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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that's how I would describe it, but they have really narrowed their focus in a way that's becoming tedious.

Their narrow focus on elite media/academic preoccupations has really made their coverage unappealing. I mean I'm interested in that stuff to an extent, but no everything in the world needs to be examined that way.

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I had a Facebook memory from four years ago commenting on how I was proud of NPR for covering the beginnings of the Trump presidency in a fair and balanced way.

Could only look back and laugh.

Not sure where they took a wrong turn, but "fair and balanced" or even "well-rounded" are not terms I would use to describe current NPR.

On their national broadcast they have a couple of reporters who do their best to be balanced (Shapiro and Greene), the rest don't try to balance stories (for example on a budget issue they’ll go to a Democrat and not also add an IND or Republican. Or on immigration, or on workers rights, etc. Those two guys though at least make an effort to have multiple sides for a story and also don’t try to spike the story as others do (from the outset frame something with great bias).

Steve Inskeep is the worst offender in my opinion.

I wouldn't say he did it single-handedly, but I went from tripling my monthly donation in the Spring to cancelling my membership and getting rid of my radio in October.

What's a good contemporary replacement for NPR that gives consistently unmotivated coverage?

It's a shame that I'm struggling to think of one example that fits into that category...

I think the era of single sources for news coverage is over, for better and for worse. On the one hand, it's harder to just dial to one place on the radio/TV/internet and be well-informed; on the other hand, if you do the work, you get way deeper into interesting subjects than was ever possible before. You can get way more info on Covid out of This Week In Virology than even the competent NPR reporters of yore could have ever given you, for example. Esoteric interviewers like Tyler Cowen (on Conversations With Tyler) are vastly smarter and more perceptive than Terry Gross et al. That said, they are not all located on the same place on a radio dial that you can just trust, and you have to sift through the muck to find them.

I don't think that happened in a vacuum, but they have acquitted themselves poorly over the last 4 years.

To a large extent media audiences self segregate and demand certain content, and media companies have responded by tailoring their products. That probably further narrows their appeal.

I have to imagine that some of these news orgs will simply fail once they become too narrow and audience preferences shift again. News operates in a market just like anything else.

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