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Comment by lsdafjklsd | Hacker News Reader

my dad is a fox news republican, a few years back we were driving for 5 hours and were listening to npr. he was basically waiting for the overt liberal bias, but instead we listened to a bunch of fascinating stories and interesting shows about a variety of topics. I read somewhere that npr isn't liberally biased, but their fan base is mostly liberal, because liberals tend to prefer news that has no bias. It's also not loud and obnoxious, which they like.

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> I read somewhere that npr isn't liberally biased, but their fan base is mostly liberal, because liberals tend to prefer news that has no bias.

You don't need to "read somewhere" about whether a news source is biased. You just need to read news across a spectrum of sources. And you will realize that NPR definitely has a liberal bias if you have enough breadth in your sources. I'm a far-left liberal but I'm not afraid to admit when a liberal news source is biased. Everyone loves to point out the obvious bias at Fox News and Breitbart and Drudge but then delude themselves that there are no liberally biased news sources.

If liberal is defined as "not alt-right" then sure.

But if you expect to find prominent socialists or leftist political activists or their ideas on NPR, you'll be waiting a long time. Chomsky, nader, said, hedges, parenti ... none of them get mentioned or make an appearance. Who teamed up with Richard Wolff's radio show? NPR? Nope, it was iHeartMedia. You can find these people on Al Jazeera, the CBC, RussiaToday, the BBC... Essentially the public media of every country BUT the USA.

On NPR, you'll get Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, the Heritage foundation, the Hoover institute, and other prominent vested interests and orthodox free market fundamentalism thinktanks.

The reality is the Alex Jones ilk are so out there that if you want to call anything that's not like that as liberal, you have a giant space to work with. That pejorative label corrals and prods everyone else closer to the Hannity and Michael Savages and what we get is a dedicated right and a not-so-committed, more gentle right.

When actual "not on the right" politicians rise, they get ignored, dismissed, or ridiculed by all the mainstream media. Whether it's Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders or Mélenchon. NPR was dismissive of Corbyn, who picked up the largest legislative gain in over 70 years, even on election day as trouble for Labor and mismanaging a failing divided party with old broken ideas...

It's important to remember what a non-skewed left would actually look like since it effectively doesn't exist in the mainstream us media.

As a swede I have a hard time understanding what liberal and conservative is. Here we talk about Left and Right politics. I get the impression USA only has Right and Right+ in swedish terms.

Left would be social security, right would be free market / privatise everything.

I have to admit that I wasn't paying much attention to politics in my schoolyears but I did try to read some political comic book (comedy central?) from USA...

in practice, liberal is the city-life and conservative is the country-life.

This really helps in gerrymandering districts and subdividing the population into two easily manageable groups since they don't talk with one another a lot.

I think the definitions are intentionally designed to keep the public fighting itself with one group always trying to take away the rights of the other so in practice it's slow impoverishment of the commons and a forfeiture of political capital.

Essentially it's a huge scam (or a "scheme" if you think that sounds too conspiratorial). It's not a new scam, and not the first time it's been done - not even the first time in this country. The history of and tactics of union busting in the 1800s and 1900s essentially worked on the same divide-and-conquer techniques of pitting groups of workers against each other.

Going back further, the Indian wars worked in a similar manner ... feigning favoritism or some entitlement to one tribe to create a tribal conflict and prevent the indigenous from being a unified front.

This is the same game ... we call it "democrats" and "republicans" in this version.

The most effective Roman emperors were very good at playing frontier tribes against each other, and the plebeian, equestrian, and senatorial classes against each other. This is not a new tactic. :)

The equivalent in Sweden is having a discussion about immigration. Liberal Sweden won't even talk about it in any way that could be perceived as critical. Conservative Sweden would.

Whatever. Most people who identify as "liberal" in the US would not call themselves socialist, anarcho-syndacalist, Chomsky or Nader supporters, etc. They are mostly centrist Democrats.

/s/liberal/neo-liberal/g

Does that make you feel better?

Mainstream Republicans (not alt-right) are also neoliberals. They also believe structuring all of societies ills as free markets as the optimal solution (eg, CAFTA, NAFTA, Obamacare were started/proposed by Republicans and finished by Democrats and many of Reagan's championed policies were actually started by Carter). That's what's academically called "classical liberalism".

Honestly, the form of liberal that NPR is, is mostly just target demographics; what set of values an effective identical policy gets justified with. Hillary Clinton praises Kissinger, punted for Monsanto as Secretary of State...Obama used advisers from Milton Friedman's Chicago School...it's different wrapping paper on the same present.

For instance, job creators of the right become entrepreneurs and innovators on the left; it's the same people, different label. On the right, they shouldn't be taxed because they earned their wealth and on the left is because they invest in the innovation of tomorrow. Same policy, different backstory.

The American dynamics doesn't equate to substantive advocacy differences. They are effectively sports team playing the same game by the same rules with different fan bases.

Not really interested in responding to you again considering you heavily edited your first post after I responded to it.

>But if you expect to find prominent socialists or leftist political activists or their ideas on NPR, you'll be waiting a long time. Chomsky, nader, said, hedges, parenti ... none of them get mentioned or make an appearance.

Actually, an NPR station where I lived had all of those appear.

People have to realize that local affiliates have some room in picking the shows they broadcast. I was in a relatively activist town, and these folks were not rare. I know at least one of the names you mentioned because of NPR.

Funny I remember when Cokie Roberts was pimping Bush during the 2004 elections.

No, NPR's leadership since about the mid-nineties (at least) has been aligned with big business - they are part of the media elite, who collectively, despite the "liberal media" label are actually corporatists (because that's who owns them).

There are liberal corporatists. I don't know why that would be a contradiction.

It's not a contradiction, it's a clarification. Corporatist means liberal or conservative as long as it pushes the interests of the military industrial complex.

They are only as liberal as their funders permit and kowtow to conservative viewpoints as well.

Your argument rests on the fault assumption that in a 'wide range of media', the median publication is unbiased and things that are more left-wing than it are biased and things more right-wing than it are biased in the other direction.

That's just not based in reality. In reality, almost all mainstream media is incredibly biased towards the status quo.

>because liberals tend to prefer news that has no bias

You have to be joking. Have you heard of the Huffington Post or MSNBC?

Even NPR is heavily biased at the editorial level. Most of the stories are intentionally selected to represent downtrodden folks, rust belt workers/farmers that realize they are closet Democrats, etc. The individual stories will be true but the representation of reality portrayed by the overarching theme of the stories will be a lie.

It's like a conservative station that constantly reports only crimes committed by Muslims. All of it can easily be 100% true, but the overarching theme will be complete BS.

It's clear that NPR has bias in its choice of reporting, but every other political radio station has a clearly stated allegiance more than they have a simple bias.

The difference is stark -"oh boy this story is here for the lefties" versus a guy screaming into the mic that we have to fight the bastard liberals before they throw us to the sharks.

It's not close to perfect but it's at least news.

This. Bias is primarily in what you choose to report.

>because liberals tend to prefer news that has no bias

As a kid in the central US, I asked my mom why the people in our town didn't have an accent but people from everywhere else did.

> a few years back

I'm a centrist from Minnesota, which is where a lot of NPRs content is made through our local public stations MPR. We are pretty proud of our public radio here and pretty much both sides listen to the non political interest shoes like car talk, prairie home companion, etc.

NPR news and political opinion pieces used to be neutral with a libral flair: biased, but only a little bit.

The last year or so is when they really started going crazy left and it has become unbearable. I really think that whoever the editors are made a conscious decision right around the time of the primaries to stop trying to be neutral and just go full left propaganda. There was a noticable shift and I was no longer able to listen because of how overt and propaganda ish their reports became.

>because liberals tend to prefer news that has no bias

Hmmm, I think your liberal bias may be showing.

Im not sure what you'd call it when liberals listen to... Slightly biased news, and conservatives listen to people with clearly expressed political allegiances who refer to conservatives as "us", liberals as "them", and talk about how to politically defeat the other side.

Just because bias is hard to separate out, doesn't mean everyone's behavior and preferences are equivalent mirror images of each other.

You could find someone yelling about defeating conservatives on YouTube but that viewership is going to be lower than NPR... thus liberals prefer the less-biased sources...

Each side of the political spectrum has a spectrum of biased news. For example, Huffington Post and The Young Turks are liberal news sources which are very partisan. The Economist is a fiscally conservative magazine which is less partisan, Uncommon Knowledge is an interview show with a conservative viewpoint, but also an educated and intellectual viewpoint.

If you're a liberal minded person, your exposure to conservative sources of news is likely excerpts of their most grievous offenses. Hence, the liberal bias suggests that conservatives get all their news from Tucker Carlson making funny faces at people, or Alex Jones identifying gay amphibians. The result is the belief that liberals are reasonable intellectuals and conservatives stupid fools.

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