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Comment by wombat-man | Hacker News Reader

I read his post which led to this. You should consider reading it, he cites specific examples. I think he had some good points.

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There are serious journalistic problems with his concrete claims. For example the early part of it hinges on the Mueller report showing "no credible evidence of collusion" which is a straight up misrepresentation. It found many specific instances of collaboration, and some evidence of collusion but not enough to indicate criminal conspiracy. Which is messier than what he is implying and very relevant to his argument.

Later when he talks about the political affiliations of the newsroom, how did he access the voter registrations? How many of those people don't live in DC and so aren't registered there, and how did he count them? What are the professional-ethical implications of researching your coworkers in this way?

No, YOU are misrepresenting the Mueller findings. As per the American Bar Association:

The special counsel found that Russia did interfere with the election, but “did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple efforts from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2...

With respect to obstruction: As far as obstruction, the Mueller report laid out facts on both sides but did not reach a conclusion. Barr’s letter said that “the Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’”

Yeah, this is what I remember. And I remember the media hype around his investigation.

Interesting when you say the parent is misrepresenting when that American Bar article is just a summary of the Muller report by Barr and Rosenstein, who both have come under criticism for their review of the report.

Are you really accusing the left-leaning American Bar Association of supporting Trump?

I'm merely pointing out your misrepresentation of the situation. It's not an article from the American Bar Association in support of your statement. It's a news article summarizing the findings of Barr. It has nothing to do with whether the bar is left or right leaning.

There's literally one verified fact to the whole story, Trump's idiot son took a meeting he shouldn't have taken and then nothing serious came from it.

The entire liberal media was in a tizzy for a year about "collusion" and pee tapes, pulitzer prizes got handed out over it, and then everybody just got really quiet and stopped talking about it.

Your points seem irrelevant to this

NPR listener demographics

2011: 26% conservative, 23% center, 37% liberal, 14% ?

2023: 11% conservative, 21% center, 67% liberal, 1% ?

Is or should be their main editorial goal to exactly mirror the political affiliations of americans? Is that the issue Berliner was raising in his essay?

I didn't read it that way, and I do find this relevant to the points he was making, which were much more about journalistic practice and ethics than about the demographics of listeners per se.

To what degree is this shift due to NPR's own actions vs. the pressure of the former president?

I would guess that any news source that is not specifically pro-Trump has bled conservative viewers/listeners/readers in the last 8 years.

Part of the problem with this stat, which I saw someone point out on Twitter, is that conservative demographics have changed since 2011. College-educated white voters, especially women, have shifted significantly toward the Democratic party during the Trump years, and that was probably the biggest listener demographic for NPR.

So NPR listeners in 2011 and 2023 could be the exact same people and the % of conservative listeners would have gone down. (That said, I suspect this isn’t the only explanation - NPR content has gotten more ideologically left during that timeframe too)

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