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Comment by jamiequint | Hacker News Reader

You actually believe that Amazon has editorial control over NPR and specifically exerted that leverage to make this article incoherent?

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One of the common threads in media critiques like Manufacturing Consent and Hate, Inc. is that direct editorial control is not necessary in order to promote your agenda. Control of money and access, along with ideological indoctrination of journalists at elite universities, is all that's needed. See also my comment below about NPR listenership and trust in Amazon as an institution.

You just need to have influence over who hires the journalists. If they like you then they'll hire people who will probably also like you.

Semi-off-topic but Manufacturing Consent really changed the way I see the world and think about media. As a kid I never questioned that Iraq War-era Time magazine article with diagrams of a mobile nuclear weapons facility. It should be required reading.

Same for me. Unfortunately, I found it hard to get along with some close relatives after my change in perspective.

>>> We need to note that Amazon is an NPR funder.

> You actually believe that Amazon has editorial control over NPR and specifically exerted that leverage to make this article incoherent?

You don't have to have editorial control to have influence.

For instance: how smart would it be for you to complain about your employer in public forums under your own name? People call that "biting the hand that feeds you." So even if you have a legitimate grievance or have witnessed clearly unethical behavior with your employer, maybe you decide to keep quiet because you need the money from your job.

Your employer just influenced what you write without having any editorial control over you.

This is the story of our entire media. No, they didn't line by line come in and edit the article, but any media outlet is going to self-censor to not lose a big sponsor. I think that's pretty self-evident at this point. The classic Manufacturing Consent does a deep dive into this dynamic.

Related, newspapers are historically unprofitable. Why would someone like Jeff Bezos buy the Washington Post? Like any investment, he expects some kind of return. And the return in this case clearly isn't direct revenue.

Do you have any proof of that? Otherwise it's just conspiracy theory. Sometimes people do things that don't benefit them. It's called charity. I don't think that Bezos is a saint, but I also don't think he bought the New York Post to be his mouthpiece nor would the editors allow it.

I think you would find that the book or two hour YouTube documentary “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky provides compelling answers to your questions. I do understand it can be irritating to hear “watch this two hour doc” as a response to an internet comment, but it really is a master work on the subject. I haven’t seen it in a few years so I can’t do its arguments justice, but it completely changed my views on how media works. I have been meaning to watch it again though.

For a different take there is a YouTube series from “Crash Course” on “media literacy” that I suspect goes over this, but I haven’t gotten that far in the series yet.

And then there’s also Michael Parenti, another author who has written and has YouTube talks on the subject.

Either way I just want to say it’s not wild conspiracy theory. It is an established body of work people are talking about here.

NPR's CEO previously was in charge of external propaganda: "From 2015 to 2019, Lansing served as the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the independent federal agency whose programming reaches an average weekly audience of 345 million people in 62 languages." [0] Now at NPR he coordinates internal propaganda. Angry Bezos emails will be career-shortening for NPR staff.

[0] https://www.npr.org/people/770270513/john-lansing

The implicit threat of loss of funding and/or access is often enough to sway editorial decisions in a way that could appear like direct control.

NPR is on the record [0] as not even informing their editorial staff of their 175+ sponsors, which causes other issues (for which there is actual evidence, which, while reasonable, I haven't seen for your theory):

> That lack of awareness has led to some embarrassments in the past. Online spots from America's Natural Gas Alliance once ran next to a series on fracking, for example.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2012/03/16/1487788...

Cargill and Koch industries certainly did.

So it's not a stretch.

You actually believe that NPR doesn’t edit articles to protect the people who fund them?

Yes, I do actually believe in their editorial independence. Here's an NPR opinion piece talking openly about the subject

https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2012/03/16/1487788...

Some excerpts that I liked (keep in mind, these are out of context, which is largely focused on why we should keep a very close eye out):

> Companies are most interested in getting their name before NPR's audience. They are, in other words, more interested in you than they are in NPR's journalism.

> The staff that sells sponsorships does not contact the newsroom to ask for coverage favor for a corporate client. To do so is a firing offense.

> Companies and marketers almost universally know not to ask journalists for coverage favors in return for sponsorship and advertising. To do so would be an insult—like asking a professional journalist to be a prostitute. It would invite distrust and negative coverage. It also would undermine the independence that attracted NPR's coveted audience in the first place.

> "Rote disclosures of every connection to a sponsor would not only clutter our programs, and be rendered meaningless in the process, but would also require producers to have an awareness of our corporate supporters that could actually be counter-productive and erode our firewall."

I mean this with all due respect, but highlighting NPR's own defense of their editorial practices is hardly convincing.

NPR routinely runs editorial pieces that were pitched to them by corporate sponsors or their fronts like think tanks. They likewise have have discussion panels featuring these groups' talking heads. Listen to a few episodes of Marketplace if you want the most obvious corporate propaganda imaginable. Their impartiality is laughable.

"Listen to a few episodes of Marketplace if you want the most obvious corporate propaganda imaginable."

You mean NPR's business news show? That's what business news is, right?

If you read something like the Financial Times, it’s actually far less propagandistic than most “business news.” It mostly just reports the raw, unfiltered reality of Capitalist exchange. There are actually quite a few Marxists who like the paper for this reason.

When contrasted with something like Marketplace, which ceaselessly and glibly spins the darker realities of our economy to somehow be “upbeat” or “positive,” the difference becomes more obvious. And this is an editorial and ideological choice made by NPR, pursuing this framing.

Just to be precise, Marketplace is not produced by NPR.

It is produced by American Public Media, which is a branch of Minnesota Public Radio (and Southern California Public Radio).

Perhaps you meant "US public radio" in general, but said "NPR". They are not equivalent, however.

It's a distinction without any real difference. You could make the same argument about Planet Money, an NPR show, that went out of the way to provide cover for the banks during the financial crisis, had their host attack Elizabeth Warren in an interview, all while taking money from the same industry. Adam Davidson (the host who attacked Warren) of course then also went on to collect all kinds of "speaking fees" from financial institutions.

https://shameproject.com/profile/adam-davidson/

NPR, despite what the parent linked, does almost nothing to police these conflicts.

It's a distinction with a difference. And no, I could not make the same argument about Planet Money, since that show is produced by NPR.

If you say "American public radio", do you also include Democracy Now? Do you include shows produced by other local stations, including the ones that do not get distributed? NPR is not the totality of "American public radio".

Understanding the structure of public broadcasting in the USA is critical to understand why it works the way that it does. NPR is a distinct organization, even from CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting), even if its sensibilities are echoed in other public radio organizations (like MPR/APM).

As for your points about Adam Davidson, I don't find that shameproject.com page particularly persuasive. It's clear that Davidson's worldview does not align with that of the people/person who wrote the page/manages the site. I don't find this particularly remarkable or even particularly interesting. Davidson's worldview doesn't really line up with my own either. But there's a bunch of stuff on that page (the quotes in particular) which lack context, and a lot of other stuff that consists mostly of deeply subjective assessments and assignment of motive to Davidson without much evidence.

Not taking money from the people you’re covering is the barest minimum of journalistic ethics. Regardless, of whether you or I agree with anything else on that site, Adam Davidson, or whoever else, failing to meet that basic standard should be patently disqualifying. The fact that he was the host of a flagship, economic reporting show, even more so.

There are many other reasons I find it hard to take NPR’s claims of impartiality seriously, but this one is so glaringly wrong that it speaks for itself.

I don't accept anyone's claims of impartiality. This notion of objective journalism is a US disease, and it needs to be stamped out as rapidly and as widely as possible. I view NPR as an excellent source of reporting on "people's lives as they experience them" and "the political status quo". I would never dream of considering NPR to be how I found out about ideas and practices outside of the political status quo - that's just not what they (or any other mainstream media) does.

> prostitute

I expected better than NPR. They could have just said "like asking a professional journalist to be a PR agent".

There's no need for anything so obvious as a request from the sposorship sales staff to the newsroom, or corporate sponsors asking journalists for favors. It could be an unspoken, unwritten understanding, subtle enough that the newsroom staff and journalists might honestly deny it exists. Just knowing that Amazon is a major sponsor of your employer (and hence, your job) is going to affect how you write about them, whether or not any overt favors have been requested.

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