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Comment by wffurr | Hacker News Reader

“ We need a new media channel, the press version of a third party, where those financial pressures to maintain audience are absent. Ideally, it would:

* not be aligned with either Democrats or Republicans;

* employ a Fairness Doctrine-inspired approach that discourages groupthink and requires at least occasional explorations of alternative points of view;

* embrace a utilitarian mission stressing credibility over ratings, including by;

* operating on a distribution model that as much as possible doesn’t depend upon the indulgence of Apple, Google, and Amazon.”

This reads like a description of NPR to me.

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No way. NPR is clearly aligned with the Democrats. You have to live in a bubble not to see it.

I agree. I'm a moderate liberal, but I'm aware enough to realize that NPR only frames debates in terms I agree with (and increasingly only in terms that people more progressive than myself agree with). Which strikes me as profoundly unjust considering they are government-funded. I guess I can't muster the short-sightedness required to celebrate the government's wildly disproportional endorsement of my own position. Of course, someone will make some dichotomous argument that it's the progressive position or literal Nazism.

America would be in a much better place if more people had your sense. Or perhaps most Americans do and we are just being driven insane because the nutcases are the ones that get all the attention.

NPR is not government-funded ... it is funded mostly by donations from wealthy listeners and corporations

“Only 4 percent of funding in fiscal year 2017 came from federal, state and local governments ...”

https://www.newsweek.com/where-does-npr-get-its-funding-call...

I'd still consider something to be government-funded if they receive millions of dollars in funding from the government (wikipedia shows $200M in revenue in 2016). [1]

It is relevant that this is a small portion of their budget, but generally when someone thinks "this shouldn't be funded by taxpayer dollars" they don't stop caring just because the millions of dollars spent only cover a small portion of the entity's total budget. Typically these arguments are ideological/philosophical, not matters of degree.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR

Huh, fair enough. At that point we may as well pull that remaining 4 percent then. Clearly they’d prefer to go in a different direction anyway.

NPR is government funded, and was established by Congress.

A lot of people conflate "NPR" with "public radio" in general. So your local public radio station may air some things that are "clearly aligned with the Democrats" but as an actual news organization, NPR News is as good as any out there. They take fact checking seriously, they issue corrections when they get things wrong. They take time to put things into historical context and they don't bend over backwards to give "both sides" to debates that clearly don't have two reasonable sides.

If it's so clear, find me a single example of NPR news being aligned with the Democrats in a way that is divergent from objective reality.

I remember hearing a discussion of affirmative action on All Things Considered. All of the guests on the show were in favor of affirmative action (so much for all things considered), and when the 'mismatch hypothesis' (which postulates that affirmative action may actually harm some of its intended beneficiaries by putting them in institutions where they are less prepared for the academic rigor than their peers) came up, the idea was dismissed out of hand as being outdated and debunked. This plainly misrepresents the state of the research, which has pretty conclusively shown that the mismatch effect appears in elite law schools and in STEM graduate rates.

When I heard this dismissal and noticed that no one pushed back, it made me realize that the guests and host were all ideologically aligned. I still listen to NPR, but I now know that they are much more biased than I previously thought.

To downvoters: do you doubt that this happened or think it isn’t an apt example of NPR being aligned with Democratic Party positions?

I didn’t downvote, but I am wondering if this happened. A quick search of NPR transcripts makes me think the last time the mismatch hypothesis was discussed on All Things Considered was in 2012 and it was actually taken seriously (it was the focus of the piece). Perhaps you are thinking of a different public radio show, and inadvertently proving my point that people are unable to differentiate NPR news with other stuff they hear on the radio.

I appreciate your trying to find it. Here's the link. [1]

The guest refers to the mismatch hypothesis, described by a Supreme Court Justice, as an "arcane argument" that is "really proven not to be the case". Then the other guest on the show laughed at the Justice (Scalia) and mischaracterized his statement. According to her, Scalia believes that "African-American people are stupid".

In reality, the mismatch hypothesis is about largely about preparation level. If you have equally intelligent students with large differences in academic preparation, the student that is less well prepared is likely to be harmed (in terms of GPA, class rank, likelihood to drop a well-paying major) when surrounded by other students that are more well-prepared.

If one of the guests or the host were even vaguely familiar with the concept, this mischaracterization would have been questioned.

I would also note that it is mischaracterizations like these (Scalia thinks "African-American people are stupid"!) that lead to further polarization. I would expect partisan framing like this on some news outlets, but it's pretty sad to hear it on NPR, on a show whose name implies openness to all perspectives.

1: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/11/459392702/week-in-politics-tr...

So your smoking gun is... an opinion piece from 2015 where the host didn’t contradict or challenge the opinions of the guests? I’ve heard lots and lots of unchallenged opinions from guests on NPR, many of them from conservative perspectives. It is not always possible (or even desirable) to be a real-time fact checker in a daily interview show.

So again, an example of bias in actual news reporting?

It's not an opinion if it completely misrepresents a well-known sociological phenomenon. I also never said this was the only example, but it was particularly egregious because the show purports to present multiple perspectives. But hey, it looks like you're pretty set on not believing others (even when they take the time to dig up the proof that your original comment asked for), so I'll sign off here.

You do understand the difference between opinion journalism and news reporting?

NPR News is dead center along with the BBC, Reuters, the AP, Christian Science Monitor, etc.: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings

If you think NPR News has a liberal bias, that may be because reality has a liberal bias.

Plenty of Republican politicians go on NPR for interviews.

NPR opinion and talk radio pieces are slightly left of center.

> because reality has a liberal bias.

I think I've read this multiple times in this submission, and I think you're the one saying it over and over again. Do you not realize you're quoting Stephen Colbert from a news satire show?

Have you just been regurgitating this for years and no one had the decency to point it out to you?

Pretty sure I have posted this exactly once. Not sure where you get off.

Satire has a way of making uncomfortable truths easier to hear by cloaking them with humor.

Not NPR. Not even close.

We need dispassionate reporting of apparent facts, emphasis on equal time for both side of every issue/report, and zero editorializing by commission or omission.

This is a pipedream sadly.

To prod this a bit: Qanon is popular and growing conspiracy theory. Should a news organization covering it spend equal time detailing the supposed evidence of an international satanic pedophile ring as they do discrediting it?

If such a news organization became mainstream, do you think this would lead to people being more or less informed?

Regardless, I think the "zero editorializing" idea is self-defeating. As others have said; there is near infinite information and finite webpage space and broadcast time.

> Qanon is popular

Is that true though? What % of Americans support it?

What a disaster every thread about media bias is. People can’t see past the end of their nose about it. They’re all so locked into “my bias is the correct one” that even objective reality seems biased.

Of what NPR pretends to be. Maybe was, I don’t know I only got to the US in ‘07.

I remember how furious my professor was at Terry Gross for her (in his opinion rude) interview w/ Jimmy Carter. He otherwise loves Terry Gross.

But he’s a “liberal”, so he likes NPR. NPR is pretty brutal if you disagree with them and are well informed about a topic.

I had to stop listening to NPR years before Trump came along (yes, there was polarization back then) because they’d make my blood boil with, what I thought, has thinly veiled partisanship.

Some of their reporting is just grossly wrong. If they report on anything about Christianity it’s usually riddled with embarrassingly wrong statements.

And then there’s three editorial discussions. I’m an immigrant, and I’m embarrassed with NPRs obsessions with telling me how other people outside the US live. A little bit of it is very important, but after listening to NPR for about ten years I’ve learned nothing about the famous “meat and potatoe” Americans. My dad, who traveled to the Midwest for work for a couple decades taught me more about “fly-over” Americans.

That's the joke. We already have fact-focused, by-the-book journalism outfits that bend over backwards to present all reasonable sides of debate. These are always characterized as communist propaganda outlets by Trump's allies.

Sure, NPR and Axios exist. I think where Matt is wrong is that Fox, Salon, MSNBC and all the like need to be gone for a while. Their impacts will always overwrite whatever great accomplishments in truth and lack of narrative the other outfits work to establish because they're just another option to the average coffee pounding conservative or liberal looking to get their ideological rocks off on their break or in the car. These are the kind of people who describe nuanced views as "both sides" or claim they're watered down versions of "the truth".

> We already have fact-focused, by-the-book journalism outfits

Can you name them, and how you verify them as factual?

We already did. Multiple independent analyses of partisan bias in reporting agree.

Feel free to do your own research.

I was kind of asking jeffbee since he said it, but I see you provide a list there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25739773

Which analysts of partisan bias do you consider independent, and why?

For example, why should allsides.com be trusted? There seemed to be a point when "fact checkers" started to pop up all over the place, but they also had a liberal bias: www.politifactbias.com

Clearly the answer is a meta-analysis, but at a certain point it’s turtles all the way down and you need to judge whether you are being fed crap with a modicum of critical thinking.

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