, they stand for nothing, and that makes them instinctually repulsive. Like they literally are the journalists in movies who will happily say whatever their masters want this week. It’s disgusting, you might as well be VOA for all the perspective you’re getting.
Swapping Diane Rehm for JJ Johnson or whatever is emblematic of that change for example. Diane Rehm never let a guest gish-gallop unopposed etc, JJ just went into sputter mode and was like “I don’t think all of that is true but-“ and gets run over again on his own show etc. It’s just bad in an aggressively “it’s your right to feel that way but…” kinda milquetoast way. They stand for nothing and have no position or perspective. And I know that’s the new school of journalism today but jesus christ it’s pathetic to see in action.
What makes a man turn neutral? Unironically.
I'm sure its hard to compete with so many alternatives to the same content.
Also, the panelists only ever talk about their own identity group. Non-woke would be talking about other people's.
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] 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.
(Which, to be fair, they did in part because many early trade unions were openly and blatantly racist.)
Democrats took on race as an issue in the early 1960s, leading the Republican's 'Southern Strategy'. White blue collar workers only shifted to the GOP in the last 10 years, I think, especially for Trump.
That’s a weird way of framing a law that got only 60-40 support among democrats in Congress but 80-20 among republicans.
But it was more of a “Mad Men/Lucky Strikes” situation: https://youtu.be/8Nvf4BteCR4?si=snxZFKB1HmaljUmR. Once both parties supported the civil rights act, the had to campaign on different issues. Democrats turned to a more academic and activist view on race, focused on using government to undo the effects of past discrimination. Legal equality having been achieved, republicans turned to social and religious conservatism.
The more important piece of the puzzle is economics. In the 1950s, Ohio had a median income 57% higher than North Carolina. Illinois was 75% higher than Georgia. That gap started to close dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s, opening the door to republicans coming into the south on a pro-business and deregulation platform. It’s not a coincidence that nearly all of Toyota’s manufacturing facilities in the US except one are in what are now low regulation red states.
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/alab...
Except the switch didn’t happen until decades later. Virtually no Dixiecrat switched parties. And Carter won every southern state except Virginia in 1976. He did better in Alabama than in New York. Reagan and George H. W. Bush muddy the analysis because they won everywhere, including deep blue states. But Reagan did better in wealthier, more educated southern metro areas in the south than in presumably more racist rural areas. Clinton won a number of southern states in the 1990s. Republicans didn’t win a majority of southern congressional seats until 1994.
Apart from it making no sense to say Dixiecrats protested Democratic support for the civil rights act by switching to the party that not only supported it more, but supported all the previous civil rights acts, that narrative ignores the actual issues that mattered to voters in the 1980s and 1990s. Abortion, foreign policy (patriotism), and economic policy became defining issues during that time. And on all those fronts, ”new south” voters were more aligned with the Republican position.
Put differently, democrats support for segregation was keeping southern democrats in the party. It was preventing what would otherwise be ideological sorting of a voting bloc that was already more religious conservative, patriotic, and was benefiting economically from deregulation as industry moved from northern states to southern states.
> Many of these voters continued to oppose racial (and "legal") equality for many years, and in some cases are still do.
Nobody opposes legal equality. Many republicans oppose what we now call “equity”—taking race into account to produce racially even results. If you look at “racial resentment” tests, for example, the fundamental difference in attitudes that appears is that liberals have a special sympathy toward black people, while conservatives have equally unsympathetic attitudes towards everyone: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/renos/files/carneyenos.pdf.
Your Alabama example illustrates the point. Alabama is trying to draw a map favorable to republicans for the same reason Maryland draws a map favorable to democrats: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/mary.... Alabama isn’t trying to disadvantage black voters, just as Maryland isn’t trying to disadvantage white voters.
Possibly that's true now. It was quite different in the South 50 and 60 years ago. (I grew up mostly in the South during that time period: my USAF dad was stationed at different places there.) And as a South Asian, you likely would not have counted as "white" — maybe legally you would have been, but as a practical matter an awful lot of people would have treated you and your family as "colored."
If you think I’m the least bit phased by that: I had to defend my interracial marriage at a Bangladeshi wedding last year, in Canada. (And by that I mean I deflected about there not being any Bangladeshi girls in Chicago because we don’t make a scene about stuff like that.)
I have never met a white Republican remotely as racist as Indians, Bangladeshis, Arabs, Vietnamese, and Chinese people I’ve encountered.
So maybe even white Republicans are "woke" by comparison? :-)
PS do you mean "the least bit fazed"?
White republicans are, for the most part, non-racist. Once you establish points of commonality with them, they do not care or comment on what you look like.
What happens before you "establish those points of commonality"? Do they just unleash a constant stream of racial epithets at you?
Look, the reason you think Bangladeshis are racist and White Republicans are not is because other Bangladeshis are comfortable speaking freely about ethnicity/race in front of you, whereas White (and other) people are not.
I'm a Black man in an overwhelmingly White Republican part of the South and I have overheard disparaging comments very casually made (e.g. about the number of Indians who frequent our local Costco) when people thought it was "safe". I've also had a White Republican friend confide in me how absolutely racist the area we live in is, including some choice comments made by people we know in common.
And, surprise: I'd never directly experienced it, as they somehow elected not to share their racist attitudes with me, or speak of race at all in my presence. Indeed, they just "accepted" me.
>Woke people [...] categorize individuals based on race/ethnicity.
No. They just honestly acknowledge the undeniable reality that other people (and systems) do.
So, the reason you find their speaking the truth racist is because you're in absolute denial that anyone else is.
They do not. But establishing commonality is a predicate to relating to people. Anywhere you are in the world, you must make efforts to relate to people on their own terms. If you walk into a village in Bangladesh, you need to figure out how to relate to them. Nobody owes you acceptance. The onus is on you to show you belong.
> Look, the reason you think Bangladeshis are racist and White Republicans are not is because other Bangladeshis are comfortable speaking freely about ethnicity/race in front of you, whereas White (and other) people are not.
Which is a good thing! Liberal whites are way too comfortable talking about race.
> I'm a Black man in an overwhelmingly White Republican part of the South and I have overheard disparaging comments very casually made (e.g. about the number of Indians who frequent our local Costco) when people thought it was "safe". I've also had a White Republican friend confide in me how absolutely racist the area we live in is, including some choice comments made by people we know in common.
But do they treat you differently as an individual based on race? I think that’s the fundamental difference between how liberals and conservatives view race. To me, the only thing that matters is that you treat me as an individual without regard for race. And in my experience that’s true of white conservatives. I don’t care if people have abstract notions about people from Muslim countries if they’re able to treat me as an individual. And quite ironically, white conservatives are much better at that than white liberals.
I absolutely condemn anyone that would treat an individual differently based on race. And that’s why I think white liberals are wrong and must be defeated. But I do not think that people perceiving conflict between groups is equivalent to racism.
OTOH, if someone holds deeply racist beliefs, it's somehow not racist unless they direct racist words or behaviors explicitly and overtly at you personally.
In your world, racist ideas stay contained as long as they're never uttered in a personal interaction. They never influence networks, opportunities or systems. And, there's no legacy from centuries of codified racism with which to contend.
No. As long as we never mention race aloud in a personal interaction, then everything is OK.
It's...not very coherent or realistic.
The implication of your "absolute condemn[ation]" is that (supposedly) it's categorically impermissible to try to remedy generational impacts of past race-based adverse treatment. That sounds more than a little like "I'm alright, Jack" (which loosely translates from Brit-speak as, "I got mine, pull up the ladder").
I'm really curious what has caused you to feel that way.
We can be confident that when "woke white people" use the term "colored" today, their intent is very different than it generally was in the South of the 50s and 60s — and in not a few places today as well.
> Possibly that's true now
It's clearly not true: Acts of hate and discrimination are at highs; White nationalism and Christian nationalism are at multi-generational highs, with advocates in the White House and Congress. Leading news organizations promote replacement theory; laws openly discriminate against immigrants, liberals, and LGBTQ+ people.
Much of that is not done by and otherwise not uncommon in the Republican party.
Discrimination is at such historic lows that democrats have literally had to redefine terms like “racism” and “white supremacy.” In the 1990s that meant wearing a klan hood. Now it means opposing violent rioting. In terms of substantive policy, Donald Trump is literally to the left of where Bill Clinton was just a couple of decades ago. Possibly to the left of where Obama was when he was campaigning in 2008.
Because there is no meaningful opposition to legal equality, democrats have had to switch to policing thoughts and speech about race and gender and trying to socialize children into thinking about race and gender in certain ways. Look at how they react to Trump: they fixate on his lack of manners, not any particular policy. There’s no sweeping civil rights bill they support that he opposes. They don’t want to increase immigration, or give amnesty to illegal immigrants, or defund the police, or grant reparations, etc. (At least they won’t admit that publicly.) They simply don’t like how Trump talks about immigrants, crime, etc.
The truth is much easier - easier to think about, much easier to support, easier to work with. I hope you'll consider joining us on the bright side - it's a much more fulfilling life and people desparately need you.
The “post-truth” idea is that of a “racist” country is what’s being peddled by white people on NPR. It’s bigger, more significant, and more fundamental than Trump’s “big lie” about the election.
I don’t know about the bright side, but I’m on the right side. I grew up in, from my perception, a society where racial classifications didn’t matter. Instead of trying to extend that to everyone, white liberals are now trying to reimpose racial categories on my kids. They’re fighting for the legal right to discriminate against Asians. All out of some warped sense that it’s 1963 again. Like soldiers coming out of their trenches not knowing the war has ended.
I’m not optimistic. They command so much power in our institutions that I think when all is said and done, they will have poisoned a generation of kids into seeing race and racism where it doesn’t exist.
The South was solidly blue from the end of Reconstruction. A literal contiguous blue block in every single election from 1880-1948; sometimes the only blue states on the map. https://www.businessinsider.com/united-states-map-presidenti...
The defection was a messy period between 1948-1980. Following desegregation of the armed forces in 1948, the "States Rights Democratic Party" candidate for president carried 4 states against the Democrats and Republicans on a segregationist platform. In the next 10 elections Southern states defected several times from the mainline Democratic party candidates for segregation-friendly candidates -- sometimes to Republicans (Goldwater) but also to other third-party candidates (George Wallace, "American Independence Party") or to blue-dog Dems who weren't even running (eg Byrd).
By 1980 the South was solidly red; sometimes the only red states on the map. (At the national level. The transition was slower at state level and curious artifacts still remain today.)
To recap: Solid blue south from 1880-1948. Clear defection in 1848-1980. Solid red south from 1980-present. The defection was clearly led by segregationists leaving the Democratic party.
It's true that segregation lost support over time, and that Republicans drew lines to avoid becoming the party of segregation per se, and that other things were happening. In 1968 former Democrat George Wallace won the South with a brand-new third party, but he had had verbally moderated from "segregation now, segregation forever" in 1963 to leading his 1968 platform with "As this great nation searched vainly for leadership while beset by riots, minority group rebellions, domestic disorders..." [1] Wallace tried to run as Goldwater's Republican VP, but was rejected as too racist for the Republican party. Wallace's platform wasn't just race dog-whistles; it also listed student protests, war, taxes, etc.
Still, for the most part, the parent comment marshals technical truths to obscure the historical arc. It's true that segregationists wouldn't defect to the candidate that supports civil rights more; by 1980 this does not describe Republican candidates. It's true that most segregationists not change their local party affiliation; they did start voting against national Democratic candidates, and eventually for Republican candidates. Carter and Clinton are irrelevant to this historical arc.
By 1980, Republicans had lured white Southerners from the Democratic party (for president). They did so with a platform and candidates that reflected Southern racial attitudes, which were not segregationist by 1980. (The Democrats won the South with a segregationist platform from 1880-1948.) People can argue about the centrality of Republican appeals to the South across various axes, but there is a flawless historical record about the centrality of desegregation in ending the Democratic solid south, and it's not an accident that the Republicans are the modern party of "Total And Complete Shutdown Of Muslim [Immigration]" etc. Racial politics are a thing in the world, a thing in the US, and a thing in the D/R divide in every era.
[1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/american-independe...
> That’s a weird way of framing
It's not weird; it's conventional political history retold over and over.
But they didn’t—the 1976 map looked like the “solid south” with Carter winning every southern state except Virginia. In 1980, Reagan won Alabama like he did New York. But Carter won most of the rural parts of the state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidentia.... Carter did better in Alabama in 1980 than he did in New York.
> That’s a weird way of framing It's not weird; it's conventional political history retold over and over.
Told by who to who? It’s a self-serving narrative told by liberals to liberals that doesn’t work timing-wise and ignores the much more important effect of economic changes.
Long-term changes in voting patterns don't happen in one election, and they're a multi-variate phenomenon. In 1976, Carter was the incumbent, a Southerner himself, and a beneficiary of the Watergate fallout and the Nixon pardon. Reportedly, his own pollster "Patrick Caddell stated that televisions ads by the Carter campaign in the south 'were blatant-waving the bloody rebel flag'. To avoid being viewed as a liberal in the south Carter campaigned with [George] Wallace and voice[d] opposition to welfare and support for balanced budgets and national defense. He also campaigned with segregationist senators James Eastland and John C. Stennis." [1]
Before that, in 1964, Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act, and in that year's presidential race, he carried the Deep South, less Florida with its New York retirees, plus his home state of Arizona — and that was it. Previously, the South had been solidly Democratic since Reconstruction (except for war-hero Ike).
In 1968, "segregation forever" third-party candidate George Wallace carried most of the Deep South.
The 1972 election pitted the supposed peacenik Democratic candidate George McGovern against incumbent Nixon.
In 1980, Reagan famously announced his support for "states' rights" and excoriated "welfare queens," both of which of course were dog whistles to Southern segregationists. [2]
[0] https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/x-o9qAO_oEEC?hl=en&gb...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#1976_electio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#Reagan's_Nes...
I’m going to start with this point first because it’s the problem with the whole line of thinking. Democrats use the notion of “dog whistling” to brand Republican policies racist based on the premise that republicans are racist. But their support for that latter assertion is that republicans support supposedly racist policies. The reasoning is completely circular (and unfalsifiable).
Republicans opposed the creation of the welfare state in the 1930s when pro-segregation democrats introduced welfare programs. They likewise opposed the expansion of federal government at the expense of the states by vicious racists like Woodrow Wilson. So what are we to infer from Republicans’ continued support of the same policies before and after democrats abandoned their support for segregation?
To circle back to your first point, why would LBJ fear losing the south? Why would southern racist democrats switch to the party that had supported the civil rights act even more strongly? That’s like Muslims switching to the GOP because they’re mad at Biden for his support of Israel.
They offer plenty of evidence, and so do the Republicans themselves, some of whom openly embrace white nationalism, Christian nationalism, replacement theory, etc. Openly defying convention and saying racist things is commonplace and cliche. Going back further, someone in this thread even quoted the interview about school busing.
Because the GOP — having had their electoral asses whipped for decades, looking for a way back into power, and with the John Birch Society and Liberty Lobby crowd (backed by ultra-rich folks wanting tax cuts) looking for a seat at the party's table — started espousing "conservative" positions and dog-whistling to the racists.
In essence, the GOP said, "OK, southerners, we get it that YOU don't like what we've been offering for years, and WE don't like that we keep losing elections, so we'll start offering what YOU like."
Once again: Life isn't a snapshot or freeze-frame, it's a movie. The Dems used to be the party of racism and the GOP the party of freedom and equal opportunity; over time, the parties switched roles.
A lot of it is race, Democrats started essentially calling all White people racist, i.e. blaming all white people for generational racism. Tons of people who were not racist did not appreciate that - personally I believe it's why Hillary lost, her "basket of deplorables" comment lost her a lot voters.
"All that you need to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues that he's campaigned on since 1964, and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster. ... You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968, you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner."
I would say that the present state of the Republican party is very much in line with that, except that race didn't ever truly come onto the back-burner; somehow they're still talking about "those people" all the time.
So, Republicans are the party of white people who are proud that they are white (and annoyed that they can't show their pride openly anymore), while Democrats are the party of white people who feel guilty about it (and annoy everyone else by trying to make everyone aware of how badly they feel about it).
He's "not" saying that, and then he goes and says that.
He's point being that Republicans are most concerned with economic things, but because he things a better economic policy hurts blacks, therefor Republican are racist?
Or, maybe, they just want a better economic policy, and they don't view everything through the lens of race? (i.e. color blind) While Democrats in contrast do view every decision through that lens.
> somehow they're still talking about "those people" all the time.
And "they" being Democrats or Republicans? Because I see Democrats talking about race far more than Republicans.
Your last sentence tells me you view everything through the lens of race, but not everyone does that.
And no, I don't view everything through the lens of race, and I think that American progressives often end up looking very silly when they try to shoehorn it everywhere. At the same time, it's very obvious from just looking at the American political discourse that racially driven thinking is very pervasive there even when it's not openly mentioned.
I've also heard plenty of explicit racial talk from Republicans - it just happens in environments where they don't need to check themselves. One of my hobbies is guns; my gun collection is well into the double digits, and includes plenty of stuff that'd be referred to as "weapons of war" in your typical progressive publication. Consequently, I spend a fair bit of time in the associated community, which, of course, leans very heavily to the right. And because of my guns, they often automatically assume that I am politically of the same mind as them, and talk to me and around me without the usual checks. What I can tell you I've heard the word "nigger" thrown around quite a bit in those circles, today - but it is okay, you see, because "it just means bad people, so it's not really racist". Some other choice wording includes "those animals" referring to Hispanic immigrants, or "those things" referring to trans folk.
That seems very hard to reconcile with Donald Trump, overwhelmingly popular party leader, as well as many, many other Republicans who express hatred to contempt and create legalized discrimination against many groups, LGBTQ+ people and immigrants for example.
Much of the same criticisms can be leveled at leading democrats. What they once championed they no longer do and have radically shifted multiple core positions.
The “uni parties” are covered in filth and it benefits them for us to be at each other throats like it was some sports ball game.
I often see people blame Reagan for things he didn't do. For example Airline Deregulation has been making the rounds recently, blaming Reagan, that happened in 1978, Carter-D, several years before Regan became president. Did he deregulate a lot? Sure, but not everything. I am of no appreciation for Reagan (I identify as an Eisenhower/Rockefeller Centrist-Republican), but I like to put blame where blame is due.
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
Not a shred of its contents were ever disproven, but much was corroborated.
It's only "uninteresting" if you exclusively follow NPR, I think.
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.
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.
Then widespread internet and social media happened, which shortly led people into echo chambers while simultaneously gutting the institution of journalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots
“the most destructive period of local unrest in U.S. history”
What? All joking aside, what the Fuck?
Rodney King. LA riots. NAFTA protests. Branch Davidians. Presidential sex scandals. First desert storm. Political correctness. Women's movements. Bosnia et.al. Rwanda. HIV/AIDS epidemic. Ruby Ridge. Wage stagnation. The final death of small town commerce due to Wal-Marts.
And these are just the things I thought of in the last minute. I'm sure there are a ton more issues I'm missing.
The people you talk to are doing what people have done since the beginning of time. They're remembering the past fondly while forgetting the bad.
I’ll note this though: I think the people who do this don’t really identify as “white.” It’s become a class marker. Your plumber is “white.” NPR listeners aren’t “white.”
NPR listeners aren't white? What are you trying to say here?
My theory is that NPR listeners no longer really identify with the label “white.” They might acknowledge the label applies to them. But when they complain about “white people” they are referring to other white people.
Much better than whatever activist garbage we have now.
Not surprising, a lot of profitable rackets depend on those issues remaining unsolved. What would e.g. all the homelessness experts do, who collect billions annually to hold conferences where they agree with each other on settler-colonialism and the newest genders, if they were to actually solve homelessness?
Climate change is being solved, but it's being solved through technological innovation, not masturbatory discourse.
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?
It’s just not interesting or newsworthy.
I think that's interesting and newsworthy. Maybe because we know it already it seems obvious, but a younger generation might not understand how deeply enmeshed the military-industrial complex was (and to some extent still is) in academia.
Okay, but is it an okay topic for a history podcast like the one sobellian was apparently listening to?
> You know, the most disturbing part of the history of AI for me comes from the fact that these men who were working in artificial intelligence looked at those massive, noisy, hot mainframe computers and saw themselves in it. They looked at them and identified a deep affinity that there was something fundamentally shared between their minds and these machines.
> White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.
> I think underneath all of that arrogance and hubris is a real lack of faith in people.
> And what I have always found so shocking about the Turing test is that it reduces intelligence to telling a convincing lie, to putting on the performance of being something that you're not.
> ...And in effect, replace God with science?
To me, it felt as if the piece was dripping with contempt for people that actually started the work on the basis that they were nerds with the wrong identity.
To every extent, I would counter. It's incredibly rare that a person is currently involved in STEM research at a university and some sort of US Military grant isn't providing at least some amount of funding to it/them.
My university for one allowed students to view comprehensive data about grants provided to research groups (after much internal campaigning), but absolutely refused allowing that data to be accessed by the general public. The reason was obvious when you looked at the data: 70%+ of the bucks came directly from various militaries.
It would be nice if instead of harping on this point they actually told what they think the missing story is.
If they think that AI is missing certain kinds of thinking - by all means tell me what they are concretely. Like i don't know if i buy that lack of diversity in earlier AI research meant that the AI research only allowed certain kind of "thinking" (AI doesn't really match anybody's thinking regardless of race), but i would be interested in a well researched argument that it did and what those other kinds of thinking are.
I think the problem fundamentally is that these stories tend to be platitudes (lack of diversity = bad) but don't actually go deep into what that concretely means. Ultimately i want something that makes me think about the topic in new ways; you need to dig beyond the surface to do that.
You, a person that already knows about this, will never get that from a short segment on a public radio show intended for a general audience that knows next to nothing about it.
It is intended to make that audience think about it differently, because they have not even bothered to think critically about this at a surface level.
The fact that these models (along with every structure in any society) embeds the biases of those that designed them seems to continue to elude so many commenters here though, so it seems they really need to keep hearing this too.
Also, the models embeds the biases of all the people who create content on the Internet. The designers biases come in to l look at with the prompt hacks put in place later to prevent the AI from expressing bad thoughts.
It must be exhausting thinking like this all the time.
In 2024, they are simply a reflection of what modern liberalism has become.
The 2005 version of David Sedaris would practically be considered "right wing" in 2024.
Critical theory and intersectionality have come to dominate all liberal discourse to the level of farce. NPR is just a mirror.
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.
I’m pretty sure more recent polls show the same thing is true now but I can’t find something more recent so take that with a grain of salt.
Think of one of the 17% of people polled who think 50% of America is black. First, it’s baffling to me to understand how that’s even possible. They must be living in an extreme bubble where they seldom interact with other races. Likely this isn’t even their fault, so how would they ever know to correct it?
Second, if I was one of those people, I would probably think the US is hopelessly racist seeing white people “over-represented” in basically every area of life.
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
I can tell you that from my own life experience and what I can recall, it has certainly felt like a shift in content. All the anti-white stuff, the social justice stuff, the pro-censorship stuff, etc. It existed before in tiny bubbles like Tumblr, but it was during the mid 2010s that the major news sources started adopting those viewpoints too.
It's suspicious to me that they went for the hockey stick curve to demonstrate their complaint rather than adjusted for the number of articles that they are sampling from.
It's actually making my exact point that "diversity and inclusion" were mentioned in 0 articles in the 1990s. I'm saying that this is a relevant thing to more than 0% of the population, so there should be representation of that accordingly. And now that we have more articles talking about it, it seems reasonable that some percentage of news articles (above 0) would be discuss these topics.
What is the proper number of people to be killed by the police that we shouldn't worry about it? (hint: don't answer this question) The fact that people think the number is more than it actually is feels pretty moot when the number is more than zero. It's also more as a percentage of police killings than one would expect if we were just talking about police incompetence. If this has improved in the years since, then I think that's probably a good thing? Hot take, In general I think the police killing fewer people is a good thing.
I wish we could stop making everything into a war and fight and just let things speak for themselves. Show don’t tell.
Lately I have been working in DEI committees to better understand. I believe in helping the poor and marginalized but having officially reviewed equity theory I feel a bit disgusted with myself.
But I guess that's exactly what an LLM would say, isn't it?
The parts of it that are under-discussed are the parts they're still not discussing. The unsolved parts are unsolved as a result of bipartisan unwillingness to solve them.
Example: Historical racism caused black people to lack the generational wealth to own a home. The solution to this is to make home ownership more affordable, i.e. to build more housing and bring down the market price of buying a home. But many of the existing homeowners, who don't want home prices to become more affordable, are Democrats, so this problem is unsolved even in areas like San Francisco under 100% Democratic control.
Example: Parents want their kids to attend schools with smart kids so the other students aren't disruptive and don't require the teacher to slow the pace of the class. The solution to this is to put kids of similar intelligence in the same class, which also helps smart minority students who can get in based on test scores rather than money. But then affluent parents with disruptive or less intelligent kids don't get into the smart class, so they prefer solutions where the metric is parental income (e.g. ability to afford a home in the "good" school district) rather than test scores, and then get to feel good about themselves because even though this result is even worse for poor minority students, they can point to the statistics that minority students from poor backgrounds have lower test scores as a reason to refuse to use test scores and wrap their self-interest in the flag of anti-racism. Then many of those parents are Democrats, and moreover the alternate solution where you break up the "income buys a good school district" system would be things like school vouchers, which are opposed by public school teachers unions because they allow non-affluent parents to choose a private school if it's better, and those unions are a Democratic constituency. So again the problem goes unsolved, even in areas controlled by the people who claim to want to solve it.
So these aren't the problems they spend most of their time talking about, because that would be goring the wrong ox. Instead they talk about identity politics and historical circumstance which cannot be solved because they are just abstract ideas and empty rhetoric instead of anything attached to a reasonable policy proposal that might actually do some good.
Sure.. but.. does it lead to problems actually being fixed?
Maybe the "statute of limitations" for these things should be long - not to mention the idea that racism wasn't magically fixed by ending slavery and the "owning" you mention. You don't think anyone was actively racist and causing harm 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 50? So if person Y's grandparent was harmed by, say, person X's racist grandparent in the 1950s, and that caused person Y's family to suffer for generations compared to what likely would've happened otherwise, and that's leading to ongoing societal harms, it could be legitimate public policy interest to try to even out opportunity.
Of course, this hasn't actually changed in the last few decades - terms like "equal opportunity" and "affirimative action" have those words in their very name.
But certain interests have made very successful pushes in the past few decades to brand policies under those umbrellas as "actually the real racism", or paint everyone supporting them as "actually trying to guarantee equality of outcome," while continuing to beat the very-old drum of "people being worse off implies worse ability, it's just science" which couples oh-so-very-nicely with the more active forms of denying people opportunity that hardly ended in the 1960s.
In fact, how far back do you even take this? Should we also hold the people of the modern-day Republic of Benin responsible for what their ancestors, the Kingdom of Dahomey, did, which was abducting and selling their African brothers for a bit of cash?
To address your other point, if my grandfather did something to hurt your grandfather in the 1950s, and it's been 70+ years and the only thing your family has figured out how to do since then is complain about how some guy was mean to your ancestor that one time, and that life is so unfair and you're so oppressed because of it, the issue may not be my grandfather, it may just be your family and their victimhood mindset. It feels good to "be oppressed" and have personal responsibility taken away, because when it's always someone else's fault, it can never be yours.
> I was giving a lecture on genealogy and reparations in Amite, Louisiana, when I met Mae Louise Walls Miller. Mae walked in after the lecture was over, demanding to speak with me. She walked up, looked me in the eye, and stated, “I didn’t get my freedom until 1963.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/437573/blacks-were-enslaved-...
It's an unspeakable evil. The "statute of limitations" on sins of the fathers is "until atonement".
Even today, there's plenty of forced labor and sex slaves that exist in the USA. That doesn't mean it's an active systemic issue of oppression, it just means that bad people do bad things when they can get away with it, in spite of a system to stop it.
We shouldn't hold people who didn't do bad things accountable for the actions of people who have done bad things. I don't think that's a radical idea.
The problem comes when it’s the ONLY topic of discussion. Inflation is only relevant in how it impacts minorities. COVID is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Climate change is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Quality of schools is only relevant as it impacts minorities.
When it’s your only lens, it can distort your views, and in the case of NPR, caused them to get some stories wrong. Which then destroys your credibility which is really the only currency a journalist has.
I think in general being able to have these conversations means that we can progress slowly. It's tough recently, cause we've definitely regressed a lot. It would definitely help if the internet weren't effective at telling us only what we want to hear. I guess, in general I think the problem is we aren't actually able to progress discussions.
So my original wording "pick up where we left off" was wrong. We can already do that, we just can't move on from there. I think if we can figure out how to do that without hitting each other then maybe the problems would get fixed.
My impression is that a huge portion of identity politics and coverage is more about picking fights where each side can feel smug and superior, rather than actually changing things for the better.
Broadly speaking, it's the study of how law and media impacts society's view and treatment of others through the lens of race.
As for my opinion on it:
I generally support it because it advocates for another mechanism to study the impact of law.
I think most legislation should be regularly studied for impact, effectiveness, and fairness. For example, stimulus bills ought to be reviewed for economic impact, regulation ought to be reviewed for effectiveness/relevance, laws with social impact ought to be reviewed to ensure it doesn't harm the people.
A number of scholars seem to adopt a blameless mentality to figure out how laws (even unintentionally) have negative impact, and use that to propose solutions. I admire this approach to legislative critique.
While I think a few ideas some scholars advocate for are infeasible to implement, the broader field has a lot of merit.
compare to Car Talk - a show that entertains you and teaches you about engineering. different value propositions of these two things
Heh. If you tune into the AM band you'll hear plenty of guys "discuss race." It'll make you fear for the species, but still.
For everyone downvoting, I'd be interested in the proportion of articles that discuss race as a percentage of total articles. If the number is more than the number of black people in America, I'd be willing to consider that we've "overcorrected". But a quick search around the web isn't yielding any clear results on this to me.
Almost all the conservative media outlets and all their pundits do simply because the whole topic has been an arms race for years. Conservatives are finally attempting to sway the popular narrative that race and identity politics are the only thing that determines your future.
They often discuss race within the context of identity politics and the far-left idea that "all white people are racist" versus their notion that race doesn't determine who you are, how smart you are and how successful you can become.
Its the age old philosophical idea of determinism vs. free will
This probably describes a single-digit percentage of the people who produce content on NPR. They know the two or three black people who hung out in their circles in the elite colleges they went to, and only stay in contact with zero to one of them. They pretend to know every famous black person they met at a dinner party, or a conference; there are probably 100 black professors, writers, and entertainers that a million or two white NPR-Americans are pretending to be friends with.
Black wealth peaked in 1997. NPR supplies itself from the most elite circles in American society, who largely control its wealth. They're not actually concerned, they're consistently using race as a cudgel to attack other white people for their own purposes.
Come on, they're about as diverse as America itself is: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179803822/people-at-npr
In fact, Black people are proportionally overrepresented relative to the U.S. population at NPR, while Hispanics are underrepresented.
Sunday morning's Weekend Edition host, Ayesha Rascoe, is a Black woman. Unfortunately they lost Audie Cornish, also a Black woman, from All Things Considered. She was great.
I do think it's fair to argue that NPR is far more liberal than it ever was, and Uri Beliner's inside story provides some credence to that. But that's different from being "white." (Keep in mind that the vast majority of Trump voters are white and would bristle at NPR's news programming; support by non-whites is relatively low.)
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://thenewpaper.co - sends you a daily text message with a short, concise daily news report that is sufficient to be aware of anything major.
https://www.boringreport.org - aggregates news stories on a particular subject from various outlets and produces AI-generated summaries of them with all the clickbaity headlines and other forms of button-pushing removed.
She then gave a TED Talk that contains some slippery equivocations about truth, includes the inevitable climate-change jibe, and states the contradiction: "we all have different truths" (she uses the phrase 'personal truth' instead of 'subjective opinion' )...
https://singjupost.com/what-wikipedia-teaches-us-about-balan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?hidebots=1&hidecategoriza...
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=feedr...
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.
I think it's more like: In the end, your local NPR station deserves credit/responsibility for what it broadcasts. Not all of the shows they broadcast are NPR shows. There's PRI, for example.
The other thing is that sometimes there are multiple NPR options that could be presented.
EDIT: I checked the schedule of my local NPR station:
The morning/afternoon schedule:
- Morning Edition (NPR)
- On Point (seems to be NPR out of WBUR)
- Here and Now (also NPR out of WBUR - I actually think this one is generally pretty good)
- Think Out Loud (local production of OPB - really good local interview show, the guy is an excellent interviewer, I wouldn't be surprised if he gets moved up to the national level at some point)
- BBC Newshour (BBC, of course)
- The World (PRI - actually a really informative program about events outside the US)
- All Things Considered (NPR)
- Today Explained (VOX podcast)
- Marketplace (APM - informative business show)
But NPR doesn't broadcast anything - your local affiliate does. And they have complete discretion on whether to broadcast anything NPR gives them.
NPR's own Terry Gross has described Car Talk in these exact words, "an NPR show".[0] A large part of NPR's mission is distributing shows produced by local affiliates, and no doubt they exercise significant editorial discretion in determining which shows to distribute. For the purposes of this discussion, who cares if a show is produced directly by NPR, or if it is produced by another organizaton using NPR's money and then distributed by NPR?
It's interesting that you invoke Terry Gross as being part of NPR, when NPR actually says otherwise:
> Several programs that NPR distributes are produced by NPR Member Stations, not NPR. These include top-rated news and cultural programs such as Fresh Air with host Terry Gross from WHYY...
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178640915/npr-stations-and-pub...
NPR shows are things like All Things Considered. Car Talk was produced by an independent affiliate (just like Fresh Air). Yes, I am distinguishing between the two.
If NPR doesn't consider Fresh Air to be an "NPR show", then nor do they consider Car Talk to be an NPR show.
There's a difference between these and things like TV shows. Stuff like The Simpsons is actually a FOX show (as in whatever company makes them is owned by Fox). Whereas NPR never "owned" Car Talk, just as they don't currently "own" Fresh Air. These shows can always choose not to be part of NPR syndication. It's ultimately a licensing deal. They do own All Things Considered.
Fresh Air's X handle is @nprfreshair, and you want to tell me it's not an NPR show?
More importantly: how is any of this possibly relevant to the original conversation?
They also explicitly say that it is not produced by NPR.
It's not an NPR show in the sense that when the licensing deal expires, Fresh Air can choose not to be syndicated on NPR. It's an independent show that licenses itself to NPR. A show like All Things Considered has no such freedom.
> More importantly: how is any of this possibly relevant to the original conversation?
The original conversation was about how one can influence their local affiliate to change their programming, until someone came and nitpicked about whether NPR owns Car Talk or not.
> Car talk is a production of Dewey Cheetah Howe and WBUR in Boston. And even though NPR staffers pass through the stages of denial anger depression and acceptance then go back to denial again whenever they hear us say it this is NPR.
https://youtu.be/1ExBaSRyXEM?si=mszTKyvWhrOU2Ezg&t=3180
> Car talk is a production of Dewey Cheetah Howe and WBUR in Boston. And even though hearing aid salesmen are consumed by guilt whenever they hear us say it this is NPR.
How much less NPR can it be when the hosts say at the end "This is NPR"?
Dewey, Cheatum & Howe. It's a joke name like Sillius Soddus or Biggus Dickus.
https://www.cartalk.com/content/history-car-talk
> Nine months after starting with Susan, in the fall of 1987, NPR agreed to launch "Car Talk" nationally. So there we were, following in the footsteps of award programs like "All Things Considered," "Weekend Edition," and "Morning Edition." We, like you, remain entirely mystified and have no idea what combination of prescription medicines brought about a decision like this out of NPR's management. We can only assume that they were looking for some cultural diversity, trying somehow to balance their high quality programming with crud like ours. Stations turned to us in droves - much in the same way that lemmings flock to the sea.
> We discovered pretty quickly that producing a national radio show is a lot of work! Shortly after going national, we decided we needed a staff. That way, our afternoon naps could continue uninterrupted and, when not napping, we could still pursue our CAFE study. (Don't confuse this with the government's Corporate Average Fuel Economy report. Ours is about latte and cappucino in the greater metropolitan Boston area.) So, in 1989, we founded Dewey, Cheatem and Howe.
https://www.npr.org/people/2100834/tom-and-ray-magliozzi
In 1977, Tom and Ray were invited to the studios of NPR member station WBUR in Boston, along with other area mechanics, to discuss car repair. Tom accepted the invitation, and when he was invited back the following week, he asked, "Can I bring my brother, Ray?" The rest, as they say, is history. The Magliozzis were subsequently given their own weekly program, Car Talk, which soon attracted a large local following.
In January 1987, then host Susan Stamberg asked Tom and Ray to be weekly contributors to NPR's Weekend Edition and on October 31, 1987, Car Talk premiered as a national program, presented by NPR.
...
Car Talk is produced for NPR by Dewey, Cheetham & Howe and WBUR in Boston. Doug Berman is the Executive Producer.
---
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510208/car-talk
> The Best of Car Talk From NPR
> What are you going to do if two NPR hosts proclaim that you are so friendless you have to hang a porkchop around your neck just to get the dog to play with you? And what if those heartless hosts were your very own uncles? Find out on this episode of the Best of Car Talk.
That's listed under https://www.npr.org/podcasts/organizations/s1 which is "NPR Podcasts & Shows" with "NPR" in the top left corner of the icon.
If you go to Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/7y4fsFiHniACpBxFbvYKzY - this is from NPR and not On The Media (which I also listen to on a public radio station) https://open.spotify.com/show/3ge9HkAgzE1PP6193I1Vet and in https://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538775/on-the-media it is listed in a different organization ( https://www.npr.org/podcasts/organizations/s552 ).
Source: Wikipedia
I'm laughing at everyone trying to split hairs over Car Talk in this thread. Most long-running programming on PBS were all "locally produced".
And I would split hairs with PBS as well :-)
As I mentioned in a sibling post, NPR shows are things like "All Things Considered". Stuff like "Fresh Air" and Car Talk are not considered as NPR shows - not even by NPR themselves.
So when NPR themselves[1] refer to it as "NPR's Car Talk" in official copy, you're saying that is horseshit? You should write to NPR and let them know they are wrong.
Also this:
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2014/11/03/357428287/tom-magliozzi-popul...
Believe it or not, Fox News' viewership is much more diverse than NPR's. NPR fails dramatically by the standards of diversity that they hold everyone else to. It makes sense that they now cater exclusively to self-hating white people, since that's the only market they have left after years of declines in programming quality.
Programming is still available in podcasts and elsewhere.
Like, seriously, do you think Latin people came up with the term "Latinx"? This strain of self-hating progressivism has been predominantly white for-ev-er
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.
To contrast, the FT used to have good comments (and still does on really obscure topics) but overall they've gone massively downhill because of the lack of decent norms around thoughtful conversation.
Good! USA politics are so ridiculous and toxic, it's better to have a place that's free of all that garbage. However, I don't agree that these discussions get "shut down": I see Americans posting their libertarian, gun-fetish stuff here all the time.
The same crowd has now migrated to ActivityPub. You can find them there still acting the same way today.
"25% of stories uplifting Black voices" etc.
It just seems so forced.
I have started reading the piece by Uri now and it basically confirms what I was imagining.
"He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission"
"Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system."
Pretty much guaranteed that they were trying to hit race/gender quotas.
If NPR wants actual diversity (of opinion), they should consider tracking the political affiliation of the people they interview in their database. But in my experience, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) never seems to include a diversity of political views. I find that very suspicious.
I think it’s quite on the nose for organisations to cater to that community explicitly. And the wider population is far more diverse than that.
Diversity is implemented in a strangely homogenous way where there is only one monoculture. One correct, diverse way to run such an organisation.
Most of their reporting does have a left bias, and of course opinion even more so.
But they do have some serious, thoughtful conservatives in their opinion pages. Like David French and Ross Douthat. And they have reported on controversial issues like the dangers of medically transitioning minors. David Leonhardt points out the places where conservative arguments have facts on their side, like how closing schools during Covid for so long greatly damaged learning outcomes and was a bad decision overall.
It eliminates blind spots that come from only considering views confirming an ideology and thus getting important stories wrong.
Some of their editorials are nutz but many, on both the left and the right, are exemplars of journalism.
I think publications like Unherd, Compact, and of course Taki's Mag have their fingers closer to the pulse. I don't endorse the contents and can't even vouch for the quality of the writing, but it's not an ideological dead-end in the way the NYT, Atlantic, and National Review are.
Those other publications do indeed have their fingers on the pulse of the dominant populist faction on the right, just like their progressive counterparts have their finger on the pulse of the populist left. But those aren't the only (or in my view, at all) interesting things to read about.
It's fine (good, even, IMO) that you disagree with conservatives (I do as well), but that doesn't mean they don't exist. The "normal people" that you've met, or that I've met, are not a good sample of the range of political viewpoints that exist.
The people who voted for Reagan and HW Bush and John McCain - who was way more popular than any current Republican leader, and put up a strong showing against Barack Obama, the most popular politician of our era - and Mitt Romney haven't all died or joined Trump's weird and actually pretty tiny cult of personality. They're still out there stewing about what has happened to the Republican party.
You do a serious disservice to David French by including him in the same boat as Ross Douthat. Mr. French does often post thoughtful pieces from a conservative viewpoint, but most of what I’ve read from Mr. Douthat is quite the opposite.
Indeed, most of what I’ve read from Mr. Douthat is just a thinly-veiled sermon that paints “liberals” as one-dimensional characters that (along with our whole society) just need to find god. A conservative catholic god, specifically.
Really, he’s a religion columnist masquerading as political commentator. And not a particularly good one, at that.
David French, though, is a decent writer.
Check out the Matter of Opinion podcast. Douthat is very comfortable engaging in give and take with liberals who have very different views. He presents orthodox Catholic opinions yes, but he’s intelligent enough to understand what’s a good or a bad argument.
My other problem is that I just find his writing and rhetoric to be very weak.
Balance isn't positive or useful when it shifts things further one direction, especially when there's such a massive shift.
It’s hard to find a thoughtful full on Trump supporter, because his “arguments” don’t lend themselves to thoughtful reflection or analysis.
Trumpism believes in nothing but suborning yourself to Trump's will and needs. Sure there's some vague isolationism and xenophobia, and some pandering to Christian nationalism, but the only consistent policy position is fielty to Trump. That's why there aren't any interesting Trumpist pundits. The House is twisting itself in knots right now because they can't decide what he wants or will tolerate regarding Ukraine funding. A real party with a policy would have an articulatable agenda, probably with some dissenters on this or that, but all the current Republican party can agree on is how great dear leader is, and Democrats are bad.
Some opinions are not worth entertaining. If NPR were broadcasting the rantings of flat earthers, Sasquatch hunters, and anti-vax weirdos, it may be entertaining but it wouldn’t be news.
Also: the reason DEI initiatives ignore “diversity of political views” is because that is not a trait you are born with.
Its a balancing act. Like every balancing act, you can fail on both sides - by being too open minded (and believing Alex Jones or whatever), or by being too closed minded.
I think if you live in a country where half of the population has some particular view of the world, you're being a bad democratic citizen if you don't take the time to understand that point of view.
I think its much healthier when news sources actively struggle against the pressure to be an echo chamber. And be self aware enough to know their own biases & make them clear to their readers. I also like hearing the reasonable arguments against their position: "We endorse candidate A, but here are some reasonable criticisms of A that their opponents bring up."
The Economist does this. Other commenters in this thread mention the New York Times does this. Generally, I want to follow journalists who know more about the topic than I do, and can help me see a bigger picture.
Is that true? You're born from your parents[0]. I don't think it's actually much of an important distinction that you would have different socialization if you were adopted. Younger LGBTQ/NB people don't agree with this nearly as much as they used to, for instance. Several of those groups are just things you decide to do.
[0] as the vice president said: https://twitter.com/brownskinthem/status/1712665740069724184
Surely you can see the difference between airing the view that it's reasonable and expected for the modern IRS to have significantly fewer employees per capita than they did before the advent of computers, and airing the view that autism is caused by Lizardmen.
Computers can do audits and litigate cases now?
The vast majority of the contemporary debate revolves around the defunding of the IRS's legal team and their ability to hire external council, and the observed fact that they have been pursuing less and less tax cases over time against large companies in particular.
there's a number of reasonable "defund the IRS" arguments I could entertain, such is "tax collection is bad", but the idea that computers simply means the cuts in IRS employees is "reasonable and expected" just ain't so. The cuts were directly agitated for by lobbying groups like CEETA, of which Microsoft is a member, Microsoft having a massive pending IRS tax case.
The other side of this coin is that every time the IRS audits anyone, they have to incur significant uncompensated costs to deal with the audit even if they've done nothing wrong. Anyone subjected to this obviously and reasonably is not going to like it, and allowing the government to convert all of the efficiency gains from computerization into more staff to impose those costs on innocent people is not inherently the right thing to do.
> The vast majority of the contemporary debate revolves around the defunding of the IRS's legal team and their ability to hire external council, and the observed fact that they have been pursuing less and less tax cases over time against large companies in particular.
How many staff they have and who they target with those resources are two separate issues.
> the idea that computers simply means the cuts in IRS employees is "reasonable and expected" just ain't so.
If they had N employees doing audits and M employees doing clerical work, and now computers mean they only need 10% as many employees to do clerical work, it is completely reasonable to say that they should now be able to do the same work as before with 10% as many clerical employees because that is what happened.
They may be two separate issues, but they are two interconnected issues, as with limited legal resources its more profitable to audit average people than to audit the wealthy who can evidently hold you up in court for decades, whereas with more legal resources there's more of an incentive to go after the high-hanging fruit since you'll already have the low-hanging fruit covered and have exhausted their resources already.
Suppose the IRS can audit a thousand small businesses and they recover more from this than their own costs. But at the same time most of the small businesses are innocent, and the audits collectively cost them several times as much as the IRS "profits". This is not a socially beneficial undertaking because the net costs across society exceed the net benefits, even if it has higher margins to the IRS than auditing large companies.
If you specifically want the IRS to target large companies then you can have them do that regardless of whether the margin of that to the IRS is less lucrative than the behavior that imposes more uncompensated costs on smaller businesses.
It's not really all that hard to earmark a certain amount of IRS funds to only go after companies over XX size. I think this is actually essential under neoliberalism because one of the fatal flaws of neoliberalism is giving large companies more wealth & power and then expecting to be able to tax that back to fund the welfare state, which generally falls on its face as you've just given large companies all the wealth and power in the world to stop that from even happening. If neoliberalism is to survive as a political ideology and for us to not end up adopting socialism (which is bureaucratic and corrupt and inefficient), it's sort of essential that organisations like the IRS have a decent amount of power and for them to direct that power at large institutions.
So is every other society in history. I'm sure ancient Greeks were convinced that they had it all figured out, too.
Fish don't have a word for water. Spend a significant part of your life immersed in a society with a radically different worldview, and it'll be very clear just how arbitrary team blue/red complaints about bias are.
You don't actually want unbiased reporting. It would be either useless, or make you extremely uncomfortable all the time. You're just unhappy that it's got the wrong bias.
For example, would the same people who say "we focus too much on race" view Desantis's policies and opinions as "race neutral"?
No, it starts from the position that race is not the most important facet of a human being's life.
> So without intention you'll simply perpetuate the negative voices.
Almost none of a person's daily life is dominated by racial issues, except maybe people who specifically work in that field of course, and so very little news would have racial relevance. Going out of your way to use race as a lens on every issue is why it's forced.
I can't say race "dominates" my daily life -- but as a matter of politics it probably ranks #2 after issues directly related to income (mostly taxes). And I can confidently say that almost all of the negative in-person interactions I've had in my life have almost exclusively been because of race.
Why do you think racial politics works so well? Why do Black women align more strongly with racial causes than gender causes? Is it because gender issues aren't really important? Do you think that if there was less identity politics that things would actually be better for minorities? Or would it mostly be better for the majority?
That said, I don't discount the impact that both implicit and explicit racism can have. I just think it's important to take a more holistic view rather than falling back on identity as the main causal factor.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/us/slavery-black-immigran...
[2]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2007/03/18/black-immigrants-c...
[3]: https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2021-10/the_a...
[4]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-inheritance-of-black-...
[5]: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2020/07/black-women-...
I'm sure it does for many, but the question is why does it rank that high? Is it because it materially affects your life, or because of other qualitative, personal reasons that don't have much material impact? You just said that material impact ranks higher than race (eg. income, taxes), so do you think race has a higher material impact on you than foreign policy, or education policy?
> And I can confidently say that almost all of the negative in-person interactions I've had in my life have almost exclusively been because of race.
I'm genuinely curious whether you think a white person in your place would not have had most of the same negative experiences, all else being equal. You said "almost all", so if we put that at 80%, do you really think white people in your same circumstances (education, socioeconomic status, etc.) have only 20% of the negative interactions you experience? Doesn't that seem a bit implausible?
Isn't it also plausible that at least some of those people were already angry at you for other reasons, and then used racial insults because they knew it would anger you in return? Also a shitty thing to do, but it's meaningfully different to say that you had a negative interaction caused by your race, as opposed to a racist insult caused by a negative interaction.
> Why do you think racial politics works so well?
Because human beings are tribal and love defining in-groups for solidarity and blaming out-groups for their problems, justified or not.
> Why do Black women align more strongly with racial causes than gender causes? Is it because gender issues aren't really important?
Yes, most gender issues these days are relatively unimportant compared to historical norms, and shared culture defines in-groups more strongly than gender.
> Do you think that if there was less identity politics that things would actually be better for minorities? Or would it mostly be better for the majority?
I think this is a false dichotomy at the core of identity politics. The most significant objective group that materially impacts literally everyone is class, and identity politics is an excellent tool for destroying class unity. Power intentionally amplifies identity politics to play on people's tribal instincts for exactly this reason.
Probably so. At least more day-to-day. At the extremes I imagine foreign policy could be huge (if we go to war with China, for example), but even the war with Ukraine/Russia has had little impact on my day-to-day life (that I've noticed).
> I'm genuinely curious whether you think a white person in your place would not have had most of the same negative experiences
Probably not. And to be clear, these aren't small day to day interactions. But major negative interactions I've had in my life. From being put up for adoption because my birth-moms family didn't want her to have a black child (I have this directly from my birth grandmother), to being picked on as the only black kid in my class, to having my fiancée say that her family won't come to our wedding due to race (never got married, so won't know if they'd follow through or not -- but it put an extra strain on the relationship that didn't help).
And these are selected examples where race was explicitly noted as the reason. There's also a bunch where race wasn't noted, but I have strong suspicions. And while this makes me cautious, it doesn't make me disengage because most day-to-day interactions with people are tend toward quite positive.
> Because human beings are tribal and love defining in-groups for solidarity and blaming out-groups for their problems, justified or not.
These tribes are social constructs, as it applies to identity politics. But you're ignoring the fact that real politics have been used against the out-groups. Whether it was slavery, internment camps, home loans, segregation, medical care, etc... Sure you can say, "their just constructed tribes", but when one tribe has used this construct to great advantage -- it won't go unnoticed. And I'm unclear if you're saying it should be ignored or that the advantage gained doesn't exist.
What's an example of a race-based policy that has been or you think can be realistically enacted that has had or should/will have material benefits?
> From being put up for adoption because my birth-moms family didn't want her to have a black child (I have this directly from my birth grandmother), to being picked on as the only black kid in my class, to having my fiancée say that her family won't come to our wedding due to race (never got married, so won't know if they'd follow through or not -- but it put an extra strain on the relationship that didn't help).
That all sucks and I don't at all doubt that such people still exist, but I'm confused how you think race-based politics would help. To recap, you said that race issues are #2 in your political priorities after material/economic issues, ostensibly because of experiences like this, so what sort of municipal, state or federal policies or laws could be enacted that would help?
> But you're ignoring the fact that real politics have been used against the out-groups.
If identity politics have been used against out-groups, I'm skeptical that you can fix it by doubling down on identity politics in some "opposite" direction.
> And I'm unclear if you're saying it should be ignored or that the advantage gained doesn't exist.
Depends what you mean by "ignored", but to be clear I've been saying a few things:
1. identity politics is a pseudo-zero sum game and divides people who should unite against the people with the actual power.
2. class politics is materially more important than identity politics.
3. groups that have been disproportionately disadvantaged by identity politics, as you point out, are also disproportionately advantaged by a focus on class politics, and this has been born out by studies on the economic impacts of class-focused policies vs. identity-focused policies.
You don't have to ignore history to ally with someone against a common foe.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Act is an example. Affirmative Action is another example that I have mixed feelings on, but an example nevertheless. Other examples include things like access to voting, typically at a state level.
> but I'm confused how you think race-based politics would help.
Those were personal interactions meant to show where the underpinnings for where racial identity comes from. I don't think there's a policy that would fix those things.
> If identity politics have been used against out-groups, I'm skeptical that you can fix it by doubling down on identity politics in some "opposite" direction.
It's been the only thing that has worked so far. Slavery didn't stop because people suddenly forgot about identity. But rather because there were people who fought against it. The "opposite direction" doesn't mean being "equally racist", but rather not being racist AND mitigating against leverage created by past racism.
> groups that have been disproportionately disadvantaged by identity politics, as you point out, are also disproportionately advantaged by a focus on class politics,
The problem is that once this association is known the in-group fights these class policies too, even if it would've helped them. Aka, Drained Pool Politics. Welfare is a common example of this. Or even healthcare reform. Public school funding another. And if you're not aware of the underlying reason for this it'll be exceptionally frustrating because it will seem like they're going against their own interest.
I won't presume to know your race but many americans do not live with such comfort. Studies have documented how race is correlated to outcomes in everyday encounters such as traffic stops, employment interviews, rental applications, health care treatment, and school performance.
Traffic stops, employment interviews, rental applications, and health care treatment are not events a single person experiences every day, so even if race was a huge factor in all of them, and "huge" is debatable, this is all besides the point.
Really? You don't think the outcomes from those events impact your everyday life?
The long game has always been to take some contentious minority status and make it boring and commonplace. An example where you can see the success of the LGBT movement in real time is how "coming out" for gay folks is fading away because it's not some big deal most places anymore. Saying you like girls is trending towards the moral gravity of saying you prefer chocolate ice cream.
And how we got to this point is by making sexual orientation a lens on lots of different issues — gay marriage, sodomy laws, public indecency, access to prep, blood donations, aids treatments,... until people just start to consider their existence by default. You stop having to "advocate" for them.
And in an ironic twist of fate one of the largest contributing factors to lgbt acceptance happening so fast was huge amounts of marketing pushing pretty white people, specifically pretty white femme women as the least offensive gays to raise all ships with the tide. Once you see it you can't unsee it, the same playbook is happening with the trans folks with pretty white trans women and afab enbys.
Unless the person has done something worth mentioning that isn't being mentioned only because of their so called "identity" I've zero interest in hearing about it, and would consider such a discussion to be bordering on racist.
For example, one interviewee in the trump reelection campaign said they talk a lot internally about obstruction. And so, the campaign has lined up a bunch of politically aligned people ahead of time to take over key departments in the US government if trump gets re-elected, so trump can change a lot of government policies on day 1. I find that fascinating. No matter your politics, it’s interesting to know that the “opposing parties, taking turns governing in different ways” angle seems to be getting stronger.
Hearing from people I don’t have the opportunity to understand in daily life is exactly what I listen to podcasts like this for. I’m glad this coverage exists.
And calling it a "right-wing extremist goal" is bizarre. As far as insulting names for political parties go, it's only extreme in being extremely mild. Is colloquially calling the British Conservative and Unionist Party "The Tory Party" also heinous?
Edit: And my typo of "democrats" as "drmocrats" clearly reveals I'm in on the vicious plot of persecution via zero impact phraseology! Probably getting a check straight from the Kochs, even.
Well, I disagree with that.
I just said NPR specifically focuses too much on identity politics, and I think Desantis is implementing anti-LGBT, anti-education, anti-freedom and anti-democracy legislation.
I dont support the dichotomy that one must either desire an abundance of identity-based journalism or be blind to the issues minorities face. I think many of the problems this country faces, which may disproportionately affect minorities, can be covered without it being race-based. Poverty, healthcare, education, environment, climate change, foreign policy affect all.
It’s part of the reason polls show some minority voters shifting towards Trump. They don’t see their opinions and beliefs reflected in white progressivism, even with the surface emphasis on DEI.
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.
If you think all of that is too boring to tolerate, then scrounge up a can opener and the possibilities explode.
There never seems to be any good way to share my thoughts and get meaningful engagement. I was not suggesting fast food is cheap.
I blog about food somewhat frequently. It has no traction and likely never will have traction, much less engagement.
Sometimes I say a thing on hn and it gets some kind of useful engagement.
I understand your inference given the context, but you are replying to stuff I didn't comment on at all.
I wouldn't stop listening over that.
Example: A quarter lb with cheese at McD
Average price at a US McDonald's, $6.65: https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/how-much-mcdonalds-quarte...
Average price according to USDA for home cooked: $2.17 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
Fast food is typically much more expensive than home cooked from scratch and people have very confused ideas about this.
The economics all look great- about 10-30% cheaper for raw costs- except that the articles also include costs to prepare the meal (time cost, resource cost of fuel) and cleanup (time cost and often more garbage/cleanup).
also, the article that were published were mostly published about a decade ago, when the prices for fast food were a lot lower. This changed in the past few years as fast food prices went up a lot, even more than inflation on basic goods.
I typically don't include citations because nobody is here on hacker news to argue about the finer details of academic studies that carefully control for all the factors, and most of us don't have the time and inclination to read the studies in details to see where the problem lie. Instead, we build generalized models of the world that incorporate a great deal of different data and use those to explain our observations to others. My own model is based on 30+ years of shopping and preparing my own food at home, as well as working in fast food (MCDonald's), talking to franchise owners (always an interesting perspective into how McDonald's works), and regular restaurants.
Note: I live in California, a state with a different economic distribution than any other state in the country (with New York and Texas being the closest comparable states in terms of wealth distribution, relative prices of groceries and fast food, amounts of transportation required to obtain food, etc). Some people I know hunt for their own food- they enjoy the sport and it produces enough meat for a family to eat in a year! Obviously, that's a case where fast food isn't really cheaper.
My local McD's: $6.39 My local Safeway (not a budget option, no sales, you can do better than all of this): 1 1/4 lb beef patty $1.69, 1 slice cheddar cheese $0.37, 1 hamburger buns $0.22 = $2.28, misc condiments are negligible but let's say $0.25 total = $2.53
That's less than half the cost. The time and resources cost of frying that patty in a skillet and throwing it on a bun with cheese and ketchup comes nowhere close to doubling that, it's not even close.
That's what I mean by "fully loaded"- when economists compare things like this, they don't just take the published dollar costs in a single location and compare them. They made a best-effort good-faith attempt at considering all the other costs which lead to a consumer making a decision.
Also, fast food prices shot up in the past few years, faster than grocery prices. Most of the articles about this were written about 10-15 years ago.
I understand what you are trying to say about "fully loaded cost". It's also wrong. The fully loaded cost is still much lower for home vs fast. Unless you insist that you really desire specifically something like deep fried french fries, a specific cooking method that is extremely scalable and well suited to restaurant production and very inconvenient at home. But it is emphatically not true that a meal of similar ingredients/macro nutrition (burger and potato) is in general ever cheaper in fast food form.
If you want to promote the myth that fast food is cheaper, you should cite any other source than that you vaguely remember there being articles 10-15 years ago.
Something is wrong, then, because I have to go all the way back to my place to put it on a bun and put things on it and eat it. I don't have to make that commute with fast food.
You two aren't arguing about which is cheaper; you're arguing about which externalities you're willing to ignore.
However, I really don't think that's the general case people are thinking of when trying to argue that it makes some kind of economic sense for people to eat a fast food diet. The average person does go home at some point, especially so for families.
Or more specifically, it's the claim "I can't go to the grocery store and make this meal for less than a fast food meal", that is absurd.
Love this! So many arguments boil down to exactly this!
I often eschew eating out because it takes too long.
> What about cleanup?
Put it on the floor and let the dog lick it clean.
You don't clean as you go? Your area should be clean before and after your work.
But maybe my proficiency comes from starting at a Chinese restaurant at the tender age of 15, back in the 1990s.
Hamburgers for a family of five with a counter-top mise en place...
Place five buns opened up on a large cutting board (1 minute tops). Squirt your bottled condiments on the buns (1 minute tops). Hand-rip your lettuce, five servings, place on buns (3 minutes tops). Slice tomato rounds for each burger (3 minutes I guess if your knife skills are really bad). Take ground beef and hand-form five patties (5 minutes tops). Cook all five patties at once in a large pan or whatever you use (10 minutes tops - smash them if you want them well done or done fast). Spatula out the patties onto the buns and you've got burgers.
Shouldn't take more than 20 or so minutes really and I even left the cooking part for last so as to not complicate things. What you should really be doing is cooking the burgers WHILE you set up the buns. Personally I could go from all those ingredients sitting visibly in a fridge to five burgers ready to serve in about 10 minutes.
Maybe what we have here with you and with many others in America is just a lack of food knowledge. Home food culture used to be all there was before fast food. Those traditions are lost and everyone's skill in preparing meals at home as atrophied over decades.
I mean I get that there's no more Nana in the kitchen makin the sauce and both parents work but there's so many easy, quick meals that can be made for very cheap if people simply acquired the knowledge and practiced. You don't wanna eat those fast food patties anyways they're probably like half fake with fraudulent filler material or whatever. It's hard to even recreate that lab-researched frankenfood.
This is exactly what's happening. This is why I find it so upsetting to hear a source like NPR mindlessly repeating the myth that fast food is cheaper. People have gotten totally out of touch with basic home economics type stuff and the food industry is all too happy for them to stay in the dark.
Cooking at home is just stupendously cheaper. I don't understand how anyone can claim otherwise. I made the switch 3 years ago and the impact on budget was phenomenal.
Are those menu costs or paid costs?
McDonald's has moved to a model where you get the app and it has valuable coupons that take like 30% off the price that renew every day. Which is part of why the menu costs have gone up.
But the exact same thing applies to the grocery prices I quoted. I gave the non-sale prices from my area's more expensive grocery store, that's what I consider the starting point, you can definitely do better.
Not to dispute your point that grocery stores also have a lot of coupons and promotions and it’s definitely cheaper than fast food (also grocery store food has even cheaper options like beans, rice, canned goods etc that may not be equivalent to a fast food meal but are vastly cheaper and may not take any real time or effort to prepare).
So because a contractor makes 500 an hour every burger they make costs 500 dollars. Yeah that sounds plausible. They should be maximalising their economic output and leaving menial labor to others.
Fast food bulk-buys, prepares at industrial scale, and automates as much as possible. It's going to be hard to fight against that level of volume discounting.
Anyway, as long as we're throwing random cost factors into the air, fast food has much bigger labor, utilities, and real estate costs that their food prices have to cover. And individuals can do pretty well buying bulk if they put in the effort. But we talked about effort already. It's definitely not going to be simple if you want to fully quantify all the tradeoffs, but if you just count dollars, well, there's a pretty wide spread of effort levels where you can beat fast food.
I've worked fast food and grocery stores - the only time a grocery store is more expensive is when you go 100% brand name goods, and even then the price difference in total is a couple bucks.
look at the website Efficiency Is Everything. Your 'factually verified' has been debunked in like 100 different fast food studies.
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.
If you're feeding one person, I don't know that it's that much cheaper to get stuff from the grocery store compared to just eating Taco Bell every day. If you're feeding 5-6 people, it's absolutely cheaper; I can make two large pizzas at home to feed 6 people for like $8.
Also, where are you finding $3 Happy Meals in the US?
[1] Probably not literally true, but more or less how I think about it.
For example, I don’t buy milk anymore since I do not remember the last time I have finished a carton. I keep some powdered stuff around because I sometimes use it for cooking, but I don’t buy liquid milk anymore. If I did need liquid milk, I would probably end up buying the smallest quantity of milk available to minimize waste, but they would probably be a much higher per-ounce cost.
That’s what I mean about it scaling logarithmically. If you can buy a higher quantity the prices get much cheaper.
In reality, these ragebait articles are written by young people (guessing young men) who have no experience cooking for a family.
$4 for 2lb ground beef
$3 for 10lb russett potatoes
$4 for four apples
$4 for a 52oz jug of OJ
$18 total for ~8 "Happy Meal equivalents", or $2.25 per meal, so less than the actual Happy Meal, but you need 1. $20 cash to buy the supplies and 2. the time/equipment/knowledge to prepare the meals.
Yes, the headlines are rage-bait, but fast food is still ridiculously inexpensive. Yes, you ca reproduce the fast food at home, or live on rice+beans, for less. But add some quality protein and a pile of fresh veg and the price goes up.
The rest of your numbers are similarly off: - you are giving each happy meal 1.25 lbs of potato!? - apple serving size is 1.2 ozs - An average apple is 8-10 ozs, 4 apples = 26 happy meals minimum.
You realize how expensive fast food is if you are at all used to cooking at home from scratch all the time.
But cooking from scratch all the time has a time cost, too. Many families are time poor as well as money poor so there's a balancing act to be done.
For the burger example: buying pre-formed burger patties is still massively cheaper. Throwing a pre-formed burger patty from your fridge in a pan and putting it on a bun with a slice of cheese will take you ten minutes. Microwave small potatoes while you fry. You are done. There is no prep, you have made 1 easily washed pan and bowl for potatoes and your plate.
Is it the exact same thing taste-wise as your fast food meal? No, the potatoes aren't fried, sorry. Does it hit all the macro nutrients for far cheaper, and probably less time than even going to the fast food place? Yes.
Tots > Fries
So $1.30 if you buy the food yourself and make it all at home from scratch. Add $.70 for a cheap toy and you have a happy meal (McDonald's buys toys in bulk - you can't get toys for that price unless you are buying thousands)
Above prices are what I'd pay at my local higher priced grocery store online - I can get better deals at other stores but they don't have a good online prices to look up.
Most of the toys these days are cards, but you don't need to buy in that much bulk: https://www.orientaltrading.com/toys-games-and-novelties/nov...
The first one has 144 mini skateboards for 20 cents each.
To your second point: This is where exact apples to apples comparison breaks down. The sane home cook skips deep frying at home and associated hassles unless it's a special occasion. Microwave the potatoes or boil. Fast, minimal cleanup, and now it isn't junk food either.
It takes me about 7 minutes to fry a hamburger patty on my Griddle (to rare!), ignoring the heat-up time and clean-up time. The actual cooking is quite fast. On the other hand, I can end up waiting an hour in line at In-and-Out. So while I agree that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, the economics articles I've seen that compare bsed on fully loaded costs (to the best that they can) seem to conclude that fast food can be about 10-20% cheaper than grocery.
well, akshually... https://www.fda.gov/food/process-contaminants-food/acrylamid...
however the main concern with fried potatoes is cardiovascular, not cancerogenic.
The story of frying and cardio is still ongoing; I've seen several full reversals in the public health field over the past 30 years. It's really painful being a quantitative physical biologist watching the press around papers that when carefully inspected provide little to no evidence supporting their position.
Right, because people who don't have money/time to cook real food are definitely doing that. Besides, deep frying is not the only way to cook potatoes.
Not anymore. I just checked, a hamburger happy meal at the McD's nearest to my house (i.e. not an abnormally expensive location such as an airport) is $4.49. Extra $0.20 to add cheese. This is for a 1/10 lb hamburger (!). As others have pointed out, I think it's very possible to acquire the ingredients for this for less than that, assuming you can buy enough for 3-4 at once.
It’s still pretty cheap if you get whatever’s the best option from the deals and freebies they offer in the app, rather than buying whatever you want off the menu.
Yes, I used their app. I have kids so I know happy meals used to be crazy cheap. They've gone up substantially in price in the past 3 years.
We used to get McDonald's once in a while as a quick, cheap meal that our kids liked. At some point within the past year or so I realized that it's not actually cheap anymore - I think they've raised their prices more than many competitors. IMO, they are now roughly at the same prices as some much more appealing options, so we don't really go there anymore.
I see a lot of single-happy-meal deals, but few for multiple, so that’s kinda been our go-to instead. Gotta go with what the app wants you to get. I much preferred when the menu prices were just pretty-good all the time…
I don’t think you can make that assumption. For someone living alone, that burger from McD’s may well be cheaper than the equivalent made from supermarket ingredients. When I used to live alone, I stopped buying salad ingredients because they would usually go off in the fridge before I used them all. It was cheaper to eat out.
Frozen pizzas can be had for as low as like $3.50 if you get them on sale, and since they keep forever in the freezer there's no reason not to stock up at that point...
I lived not-quite-exclusively on frozen pizza when I lived alone for about a year. It wasn't healthy for me, but it was pretty cheap living, at least in the short term.
So yeah, usually I’d buy salad ingredients, make one salad (or veggie sandwich or something). Then a week later I would take a look in the fridge and notice my ingredients had gone bad. I did this several times before I gave up.
As noted elsewhere, I’m an empty nester. Cooking for two adults, both of whom are athletic and celiac, so my perception of what’s cheap is WAY skewed. We eat lots of fish, chicken, and fresh produce.
It often is. I can get a burger and fries at McDonalds for far less than the cost in ingredients to make it myself.
But, in no case would I say it costs more than $3.50 to make a quarter pounder with cheese at home. I'm also assuming the ingredients McDonald's uses are not better than even the cheapest ingredients for sale at an okay grocery store, so I'm just giving them that advantage to make it possible to compare.
The current price of a quarter pounder with cheese at McDonald's looks to be $6.22[1]. So, let's call it twice as expensive.
I didn't even bother estimating the cost of making french fries after that, since there's no way they make up the difference.
[1]https://mcdonaldsprices.com/mcdonalds-prices/
I do not, for the record, doubt that some menu items at McDonald's cost less for them to produce and sell than the equivalent would cost to make at home. I would be VERY surprised if it cost less in the long run to buy all your meals at McDonald's versus making food yourself at home. Even buying ingredients in bulk, McDonald's does have a lot of overhead to pay for and profit to make.
Buy a big package of hamburger buns and put it in the freezer if you must; it'll be fine for a while there. Thaw as you go when you want a burger: bread thaws in no time. Buy a large package of ground beef, super cheap, and segment it, re-wrap it, freeze it in amounts you know you will use when it is thawed. Want a burg? Water-thaw the meat, air-thaw the bun. Pickles are pickles and are always ready. Pre-made condiments last forever. Pull from your evolving collection of veggies OR make sure you swiped some toms and lettuce or whatever on your way home along with other ingredients for further meals because that's called planning ahead.
There, cheapest burgers you can possibly have, and better than fankenfood. It's just... organization.
Can a particular fast food meal be cheaper than some similar grocery store meal? Yes.
Is a fast food meal cheaper that the maximum cheapness calories per dollar than everything you can get at a grocery store? No.
Will people who hear it hear the second or the first?
Definitely unambiguously the first unless they're the ones trying to "well acshually" it. At the point of the second you're not even talking about burgers - the maximum cheapness calories per dollar is a five gallon jug of corn syrup or something.
It boggles my mind anyone can think that fast food is cheaper than grocery store food for the dollar. Its basically on the level of flat earthers to me.
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.
Like you, I attribute a lot of that to social media. I left Twitter and Facebook a few years ago and my outlook on life got much better. I want my news to be balanced. Not all positive or all negative. I want to be pandered to sometimes, and sometimes challenged on my world views. So I found sources that would give me that.
I totally agree with your comment - you media diet is pure choice. Make it a healthy diet for you.
I'll call bullshit (what is it about a thread on the media that so often necessitates this?).
I don't have an objective measure for shittiness, but in terms of the bleakness of public perception of the world I feel more confident in making a comment: forty years ago, The Day After had just aired.
OTOH for someone who lived in a world where a full-on nuclear exchange was not considered a serious possibility for decades, suddenly facing this possibility for the first time in their life, panic should be the expected response.
People weren’t walking around refusing to be teenagers because look at this terrible world we live in. This combination of sanctimonious, depressed, and boring probably hasn’t been seen on this continent since the 1700s in New England.
Are you for real. They invented moping around.
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?
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.
If the complaint is about #2, then I don't see it in these NPR shows. So I'm assuming they must be talking about #1. OR, they're complaining cause not all of the newscasters are white (they sampled Garrison Keillor, and the Car Talk guys as their examples)? Either way, feels like more of a problem the listener is grappling with than a problem with the actual content, to me.
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.
I guess we can call it then. This is good enough. No reason to improve from here.
We should definitely just live with a perpetual war in the middle east. That seems fine. World Hunger is good enough. Racism is more or less solved. At least it's solved enough for my purposes as a white guy. Climate change will probably be fine as it is.
I'm sorry but "this is better than it's ever been" is less of a defense of the current time period, and more of an indictment of human history.
No one in the ME was killing each other as effectively as they are now. That's a way things are demonstrably worse than "there was war a millenia ago."
I also don't think it's fair to say that the ME has been in a "perpetual war for millenia." Was the ME at war during the crusades? Or was Europe conducting Sieges on them.
As for outside invasions, the same thing has happened to almost every area of the world. Often multiple times. The Middle East is hardly unique in that regard.
“bias” only exists relative to a desired result. There is no such thing as “unbiased”.
(Also, and closely related, LLM’s reproduce the biases of those creating them, and the more control we have over LLM’s, the more closely they will do so.)
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.
Yeah, neither are really news-focused, more human-interest stories or deep dives into newer tech.
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.
I guess "the nominally-funded by public grants in amounts about two orders of magnitude down from total funding" doesn't have the same rhetorical sizzle.
And it's not "ignoring" people to realize that those who choose Truth Social or Newsmax maybe just don't want what NPR does, let alone other reasons why it might be a poor idea to chase those listeners.
If you think the so-called democracy we have now is acceptable, you've got pretty low standards in my opinion.
Will this one also? Have I once again (for the third time) picked up an ambitious anti-fan? ;)
So how do you keep everyone happy in a case like that? Well, you can't.
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.
The article specifically says partner television stations and apparently some sold their lists to Republican campaigns too ("including the 1996 presidential campaign of Sen. Bob Dole").
Your initial statement "NPR that sold it's subscriber list to the Democratic party" doesn't appear to be correct at all if this was the end of the story.
Assuming you meant "CPB" and "sold" here, no, it wasn't.
> cPB was behind the TV stations, PBS and NPr.
You'll have to be a lot more specific about what "behind" means here, though, because your entire (mis)recollection is based on it.
There's no interpretation of these events in which NPR sold anything, though.
Imo, you can't really compare NPR in 1999 with NPR in 2024 - almost everyone who was senior in the organization back then will have already retired 15-20 years ago, and their funding structure today is much more donor and advertiser driven than it ever was in the 1990s.
Trust comes more easily for individuals / news organizations / political groups when we're all more focused on the framing of arguments on their own merits, with less focus on the in-groups/out-groups of who those arguments are against or who they are supporting.
Also the source doesn't back up the claim at all. The linked article:
1. Isn't about NPR. It was about some affiliate Corporation for Public Broadcasting TV stations.
2. Points out it wasn't exclusive about selling to democrat campaigns. As mentioned in the article, Bob Dole's campaign was involved.
Regardless, know you know. And knowing is half the battle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#:~:text=NPR%20receives%20a....
> National Public Radio, Inc. (“NPR Inc.”) a nonprofit membership corporation incorporated in 1970 following passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, as amended
> [American Coalition for Public Radio, a wholly-owned subsidiary,] supports the educational mission of publicly funded, noncommercial, educational radio stations, networks, and systems (collectively, “Public Radio”) [...] aims to secure robust federal funding
One can register some legitimate disappointment in a "national public" radio organization, breathed into law by Congress, turning into something rather nakedly partisan. That only 1% of revenues come from tax dollars has little to do with that part.
[0]: https://media.npr.org/documents/about/statements/fy2023/Nati...
If the public creates something but doesn't fund it very well, that thing has to go out and find other kind of funding, which means they have to sing for their supper. This will most definitely influence their content and reporting, because otherwise they simply don't get to exist at all.
$210mm of $323mm, or roughly two thirds, of 2023 expenses incurred by NPR were for employee compensation and benefits. $58mm of the compensation were unrelated to content production and distribution; that is, booked under SG&A and not COGS. $42mm of it was for management. At least 26 individuals made a salary of more than $250k[0]. I suppose their singing voice is quite good, to receive such a supper.
[0]: https://media.npr.org/documents/about/statements/fy2022/2021...
I don’t really have a radio in my car anymore so it’s a moot point, I just stream whatever short newscast they have while driving just to catch up. I get the feeling that a lot of drivers are like this now, and they might be scrambling for a new model to match, and that’s going to cause some content upheaval (and if they didn’t adapt, they wouldn’t exist now, we wouldn’t be talking about them at all).
How does 'mm' equate to 'M'? And if it does equate, why not use 'M' as a simpler way to designate a quantity of "millions" ?
Western finance/accounting industries adopted ‘M’ from the Roman numeral for 1,000 to mean “thousand”. MM (or mm) meaning “thousand thousand”, or a million.
Separately, when the French invented the metric system they used the Greek prefixes for multiples (kilo, derived from the Greek for “thousand”, being the best known). Which is why ‘k’ denotes thousands in most other industries.
Conversely, the metric system used Roman prefixes for submultiples, which is where centi- (same root as Centurion) and milli- come from.
As for SI, I have never liked the 'non-thousands' submultiples e.g. centimeters. I think it's confusing. You have km, m, and mm. factors of 1,000. Seems reasonable. Just like we have F, mF, uF, nF, pF for capacitors.
I think the various units are there because people like 'comfortable' numbers; e.g. people seem to prefer 8.9 cm to 89 mm ('8' is a number between 1 and 9, the most preferred numbers -- because we can count them on our fingers?).
It makes me wonder if NPR news leadership thinks they are doing a good job? Is there an audience out there that think NPR is doing a good job in absolute terms? It's easy to say they are better than Newsmax or some other outlet, but that's not the same as saying NPR is good all by itself.
On one hand, you have the majority of bewildered moderates who are increasingly annoyed about getting a lecture about their "privilege" every time they want to read the news, and seeing everything reduced to a small set of talking points in a very forced and artificial manner.
On the other hand, you have genuine progressives who very much buy into the whole privilege stuff etc, but at the same time they are broadly anti-establishment, and - quite rightly - see traditional news media, including NPR, as establishment. To that audience, it just all feels like a very crude and meaningless attempt to pander to them to get their attention (and money). If they want news told from an authentic perspective that aligns with theirs, they are much more likely to get it from podcasts, blogs etc.
The end result is that nobody is happy.
Every diffusion image model produces all kinds of arbitrarily bizarre behavior, this particular permutation just happened to catch fire in the media because it's culture war tinder. The idea that Google leaders thought it was "a good idea" to generate black Nazis and native American founding fathers is a caricature.
Yes and yes. As rags have become increasingly partisan, the only ones that are sticking around and engaging/paying are those that have also become increasingly partisan. And they think the rag is doing a swell job so the execs only have their echo chamber of ardent supporters to get feedback from.
Local NPR affiliates produce locally relevant content, but national level NPR has no actual differentiator. The forces them to be much more heavily dependent on their donors (who have clearly chosen a specific side) and also means they aren't top of the list to get breaking news (no Congress member is going to spend 1-2 hours interviewing at NPR when they can have multiple interviews with nationally prominent news sources).
This seems to have caused a vicious cycle for NPR as they need to keep their donors and listeners happy, but at the expense of the long term feasibility of the product.
Furthermore, podcasts are a major portion of national NPR's "bundle", and the podcasting industry is extremely democratized/commodified now.
This has been a problem with NPR forever though, at least since the late '90s. Donor capture and the podcast market are probably bigger reasons.
Hunter Biden's laptop may have been mostly a real thing but it was not and still is not newsworthy. There have been zero revelations from it that weren't public record.
And lab leak also remains a dubious topic. For one, there is no solid proof one way or another. And two I heard more than leak advocate given air time to espouse their theory and answer critical questions.
Honestly my absolute bar none go-to source for dissecting hot button issues and their coverage is On the Media. Technically it's WNYC but I think it's carried in a lot of markets.
It seems like Berliner breaking the rules (or norms) and throwing bombs by way of another media outlet was his last-ditch effort to break through and be heard. In that, at least, he's getting attention, and now let's hope it leads to change.
The examples he gave in the FP piece all seemed very political, focusing on not covering "the other side". Honestly I don't want any of that crap coming at me in the morning, I don't want "other side" coverage just like I don't want "my side" coverage. I can get that anywhere. I listen to NPR because I want good journalism, not both-sidesism. I hope this event can lead coverage back there. With the new CEO, perhaps there's an opportunity.
[It has since been marked flagged. My comment was seemingly changed by someone to "and marked flagged", I've changed it back for posterity]
I went back through five pages of posts.
I understand the desire to keep politics out of HN but this seems like a big story to cover up.
I don't want to have to dig through folks' comment histories to try to determine if they're actually being truthful or engaged. So I'd rather the political stuff stays on reddit and x.
We don't edit other people's comments, except perhaps if the whitespace is messed up or something like that. I make up for it by obsessively editing my own though.
>I went back through five pages of posts.
It's currently on the first page, post #16. Methinks there has been a rush to judgement.
That's a bold strategy Cotton, let's see if it pays off.
Not because he criticized them.
It this a punishment that is always applied; or used selectively? If the first, then it's fine, if the latter... then yeah there's a problem.
Steve Inskeep, a fellow NPR journalist, published a rebuttal on his own Substack[0] to Uri Berliner's article. Considering that Inskeep's Substack is also for profit (meaning people must pay a subscription to read non-public articles), it seems that unless he is also suspended, there is in fact selective enforcement.
[0]: https://steveinskeep.substack.com/p/how-my-npr-colleague-fai...
>In its formal rebuke, NPR did not cite Berliner's appearance on Chris Cuomo's NewsNation program last Tuesday night, for which NPR gave him the green light. (NPR's chief communications officer told Berliner to focus on his own experience and not share proprietary information.)
I haven't seen that episode of NewsNation, but I'd be surprised if this editor were invited as a guest for a different topic. So he did seek and receive permission in one case.
Right, but NPR isn't any old employer. It was created by Congress with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a mission of "creating a more informed public, one that is challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas, and cultures." Despite it not receiving that much taxpayer funding, I would hold it to a standard of a government organization; and I expect diverse viewpoints and dissent to be a core part of that mission.
one article criticizes them, of course they're not gonna allow that. the other article praises them, of course they're gonna allow that.
This morning they had a short piece on the kidney transplant list, and how it affect Black recipients differently. They spent 90% on a personal story and how this impacted him, and I know nothing about why the process is racist or how it was created.
I rant to my friends, but recently Mike Pesca (an NPR alum) had a good take on the decline and failure of the network: https://www.mikepesca.com/thegist/episode/30939dec/public-ra...
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.
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.
NPR is... fine, more or less, both helped and hobbled by its efforts at journalistic triangulation while basically doing its job of touching on some points of currency and providing mental snack material. I roll my eyes and keep listening at some things, I make a note to check out others, I switch stations in boredom or anger in other cases.
My mention of it here or my tuning into it isn't an endorsement any more than my time listening to Christian radio networks in similar dial segments, or college radio, or freakin' Pacifica.
The point of my observation isn't an absolute assessment of its value. It's a relative one compared to "the old days" -- that it hasn't changed much at all. Arguably it should have changed more given extraordinary times and figures.
People are giving their vague experiences here, I'm sharing mine.
And this Berliner guy is apparently airing the reasons why he really needs an editorial board or shouldn't be with an organization that actually has the journalistic integrity he's posturing about. Why do I say this? His summary of the Mueller report alone in his op-ed is justification for the idea that the world would be better off in every last way with nothing of value lost if he'd never been involved with the field.
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.
[edit: add a question mark]
Every story that shows in search results is something that dismisses the Lab Leak theory as being farcical and pushed by a Right-Wing Anti-China agenda.
Yet... it was and still is the single most plausible theory - and today there's a lot of evidence to indicate it is more likely true than not.
So yes, NPR did suppress the lab leak hypothesis, very successfully. There are many today that still hold it to be some sort of racist conjecture.
As the parent mentioned - there's many other examples if we review the past few years major stories, including the Hunter Biden Laptop fiasco that, according to NPR and others seeking to suppress the story, was "certified Russian disinformation", etc.
While I agree NPR was too quick to reject and smear the lab-leak hypothesis, it doesn't help your case to include the Hunter Biden Laptop hysteria that was fabricated whole-cloth and never had an ounce of substance to it.
None of what you have said is even close to any resemblance of any sort of truth. I hope you will dig past the partisan reporting to educate yourself further on this particular political cover up.
> do nothing President trying to deflect blame onto anyone else rather than accepting the responsibility of leadership
This is some very interesting high-level spin you have going on here.
What facts there are clearly demonstrate the Trump Administration started the development and roll-out for mass vaccination. All of the shutdowns and other well-meaning-but-misguided "flatten the curve" plans became politically virtuous. In hindsight, almost all of these efforts were for not, and many caused more harm than good.
Within all that noise - China most likely did have a lab leak from a lab that the US Government already knew was severely lacking safety precautions. Trump saying that out loud caused a knee-jerk reaction from his opponents and suddenly China was made to look like a victim of racism, etc.
NPR and similar ran with that narrative and buried the most probable cause because it made Trump look like an incompetent racist moron - which is good for their agenda.
Today, here we are, debating NPR propaganda like it was reality. So, I'd say it worked quite well...
I do agree that half of the sensationalist media reflexively reaches for the racism card to create outrage, and often times it's baseless or a red herring at best. But it takes two "sides" to stoke the "culture war", and Trump most certainly played the part.
This is the line of thinking that leads to gulags and gas chambers.
And the fact that I listen to it or find it interesting is not an endorsement much less an absence of criticism. I'm listening to Christian radio networks as well (share similar dial segments, it's interesting to find out what's going on there, get a different take on the news, hear what's going 'round in terms of sermons and CCM these days, what's that you say, a Christian values investment fund, sounds not grifty at all, I am intrigued), college radio, freakin' Pacifica.
I also don't think NPR would be successful in "burying" it, but they could easily just choose to not report on it.
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.
He'd be buried if he didn't and wasn't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jonathan Haidt in his book "Righteous Mind" https://righteousmind.com/
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?
But what is usually meant by "conservatives" are intellectual conservatives, similar again to intellectual liberals who write for the NY Times and NPR. There's an old saying, "if you are not a [liberal/socialist] when you are young, you have no heart; if you are not a [conservative/capitalist] when you are older, you have no brain." Obviously, no leftist wants to agree they're all heart and no brain, but the saying exists nonetheless, from multiple observers; and perhaps in that adage is the same "common sense": if that's some sort of common progression, we can see that those conservatives might very well understand liberalism better than the liberals in that formulation would correspondingly understand conservatism.
However, if you control for intellectualism, either by restricting both pools to intellectuals or expanding both pools to include everyone who identifies as left/right of center, that difference disappears. Neither wing understands the other very well at all, both sides as a rule choose to engage with strawmen versions of their opposition, and each side claims that its strawman is a more truthful model than the other's.
I think the only predictor of understanding is the amount of exposure that someone has to actual human beings who hold the opposing view. Intellectual conservatives may have a slight advantage in this regard because college campuses tend to lean left, but I've interacted with plenty of college-educated conservatives who buy fully in to the stereotypes of liberals that are hawked on populist channels.
but you are ignoring the point I made, writing a comment a priori as if this thread doesn't already exist. I am reasonably conservative, and I understand leftists completely.
I was raised from the crib very left wing, full on commie, with socialist/social justice sensibilities. I was woke before you were born (yes, the word is that old). Then I studied classical econ, and watched the fearmongering about conservatives in the media ("Ronald Raygun is going to start a nuclear war!") never come true.
So, without changing any of my heartfelt sensibilites, I instead realized that the free market ("capitalism") actually delivers the things that working class people need: jobs and cheap goods; and that greedy rapacious capitalist employers have no interest in discriminating against anybody: if women truly earn 60 cents on the dollar for equal work, what capitalist wouldn't hire women to more cheaply make more money? but we don't see that happen, so what the left believes has to be wrong: either the capitalists are not driven by greed, or it's not equal work for less money.
so, no, many on the left who are just like I was do not understand the right, and plenty of us who have moved right from the left do understand perfectly well what noble goals that left sensibilities are trying to accomplish.
Long-term Republicans are shocked not because their party suddenly and without warning became a populist vehicle but because the populist wave that fled the Democratic party during the civil rights era finally took over the party instead of just voting in their preferred old-school candidates.
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.
I'm a one-time conservative who moved to the center after Trump. I live in a deep red state but work remotely with an extremely left-wing company (the kind that regularly has deep discussions of identity politics during work hours). I like to think I have a pretty good idea of what each extreme looks like and every shade in between, and HN has by far the most balanced political discussions I've ever seen in any forum in-person or online.
Part of my evidence in favor of that claim is that people on each extreme both perceive HN to be biased in the opposite direction.
I find that the left mob is still very present and ready to shut down fast.
As it's a place of early adopters and visionary what we see here usualy get reflected back in other places one to many years later.
I see a shift toward conservatives values is happening here too that might then progress toward other places reddit, wikipedia, mass media, etc.
Both vision have their places and are necessary. The world is changing crazy fast so we need the progressives to adapt at the same time changing everything is destructive so we need to also save and cherish what work and has for a long time.
As long as the conversation is open there is hope.
The idea that a forum that's a discussion and PR arm for a venture capital firm is progressive at heart is almost funny. If HN is anything, it's technocratic first, then libertarian to classic liberal matched with business/market friendly, then progressive at whatever margins are left. Plenty of room for someone who can argue non-progressive politics in the first two terms, and people do.
> Have you ever voted conservative? Do you have friends that vote conservative? Do you have colleagues that vote conservative.
Since you asked: yes, yes, and yes.
Bubbles are pretty much irrelevant to the question of whether NPR has changed over time. Someone who listened a lot in the 00s and then came back in the last few years is qualified to weigh in on that. And it's not like my comment is a glowing endorsement of NPR.
But assuming reasonable models of how you'd tell I'm in some kind of vacuum isolated from non-progressives... in terms of radio/audio habits alone I also spend a good deal of time listening christian radio networks that occupy the same parts of the dial as public radio stations, Rogan / Friedman and adjacent, I've spent an ungodly amount of time listening to Jordan Peterson although I dialed it way back once he became a vaccine crank and Russian shill. I get lots of whatever Musk and people who are still there because they like the direction he's taking Twitter get. I get lots of exposure from a social circle that has as many conservatives as progressives.
So, why is it you think I might be in a bubble again? Or was that just your rhetorical strategy to say "well your opinion is no less biased than anyone else's, if anything you're the biased one"?
I too was progressive most of my life, it's the water I was in for all my life. I didn't understand the other side. Here Trump, Maga, guns, red states and faith are seen as backward, stupid and evil.
It's in the last few year that I poped that buble of thinking and now can see and understand the other side.
Here it's almost impossible to any discussion with a bit of nuance, the minute you stear away from the CBC talking point you get asked "are you a Trump supporter" with a raised eyebrow.
I have seen the censure in action in Twitter, Facebook, Google and most mass media in the last few years and also the statistic of political leaning in all the big tech company and all universities.
With the lastest thing happening at NPR, I am not surprised to heard that they are also ideologicaly compromised.
I could be wrong, but I think if we were to see the political leaning of journalists and people of power at NPR it think we would find again a 90%+ of left leaning that is very far from what we see in the population.
A test I was thinking, can you say openly at work or with friend that you will vote for Trump and keep your career options and your friends?
I know I couldn't here.
- limits on abortion are more strict in most of the world's developed countries.
- legally-enforced and culturally-encouraged discrimination against the local majority race is is very unusual, it mostly happens in anglo countries.
- legalizing theft under $1000 in the name of anti-racism, legalizing the intentional infecting of other people with AIDS... laws like that are considered absurd in most of the world.
As it is, I strongly disagree with OP—HN tends to have very balanced conversations—but I wish that you would provide substance instead of shallow dismissals.
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.
But on a more concrete level, the idea that NPR ignored the specific topic invoked here is wrong, not just considering that there's no there there, but in absolute terms. I have heard NPR segments discussing it and seen posts about it. I don't expect you to take my word for it, here's some front page results from a search:
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/15/1231884999/fbi-informant-char...
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/26/1201691151/hunter-biden-sues-...
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/11/1193465237/hunter-biden-inves...
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/09/1091859822/more-details-emerg...
The origins of the laptop story have been fairly suspicious. The handling of the laptop by the computer repair shop, Giuliani, and others, has been shameful, in my opinion, and reflects their willingness to violate anyone’s rights in the pursuit of power. Lev Parnas’ recent comments seem to confirm many of the suspicions that were talked about back then.
The fact that NPR didn’t immediately run the story seemed like a good idea to me, and they even reported on why they delayed reporting it, at the time. Maybe that’s my bias showing, but it’s hard to deny that this type of story would be relegated to tabloids a decade ago.
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
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
I’m rather disgusted that my tax dollars go to them.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
Guess that's part of a "slide left" too?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Funny typo, considering that "based" means something completely different in the political realm. NPR is most certainly not based...
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.
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.)
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.
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.
The bit about political 'ammunition' is interesting to me though, given that the inciting article is briefly but thoroughly damning of the political camp evidently using this as 'ammunition'.
Juan Williams may be laughing now. Don't know about the person who fired him, then lost her job in the fallout.
Coverage seems to have gotten stuck around that time.
I still have hope for the future. Not much to be found in these comments tho.
because it wasn't DEI.
They could reasonably apply to me, too (I'm Jewish, raised in a Christian town, was wildly bullied through middle school for being Jewish). Yet somehow I've always felt that aspect of my identity was the least interesting about me. I don't care about Judaism, or Jewishness. After the Nth Holocaust movie it was like "Enough already, I get it." I wanted to talk about science fiction and physics and music and girls and sailing and yoga and computers and all kinds of other things. It's a strange impulse to want to "center" aspects of yourself that other people feel are important but you don't. (Of course, Jewishness is odd, because later in life people wanted to talk about it because of their positive prejudices - this was, if anything, even more annoying, because it was something I didn't care about and it was uncomfortable flattery and it was well-meaning so it was hard to put the kabosh on it.)
It's funny but I notice how many of the liberals pushing against left-wing extremism are Jewish. Jonathan Haidt comes to mind, but there are many others (who currently escape me). My hypothesis is that we are, as a group, relatively recently assimilated, and we know how much worse it could be, and how damn good Enlightenment Culture is compared to all the rest, and how far America has come with Jewish acceptance. Assimilation is great because it works both ways - I can't tell you how much it warms my heart to see people use words like "schmuck" or "kosher"! I don't think it would have helped me then, or helped now, to have "race" stories about Jews in American Christian suburban middle schools. If anything, I can imagine making it much worse, giving me a victim complex and a habit of blaming the system, instead of taking my social L's, and out-performing the shit out of my dumb-ass classmates, and laughing all the way along the rosy path of nerd-dom. Maybe one thing Jews really do have is a sense of humor about racism and bigotry, since we've dealt with so much of it over time. But I recall no stories of Jewish minorities guilting the majority into "centering" their experience and hating themselves and their own culture. And if I did I don't think I'd see this as a win, but as a dastardly act of passive-aggression and dominance that is unhealthy for both groups. Oppression is not the way, of either the minority OR the majority. We grow and merge and love each other and take on the best qualities of each and that's awesome.
What people say about you (or your ethnicity) is orthogonal to the reality. Its hurtful only insofar as you attach yourself to their perceptions, and people are fundamentally ignorant. One of the things people seem to forget is that humans are by default deeply bigoted (and authoritarian). It's a miracle that there exist any places on Earth that have managed to curtail those instincts. If you live in such a place (and I'd count America, even Texas, as one of them) count yourself lucky. Let ignorant people flap their gums; it's hot air, signifying nothing.
Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander come to mind. Also Edward Blum, though he's more of a "classical liberal" than a liberal in the modern sense.
In all fairness, I think generations of folks aren't really able to set viewpoints aside and have come to believe that attempting to is bad. Which is complicated. But it no doubt meant that they needed to meet that audience to keep donations up.
And at least it's better than Fox News or talk radio and their ilk.
Sounds like some of the HN audience wants content that is some of entertaining, interesting, informative and, instead, is getting some quite different content, superficial, and based on some topics common in current journalism and/or partisan politics.
Why??
For "partisan politics" content, one candidate explanation is simply money.
But for journalism, that's more difficult. A guess is that journalism is an old profession with some accepted assumptions and techniques.
One such assumption is:
"Keep it short, simple, superficial. Avoid credible information as too difficult, demanding of the audience."
One technique is:
"Keep it emotional about problems of people."
With the Web, for a focused audience journalism may be changing.
Maybe I'll pay attention to journalism again when, for a start. they report numerical data with graphs, done like STEM field students do.
Generally speaking NPR rarely shows up on my radar. Punishing him for this article though sure has the opposite effect of what they hope to achieve. In fact, with this they just sent a message to all their journalists that they are not allowed to express viewpoints making their problem worse.
Objective outsider view, NPR is guilty as charged. How can NPR ever repair trust in their reporting with this over their head?
Not because he criticized them.
It this a punishment that is always applied; or used selectively? If the first, then it's fine, if the latter... then yeah there's a problem.
NPR can't fix itself because any time they get someone that shows promise at being a stand-up reporter, they leave for a better gig.
Case in point: Joshua Johnson[0] who used to run the The1A. The show was incredible while he was there. MSNBC picked him up and now it's daily partisan propaganda.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Johnson_(journalist)
Conversely, the Hunter laptop thing has never been a compelling above-the-fold story. Hunter Biden is a politician's kid, not some elected official or, ahem, a politician's kid who has been appointed to a cabinet or advisory role within an administration. There has been no evidence that implicated Joe Biden was a meaningful participant or benefactor in whatever name-dropping grift he's gotten on at. Why would a news outlet spend airtime on this?
The lab leak story is somewhat more compelling. Although I think at this point because of analysis that concluded there were two different, yet closely related strains of the virus simultaneously present at different sections of the wet market, it's hard to conclude a lab origin is more likely than it coming from wild origins. But at the time he's referring to, it was simply a matter of dogma to conclude a lab origin was off the table.
And commenting that the DC staff is 87 Democrat is... amazing. That's the natural demographic of DC, one of the most Democratic regions in the country.
How many times do you recall seeing coverage of it on Fox News itself, whether on TV or their web site? How many times have you seen a similar piece of self-reflection on OANN? Or Newsmax? Or CNN?
Most of the time, news outlets clam up and you read the articles about them on other outlets.
That's why they're in my top three rotation.
>”Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.”
What’s the point of free speech if you have no meaningful way to exercise it?
Anything beyond the boundaries of this ticker of raw measurements depends on some level of narrative, and therefore bias. Even the driest, most unbiased reporting of "what happened" is not immune to selection bias in choosing which events to report.
Ironically, the more that a news organization pretends this purist ideal of unbiased news exists, the more biased it becomes in its effort to hide its natural biases.
In terms of raw signal/noise, a pair of oppositely polarized news organizations are more informative than a single "unbiased" one. I learn more about the "truth" (which is mostly a matter of perception) by reading both Fox and CNN, and comparing the overlaps and differences between them, than I ever could by reading a single "unbiased" source of news in the middle.
Strong disagree. You're saying that the more someone tries to be unbiased, the more they end being biased? This seems like an excuse to embrace bias and push a narrative. I've never agreed with that regarding news.
Later when he talks about the political affiliations of the newsroom, how did he access the voter registrations? How many of those people don't live in DC and so aren't registered there, and how did he count them? What are the professional-ethical implications of researching your coworkers in this way?
NPR listener demographics
2011: 26% conservative, 23% center, 37% liberal, 14% ?
2023: 11% conservative, 21% center, 67% liberal, 1% ?
I didn't read it that way, and I do find this relevant to the points he was making, which were much more about journalistic practice and ethics than about the demographics of listeners per se.
So NPR listeners in 2011 and 2023 could be the exact same people and the % of conservative listeners would have gone down. (That said, I suspect this isn’t the only explanation - NPR content has gotten more ideologically left during that timeframe too)
I would guess that any news source that is not specifically pro-Trump has bled conservative viewers/listeners/readers in the last 8 years.
The special counsel found that Russia did interfere with the election, but “did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple efforts from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2...
With respect to obstruction: As far as obstruction, the Mueller report laid out facts on both sides but did not reach a conclusion. Barr’s letter said that “the Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’”
The entire liberal media was in a tizzy for a year about "collusion" and pee tapes, pulitzer prizes got handed out over it, and then everybody just got really quiet and stopped talking about it.
Don't think of "bias" as a boolean. Think of it as a real value between 0 and 1.
You can't get perfectly unbiased. (I actually think I agree - you can't.) But you can get more biased and less biased, and the difference really matters.
Was Walter Cronkite perfectly unbiased? No. But he tried. Was the result better than, say, Fox News? Yes, it was.
There was an editor of the New York Times who, recognizing that his reporters leaned left, deliberately leaned the editorial stance of the paper somewhat to the right, in order to keep the results closer to neutral. He literally had "He kept the paper straight" put on his tombstone. The results were not perfect - they never are - but they were better than the results of "bias is inevitable, so we won't bother even trying" (which quickly transforms into "bias is inevitable, so we might as well run with our biases").
"Citation needed".
I don't disagree with your general premise, that journalism always has some level of bias; it's likely impossible to create an unbiased narrative. That said, I find it difficult to get on board with the notion that seeking this perfection is self-defeating.
I also find it difficult to believe that choosing to simply get your news from two "known biased" news organizations is the more correct choice. Some of the so-called news reported on by a certain news agency is factually false. It's misinformation, and the only use it has is exposing the bias of the agency. Presuming the agency on the other extreme end of the spectrum is doing the same thing, all you have are two pieces of incorrect data. You haven't learned anything because there's nothing of value to be learned from something completely false.
Most of us don't have time for that. I mostly prefer news oriented at business people, where too much bias would cost their readers real money, so the reporting tends to be more factual. So read WSJ rather than watch FoxNews, since even though both are owned by Murdoch, the former is for rich conservatives who have less time for idealistic BS.
@dang please ban this account.
> "We're looking for a leader right now who's going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about," Berliner said. "And this seems to be the opposite of that.
Berliner could have stopped at criticism of the coverage, but now seems to be looking for ways to attack the institution in destructive ways. Berliner knows these attacks could bury and destroy NPR. NPR holding onto Berliner this long might be a mistake - it invites the tidal wave of attacks from the right, and the 'centrist' Dems will join in (like cowards joining the bully) - but at this point, it may be time to fire them.
The real test of the CEO will be handling this crisis. It should not be unexpected in the modern world, and there are playbooks for being effective. It's now part of the job.
https://steveinskeep.substack.com/p/how-my-npr-colleague-fai...
I still recall listening to an especially wretched NPR news story ~2003 - where (in effect) Senator Slime(D) insisted that 2 + 2 was 3, Senator Sleaze(R) insisted that 2 + 2 was 5, and NPR was far too fair, balanced, and brain-dead to even hint at the possibility of 4. I stopped tuning in, and never donated another dime.
I find the person leading the coverage “solution” has the same emblematic word choice issues as the organization as a whole. I love NPR and the local public affiliates but they cannot see their own failings.
Are there any two people, anywhere in this world that truly “share little in common”?
I am in no way a Trump supporter but the way the tone shifted into vitriolic acid spitting after his election, I just can’t abide or frankly listen anymore. I just want the news.
The right are huge hypocrites. Seems like only the progressives need to apologise for holding their views but the right never does.
NPR should tell everyone to fuck off and go watch fox news if they don't want a progressive and fact based view point.
Now, I don't listen to NPR anymore, and it is for exactly the reasons described, but my media consumption at this point is limited to 3blue1brown videos (veritasium can sometimes get a bit sensationalistic). Outrage politics and in group/out group signalling is a perfectly valid competitive strategy in the modern media monomarket, and the Old Media graveyard is littered with previously esteemed names in journalism who were too principled to let trending Twitter narratives drive their reporting.
Why do these "activists" always seem like they're operating in bad faith?
I used to love NPR growing up.
The head was replaced with the ex-head of Radio Free Europe (a propaganda station), and a permanent pair of ombudsmen were placed there (one meant to always be a Democrat and the other always meant to be a Republican) to help censor news and editorial on behalf of the two private clubs who trade off leadership in the US. Funding from the government was decimated, and funding was taken over by giant managed funds, heavy extractive industries, and medical/insurance companies.
Any semblance of the hoped-for manufactured balance (to be provided by the ombudsmen) was eliminated by 9/11 and the need to invade Iraq for some reason. I'm pretty sure the positions are long gone (the mainstream media hates ombudsmen, the job attracts the ethical.) The place became neocon central until the property-inflation bubble burst. Everything that went on in society with the crash, and with weariness from the wars and the draconian surveillance laws and media censorship that resulted from them, resulted in the Obama media frenzy and election victory.
Democrats who had felt silenced during G.W. Bush felt like they had turned the tables. The problem with that was twofold. One, the Democrats who had stayed with NPR for that entire period were people with no values at all, who had continued working as if nothing had changed.
Two, the Obama presidency was not going to be a significant departure from the previous presidency, was going to extend the Bush doctrine and the surveillance indefinitely, and he made it his first priority to indemnify the people who had done very illegal things up to and including atrocities and a torture network. He was even eventually going to bring back the Espionage Act, and start surveilling journalists and political campaigns. He was also going to put all of his economic effort into protecting wealthy people from the fallout of all of those poor people losing their homes. Years later, there would be a big to-do about Trump's taxes, and the most horrifying thing in them is that Obama's legislation irt the crash had simply refunded an entire year of Trump's taxes.
Obama couldn't be more liberal, economically, other than the favoritism towards party insiders, the weakening of the boundaries between church and state, and the idea that government social programs should all be outsourced to nonprofits through heavy, usually indirect, infusions of cash. In fact, the only thing left of the social ambition that had characterized the Democratic Party from Kennedy until the destruction of the Rainbow Coalition by the Clintons' New Democrats (and their funders) was the constant discussion of race, homosexuality, immigration, abortion, and gun control (edit: and global warming.) Never decisively, of course, but stretched into endless length and endless detours, with constant claims of being too weak to actually change any policy in the face of Republican evil, eventually resulting in executive orders, again carrying forward GWB's antidemocratic executive philosophy.
That's how you end up with an NPR totally staffed with elite, careerist Democrats who are somehow now also completely neoconservative and neoliberal. The only consistent position they have on any issue is that elite Democrats are the best people to be deciding on them, not the ignorant, evil Republicans whom they agree with on almost every issue. The big controversy between them? How guilty should they feel. Democrats say very guilty. Republicans say, not guilty at all, but actually proud.
This is Democrats arguing with Republicans about who should feel guilty and who should feel powerful, not anything meaningful. The only reason Republicans are speaking up is because Palestinians are trying to talk again, and the Democrats at NPR have to give in at about a million starving children, especially if there are pictures. The guilt messes with their digestion.
You've confused the US with the UK. There is no gatekeeping of political parties in the US, no way to stop someone from joining them, and no way to kick them out if they claim to be in it.
What they do have is primary elections.
I miss the good old NPR, the narrative machine that's replaced it needs to go away.
So, I was wrong, but NPR certainly hasn't remained true to their original format.
They interviewed Adam Schiff 25 times in the RussiaGate "scandal." They dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a "non-story" and somehow they still want to claim they're non-partisan?
It might be more straightforward and honest for all you NPR-defenders to just come out and say, "It's OK when we do it, because we're right. And we're SO tired of hearing about that laptop."
To cover Jan 6 do we have to say that maybe it was Trump supporters who peacefully went to the Capitol or maybe it was Antifa who stormed it - we have to treat all possible scenarios as equally likely?
There never has been; there is no such thing as unbiased reporting.
There is only reporting that is open about it's assumptions, premises and biases, and reporting that purports to be "unbiased". The latter is insidious and dangerous. With the former, you can simply avoid it, if you want to live in a bubble; or you can consume it, and evaluate it based on the known proclivities of the source.
Also almost every story gets tied to either identity politics or climate change. Also just gets annoying even for those who agree. It’s like watching a movie with too much exposition dialogue.
On another point, what constitutes a manufactured disagreement and what constitutes a genuine one?
As to what constitutes a manufactured disagreement, that seems somewhat self-evident. A more familiar term might be "wedge issue". You correctly mention upthread how disagreements on even the most contentious social issues was handled peacefully and arguably with some tact. This is demonstrably no longer the case so my question to you is this: what changed, who changed it, and who's benefiting from the change?
Existence of batsh*t crazy conjectures do not imply that the idea of entertaining multiple hypotheses has no value.
With accumulation of evidence, probabilities attached to the propositions are revised. Thats how scientific investigation evolves.
I looked this up. Apparently she once tweeted that Trump is racist, and posted a photo of herself wearing a Biden hat.
Just crazy.
Start here:
https://www.racket.news/p/new-npr-chief-katherine-mahers-gui...
> She also scored the rare personal triumverate of being member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum young global leader, and a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Labs.
the cognitive dissonance is amazing
Summing it up as a lack of transparency (would he rather say “fairness?”) and viewpoint diversity (“balance?”) seems somewhat disingenuous. At a higher level view, different organizations are going to take different positions. Arguably, obligated to do so.
Surely he doesn’t believe every org has to pretend there are “both sides” to every story. But if he’s no longer aligned with NPR, then perhaps the suspension is in everyone’s best interest.
No, sometimes people are actually factually wrong.
I don't have any beef with anything else you said.
But based on all this whinging, today's NPR sounds awesome. I may have to start listening.
What does Occam's razor have to do with anything here? Unless you want to assert that assuming NPR acts in bad faith should be rejected in favor of them just being complete, out-of-touch morons?