Kudos to this kid. How many of us are getting bored to death by the constant coverage of politics yet suffer silently? At least he had the good initiative to write to NPR to offer feedback on something that was important to him. Nice job, kid!
Political coverage I can take and I doubt I liked trump any more than the reporters at NPR do, but that's just factionalism. I find it really problematic[1]. If there isn't anything relevant to report on, music (or dinosaurs) would do fine.
But I'm not a cute kid, so I didn't get a response. :D
On the other hand, all's good in the world when that's the problem requiring national attention!
Trump made that worse everywhere, of course.
It did make me realise that some people think the U.S. has the greatest health care system in the world though. That took some time to process.
Buying a few barrels of oil and tracking them from ground to fuel tank and making T-shirts starting from cotton and ending up as a final product are really good journalism.
Then they have the episodes where they try to sell a bunch of christmas trees, you can skip those :D
What I do like about NPR stuff is that they edit their podcasts, I just can't handle a 3 hour meandering chitchat flowing in and out of different subjects.
I grew to really hate hearing about Watergate, Watergate, Watergate, blah blah blah.
I imagine kids today are similarly sick of politics today.
One day our media will have to discover doing proper journalism - I think it will be quite a shock when the news stops writing itself. It's been like this for roughly five years (or 50, depending on how much wine I've drunk.)
You say this as the guardian are breaking a bunch of constitution-shaking-ly tough stories on the monarchy? https://davidallengreen.com/2021/02/the-queens-consent-a-str...
Also what do you expect? COVID-19 is ongoing and is still killing as near as makes no difference 1000 thousand people a day in this country, Brexit has effectively just become "real", Trump is in a major trial. It's in the news because that is what the news currently consists of...
> It's been like this for roughly five years (or 50, depending on how much wine I've drunk.)
Rosé-tinted spectacles.
"Proper journalism" is vacuous at best and a dog-whistle at worst - since you refer to 50 years ago the term "Shabby Journalism" with regard to watergate should ring a bell.
So I've been trying Al Jazeera as an additional source, and I have to say, it's good. I feel it's fairly unbiased, a bit left leaning, the writing quality is high, the occasional piece that's not is because it is written by a foreign, local, journalist that offers real local insight on an issue (e.g. they had a Tunisian journalist writing about the anniversary).
Give it a go.