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Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about this, since on several NPR podcasts Exxon has sponsored and advertised their carbon capture investment, despite it being a greenwashing campaign that comprises such a tiny percent of their overall new investment.

How can NPR not ultimately be captured by corporate interests with for-profit sponsorships?

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Professional ethics and integrity, plus occasional review by an ombudsman? Same as many other vocations...

I enjoy their non-journalistic shows, e.g., "A Prairie Home Companion/Live From Here" and "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!", but not enough to donate when I know the money is also going to pay for their "journalism", and especially not when they clearly prefer the (fatter) checks from the corporations.

But professional ethics? Fox News, MSNBC, and those other infotainment gutters are bad, but NPR is insidious: it's biased toward the class of established political powers and corporations, like a Pravda for America but dishonest about it.

Just because they run sponsorships, doesn't mean that they are automatically going to do whatever it takes to make their sponsors look good.

I think they do a good job of being objective and have a good track record for being highly factual.

Actually that’s exactly how I interpret the ads. How else is there?

They always preface stories that involve people who have sponsored them in past by stating that they have sponsored them.

Plus, they've been sponsored by many other organization, such as Earth Law Center (something like that). Does that mean that they are captured by them too?

If a politician prefaced every speech with "Politicians lie" does that absolve the speaker of accountability for lying?

Because it's already a state-media propaganda apparatus?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(Unit...

NPR is not perfect - in particular, I have some issues with the artifical equivalency between our two major parties implied by NPR interview programs.

With that being said, your claim is 100% complete and utter bullshit, unsupported by even your own source.

Claiming they're a PYSOPS unit is overcomplicating the matter. NPR basically practices access journalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_journalism) and claims not to.

I'm trying to find the old story from when NPR got caught re-using VoA propaganda (which was then a violation of federal law), but instead found this, of a similar vintage:

https://fair.org/media-beat-column/npr-floats-an-ombudsman-b...

EDIT: Ah, here is some remnant of the story. NPR was using a VoA reporter to push the State Department line on Haiti: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Amelia_Shaw

...and here is her LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/amelia-shaw-82421a29/

Access journalism ??

Oh, you mean Terry Gross' excellent and astonishingly comprehensive interviews with virtually all movers and shakers of the last 3-4 decades?

That's what I like about NPR the most. Prairie home companion, wait-wait don't tell me... BORING. it's time to change the station.

Terry Gross' excellent and astonishingly comprehensive interview of each and every member of the E Street Band.

I don't think you're disagreeing that it's state media, so at worst I'm at 50%.

BBC, RT, France24, Deutsche Welle, PressTV, and Telesur all exist to promote a state interest. How are NPR and APM different?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/25/npr-the-cia-and-corp...

Comparing the BBC to RT demonstrates the complete emptiness of your claims. Certainly, publicly funded media sources can be expected to have inbuilt biases, but to pretend that institutions with editorial independence should be compared to actual propaganda outlets which have actively participated in centrally orchestrated and well documented disinformation campaigns is ridiculous.

BBC World Service and RT are absolutely comparable. Both are very obvious in pushing the agenda of their state sponsors.

If you want subtlety, watch France24 English. If you want the propaganda arm of a dying empire, BBCWS is for you.

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/bbc-fake-news-1811...

http://oro.open.ac.uk/36441/

Doesn't it say that it only happened in the 1990s? Where's the evidence that it has continued?

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