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Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

> turning all news into something akin to NPR

Why do you see NPR as such a positive example of journalism? It seems to me that it's been skating on its previous good reputation for quite some time now.

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Likely because NPR has yet to tread on one of their beliefs with biased reporting. It will happen eventually, the rate at which it's happening is accelerating, and when they realize it happens they'll feel the same outage we all did our first time. The umbrage, the "you were supposed to be unbiased" cry

I grew up on NPR. It was always on in the background. On the way to and from daycare, in the car on Sunday mornings on the way to the uu church, playing out of a small boom box on the back porch, or winding up the miles of a long road trip. Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, Schickelie mix, etc, all were the background music to my childhood. When I entered adult life, I tried to continue listening, but leading to, during, and after the 2016 election, the biases became too base, too visible to ignore

Is there no chance that instead of NPR all of a sudden being exposed as biased, it was your own biases that were exposed?

My problem with NPR is that is the spirit of remaining unbiased, they allow both sides of the political spectrum to say their piece with little to no push back. Whichever side spews the best lines of BS wins regardless of the actual facts on the ground.

Can’t speak for all of NPR but what I listen to regularly pushes back on claims from both sides. My local affiliate had an especially critical interview with the state governor and the interviewer and governor agreed that they should do these hour long interviews more often.

NPR has been pushing back harder, and will label untruths as "lies" where earlier (circa 2015/16) it was very reluctant to do so. Many news organisations in the US tried very hard through the 2016 campaign cycle to normalise what was a very-far-from-normal. I've recently been going through some Brookings Institution podcasts from ~2012--2016, and the degree to which the hard-right shift was normalised at the time is telling.

NPR in particular avoided the word "lie" as late as 2017, see:

"NPR And The Word 'Liar': Intent Is Key", January 25, 20175:00 AM ET <https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/25/511503605...>

Contrast 2024 where this is no longer a problem:

"162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-checks former President Trump", August 11, 20247:00 AM ET <https://www.npr.org/2024/08/11/nx-s1-5070566/trump-news-conf...>

NPR also pressed the former president on lies in an interview in 2022. It didn't go well:

"Pressed on his election lies, former President Trump cuts NPR interview short", January 12, 20225:01 AM ET <https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072204478/donald-trump-npr-i...>

My view is that NPR's stance change is a positive development.

At some point, you the audience member has to be able to whittle down two sides of an argument and determine who "wins", rather than having some broadcaster decide for you.

This is...kind of an insane take on what NPR does and does not cover?

First, the insinuation that they make an effort to remain unbiased is kinda wild. As an NPR listener and donator, that isn't at all the impression I get. They seem to overwhelmingly cater their coverage and their slant towards people a lot like me. That's why I listen and why I pay and what paying customers actually expect (whether they are consciously aware of how they are supporting and consuming their own preferred bias in media is maybe 50/50 but whatever).

People conflate bias with increased criticism of one side vs. the other. But those would only be equivalent if there was some law of the universe dictating that both sides of an issue were consistently equally deserving of criticism.

I think this would be a desire for bothsidesism, the principle that (say) flat Earth theory and spherical Earth theory are both valid view points and should be given equal amounts of coverage.

Maybe so, but that doesn't matter all that much. All journalism has a point of view and its impossible to be completely unbiased...the most suspicious kind of media consumers are those that cannot recognize the bias within the media they consume.

NPR is undoubtedly a "leans left" shop in the same way Fox is undoubtedly "leans right".

Of course, even if we were talking about the WSJ or Economist or something...that's still biased. Being dead center between the current interpretation of left or right is still a kind of bias.

> All journalism has a point of view and its impossible to be completely unbiased...

So the alternative is to not even try? To double-down or triple-down on bias and shamelessly continue to self-label as journalism? To whine & cry about "the threat to democracy" while neglecting their duties as The Fourth Estate?

I think not.

The problem is simple: stop lowering the bar. Stop calling things journalism that don't qualify. If your pet barks, would you call it a cat?

You've got Jim Leher is turning in his grave.

https://www.openculture.com/2020/01/jim-lehrers-16-rules-for...

No, the alternative is to be more honest about it. The whole debate about "objectivity" is because the previous definition of objectivity produced consistent bias. And by that I mean consistent huge bias.

Objectivity meant that journalist had to identify two sides and report on both equally - even if the acts in question were not equal in any objective way. If I obviously lied and you obviously did not, articles did not reflected that at all. What was called objectivity enabled and facilitated bad actors. Consistently.

Second issue was that just a selection of topics and selection of who will be allowed to express things itself creates bias. And the rules about that consistently disadvantaged certain groups and advantaged other groups.

I understand there's a bias. But review that Leher list and you'll realize that 95% of what is passed off as journalism violates too many of those rules. That is, it doesn't qualify to be called journalism.

As threats to democracy go, there's nothing worse than a self-proclaimed journalist (read: a hack) fronting like they're fulfilling their duties as a member of The Fourth Estate. Frankly, most of them don't know the difference between cause and correlation (which is an essential / foundational concept in truth and being objective), let alone what The Fourth Estate is (and why it matters).

The problem is, the publishing industry doesn't even realize it's wrong. It's blind to its own blind spot.

What could go wrong?

First of all, funnily, Lehrer rules do not define journalism. Not even historically, origins of journalism is not that.

And some of them in fact do cause own bias - they presume how the result should look like. Lehrer rules will facilitate both side journalism where you blame both sides equally regardless of facts on the ground. As I said, it is biased toward bad actors. And against those who says the truth.

Note how they contain nothing about real fact checking. They are super easy to "be followed" while being manipulative. Stuff like "I am just reporting on what X said" whereas X said unfounded accusation that is just getting traction because you refuse to fact check it.

So we're going to nitpick Lehrer while giving current (mainstream) media a free pass? I'm sorry, I don't wish to participate in such a distraction. And the irony only highlights how broken the current situation is.

Is NPR really that bad as Fox seems from outside of America?

Not even close. Fox has admitted in court that their programming is not journalism. NPR definitely swings left, don't get me wrong, but Fox is completely unhinged. Their own lawyers argued no reasonable person would beleive them. They're just not comparable in any rational sense.

This is the problem with moral equivalence in judging media bias. One side can slide slightly left and still be almost completely factual (if slightly illogical), while the right can be neither factual nor logical - but we are made to pretend that the biases are equal here.

As a general principle, and I know it's not a very wise thing to say, left-leaning sources are on a different dimension of factuality than right-leaning ones.

I think that also depends on the story. You saw far different reporting on Covid from the two sources. Some of the stuff coming out of the right was crazy but some ended up being the truth and the left leaning sources clearly had their marching orders dialed in and even cast things that were eventually proven true to be “lies” at the time.

Crazy that ended up true? And what “lies”? In the country where I was back then (Hungary), it was quite different, but that’s also because abuse there was and there is still no opposition. COVID was just simply mishandled, and full of corruption, just as usual.

It's not about right or left, the biggest populists in the 90's were labeling themselves as communists or socialists.

There were nazis, fascists and nationalists too. They were just not in the mainstream.

Yeah NPR and Fox are the same degree of biased. It's just harder for people to tell that NPR is biased because its bias is aligned better with the liberal regimes of most western countries. If the regime in your country was right leaning, you'd see most media display that bias and NPR would be your go-to example of something unhinged and biased.

Most left leaning people can't even tell when they're watching something biased towards their beliefs because to them it's just like a fish swimming in water.

> NPR is undoubtedly a "leans left" shop in the same way Fox is undoubtedly "leans right".

Oh c'mon, it's ridiculous that I need to call out a false equivalence like that.

Fox News isn't even news; they've admitted in court that they're an entertainment program. NPR is... not even remotely that. Certainly NPR has a bias, but they at least do their best to tell the truth. Fox News makes a business out of lying for outrage engagement.

> Fox News isn't even news; they've admitted in court that they're an entertainment program.

The admission they made was about one show, the one that Tucker Carlson ran before his departure from Fox[0]. Taking that and eliding it to the rest of Fox News sounds either lazy or dishonest.

An NPR host said in 1995 that if millions of people who believed in the religious concept of "rapture" actually did evaporate from this earth, the world would be a better place. After public outrage, they issued an apology but continued their relationship with the host. Does that make them tacitly support such bigotry? Nobody sued NPR over this (perhaps if this happened today and not 30 years ago, somebody would have), but what would their defense have been? That people shouldn't take things said by a show host so literally?

I used to listen and donate to NPR, but no longer do, because I don't share your confidence that they do in fact "do their best to tell the truth". I might actually feel better about it if, like Fox, they came out and admitted that they are, at least in the year 2024, in many ways a nakedly partisan organization, instead of the taxpayer-funded neutral bringer of facts that they pretend to be.

[0]: The judge ended up dismissing the case in favor of Fox: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...

I wouldn't say NPR "leans left", rather that they "lean establishment". NPR has no sympathy at all for socialists, third party candidates, most protest movements, etc. Republicans just have too much political diversity and churn in their base in the last few decades to be anywhere near as uniform and cohesive a bloc and so the establishment usually appears at least superficially Democrat-biased.

Note: Local NPR programs are a lot better than national programs, IMO. There are two available NPR stations in my area, and they're really not similar at all except for a small overlap in programming.

Perhaps not everyone will accept the judgment of Media Bias Fact Check, but I find their ratings mostly fair and based more on verifiably failed fact checks and the like than editorial opinion.

They rate NPR as having a left-center bias and high factual reporting. The bias is based on story selection rather than the reporting itself containing substantial bias.

They rate Fox News as having a right bias and mixed factual reporting. The bias based is on editorial positions and they note that news reports are generally accurate, but commentary often isn't.

If that seems unfair, consider that they rate MSNBC comparably to Fox with left bias and mixed factual reporting, though they do give it a slightly higher overall credibility rating.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/npr

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fox-news

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/msnbc/

> Is there no chance that instead of NPR all of a sudden being exposed as biased, it was your own biases that were exposed?

There is a fairly simple heuristic to determine if a media outlet has a partisan bias. Does their coverage disproportionately portray one party in a positive light and the other party in a negative light?

The US has two major political parties that are each supported by approximately the same number of people. It would be mighty shocking if it turned out that one of them was right about everything and the other was wrong about everything. So if that's the impression that a media outlet leaves you with, that is a biased media outlet.

This is different than their coverage of an individual story. For any given issue, one of the parties might legitimately be right and the other one wrong. But that's not going to be true for every issue in the same direction.

"The Confederacy is not as bad as portrayed by the media in the pocket of the Union would let you believe"

That statement is unintentionally factually accurate and clearly an attempt to make someone try to defend the despised enemy, which really proves my point. The Confederacy were obviously wrong on slavery but if they were right on something else then "Union media" would be the last place you'd find an objective account of it.

Reasonable people can unironically agree with this statement without being a bad person or condoning slavery, so I suppose it's an illustrative point.

Republicans support a known liar, who lied and lies about almost everything. How could someone honest not portray them in a negative light? There is nothing redeemable about the whole Trump cult.

Politicians lying is so common it's a cliche. Trump does it in an unusual way, because they typically lie about what they're going to do and then you don't find out until after they're in office, whereas Trump will say inaccurate things you can contemporaneously validate.

He'll do things like call Kamala Harris the "border czar", which she never had as an official title, but she was actually tasked with handling some aspects of the migrant issue. So then it's not exactly accurate, but to write a story about it, now you're writing a story about immigration (which Trump wants) and explaining the issue by telling people that Harris really was tasked with doing something about it, with the implication that it's not solved. He's clearly doing it on purpose. It's one of the reasons the news media hates him so much. He's effectively manipulating them and they don't like it.

But then, for example, in the Trump interview with Elon Musk, Musk proposed a government efficiency commission and Trump was receptive to the idea. Which isn't a bad idea at all, but that was not the focus of any of the interview coverage I observed.

> He'll do things like call Kamala Harris the "border czar", which she never had as an official title

Trump's strategy (whether one exists or not) around this aside, heaps of people have been called the "X czar" by the media for decades. As you point out, it's a shorthand for someone in the presiding administration who is tasked with some singular objective. Rarely did their official title ever contain the word "czar".

The current media "fact check" circus around Harris never having been the border czar is yet another clearly identifiable example of a class of people who were so dismayed by Trump's presidency that they would go to any length, however distasteful, to prevent a second term.

Not really. I think the change from Diane Rehm to JJ Johnson and now the new “1A” host is precisely emblematic of the decline of NPR/APM (I do not care about the difference) in that era.

Agreed. I was a longtime listener since I had fond memories of my dad listening in the car growing up, but it’s borderline unlistenable now. Emblematic of the drastic change this generation in the aims of journalism, where everything in public life has become politicized, and the goal is no longer to inform and engage listeners, but to persuade and influence.

Yup. I used to listen to it while working summer jobs, something new every day to pass the time (not just politics either, Diane was almost a variety show in a sense, sometimes it’d be literature or authors or whatever too) and her retiring/her slot switching to 1A was really the catalyst for me to stop listening to npr altogether. I lasted a few months and realized it wasn’t going to get better and this was just the angle they wanted now.

I adore Terri Gross tho, I should put fresh air on my podcast app.

NPR does an excellent job of manufacturing a facade of being fair and disinterested, but in recent years, they've become more brazen about being a PR campaign for wealthy elites, their enterprises, and their politics, a la the Pareto principle. If you're against that, then NPR has been pretty intolerable for the past decade.

NPR member stations are on the whole decent, but the way NPR came out in force against Sanders showed both how out of touch and unabashedly unreasonable they could be when called to toe their betters' line. I'd been a regular supporter through the early Car Talk and Science Friday days, ending with their disgusting behavior during the primaries.

Pulling off making everyone look biased but you is quite a feat, and I'm impressed how many still consent rather than admit their emperor's indecency.

Fwiw, I feel the same.

What annoys me the most about NPR is the relentless gaslighting. They act / speak as if they don't have an agenda (i.e., bias) and the rest of us are too stupid to see it. There's a smug "we didn't say X or Y" attitude but the problem is the questions they don't ask, the subtle ins and outs they pretend don't exist. Their news feels redacted to the point it looks like Swiss cheese.

I enjoy the speciality shows (e.g., Hidden Brain) but the sociopolitical current events on the local NYC and PHL stations is gringe-tastic too often.

Oops. I should have said, "Their news feels redacted to the point it looks like Swiss cheese, and smells like Limburger."

are there elites that are not wealthy? or does wealthy elite just sound better as a soundbite?

Academics, artists, and public intellectuals reasonably qualify as elite while often not being wealthy.

Also lot of journalists. Though it is questionable are they part of elite. But they act like they are and follow same talking points. While not making much money.

A lot of people in professional jobs who identify with the wealthy to distinguish their place in the hierarchy from the next layer down.

Elites as defined by having an agenda, and perhaps a station to enact it from. Bureaucrats, politicians, academics, etc generally have different domains of influence and aren't all wealthy.

NPR are proud of their sponsors, and prouder yet of how very little all of the public's dollars make up of their revenue in comparison.

That's definitely not the definition of an elite.

The Rasmussen poll on elites[0] has a nice working definition of "those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile" as well as a fascinating material difference in the beliefs of that 1% of the population as compared to the rest.

If I may editorialize, perhaps we can also posit that if someone does not meet these criteria but nevertheless shares the same opinions as the elite, then they are desiring to join the elite.

[0]: https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/wp-content/uploads/...

There’s perhaps wealthy people who are not elites.

Unbiased news is literally impossible now that "alternative facts" are in the mainstream. Take climate change for example:

Party A: "As greenhouse gasses increase, so too does the temperature according to historical measurements. We should do something about this."

Party B: "There is no way to measure the global temperature, and anyone claiming to have done so is working for Party A. We shouldn't address this at all."

Whether or not you as a journalist, were to include a factoid about it being the hottest summer on record, you're now doing biased reporting. Sure, if you include the fact you're siding with Party A and saying the fact is wrong is siding with Party B. However, not talking about it all is still siding with Party B, since that's their end goal. Factually accurate, inaccurate, and ambiguous are therefore all a form of bias.

The trick it to be biased towards truth and humility. If they choose which party to align with based on considerations other than considering which party believes what that would be an excellent start.

For example, in this case a publication could run an article saying that the hottest summer on record just happened, and present cases on how big a problem it is and how much in the way of resources should be dedicated to solving it - including the case for the whole thing being a non-issue. That'd be pretty good journalism. They'd probably manage to upset both parties or make both of them happy if they did that IMO.

Neither of those are factually accurate statements; they pair a claim to fact in the first half with a policy proposal in the second half. "We should/should not do something about this" is not a statement of fact, it's a value proposition. So if a media outlet is consistently pushing the same value proposition (namely, that we should expend considerable effort to counteract climate change), then it's biased, regardless of the factual accuracy of what they report.

Biases in which direction?

I love NPR but to believe NPR is not biased reporting is completely delusional.

biased ? sure they are. Groundnews ranks them as clear left leaning.

https://ground.news/interest/npr

I think that's an overly simplistic reading. The rate them as leaning left with high factualness. While that's not perfect, calling that clear left leaning is likely to give the wrong impression.

> rate them as leaning left with high factualness.

that seems to be the trend with left leaning news sources. They don't make up lies, but they hide truths leaving people with a distorted view of the facts they have. It's nice to be able to trust that you're not being directly lied to by NPR, but you still end up feeling deceived.

The right leaning news sources tend to tell a mix of truth and complete fabrications, while also refusing talk about truths inconvenient to the narrative they're telling so sure NPR is the clear winner in that sense, but the bar is set so low that it can't really be counted as a victory.

> They don't make up lies, but they hide truths leaving people with a distorted view of the facts they have. It's nice to be able to trust that you're not being directly lied to by NPR, but you still end up feeling deceived.

It's not just the omissions though, it's the implications.

For example, they were covering the Republicans saying they want to do something about the immigrants and Fentanyl illegally coming over the border. NPR's coverage made a point of telling you that most of the Fentanyl comes over at marked border crossings rather than through the desert, strongly implying this was meant to be refuting some lie the Republicans were telling. But the clip they aired didn't have the Republicans claiming otherwise. They were plausibly talking about the desert in the context of the people crossing there. And installing a border fence there could arguably free up some customs resources to use to inspect more trucks. But they're so desperate for a "gotcha" that they make one up.

The republicans are lying about that topic though.

Fentanyl is not being smuggled by immigrants coming over the border. Stopping immigration will not stop the fentanyl.

Most (not all) of the seized fentanyl is not being smuggled by immigrants coming over the border. The arguments Republicans make are that the migrants are exacerbating the situation by diverting customs resources and that those numbers could be skewed because there is equipment to detect drugs at ports of entry but not between border crossings, so the seizure rates could be higher at ports of entry out of proportion to the trafficking rates.

Obviously this is politics and people can disagree with their arguments, but this is one of the other favorite "don't lie but kind of do" games. The claim that detection rates could be higher at ports of entry isn't outrageous, there is some logic to it, but since by definition we don't know what the rate of undetected trafficking is in each location, there is "no evidence" for their claim. This is not equivalent to it being proven false, but that will often be implied.

Republicans are saying that immigrants are literally bringing fentanyl in (as in they have fentanyl in their backpacks when crossing the border). That they are the cause of the fentanyl problem. Stop them to solve the fentanyl problem.

To believe this, you have to assume that the reporting on fentanyl smuggling by the DEA and CBP and the fentanyl convictions data from the USSC that all point to US citizen being responsible for bringing in fentanyl in to the US is insufficient because "we don't know the undetected trafficking rate is in each location". It's possible that we missed this one immigrant carrying by themself 51% of the fentanyl brought into the US, so lets put the blame on immigrants.

> Republicans are saying that immigrants are literally bringing fentanyl in (as in they have fentanyl in their backpacks when crossing the border). That they are the cause of the fentanyl problem. Stop them to solve the fentanyl problem.

Again, they're making two parallel arguments. One is, some of the migrants have fentanyl (true; not established that the number is very large), but the number could be large and isn't known. The other is, customs is spread thin because of migrants and is not catching the smugglers as a result. In both cases they propose the same solution, i.e. stem the flow of migrants.

> It's possible that we missed this one immigrant carrying by themself 51% of the fentanyl brought into the US, so lets put the blame on immigrants.

The claim is presumably that they could be missing a lot because there are a lot of migrants and more than one of them could have brought fentanyl.

Not to be overly pedantic, but Ground lists them on average as "Lean Left", with that rating coming from two "Lean Left" and one "Center" rating from three 3rd party media bias rating orgs. Their factuality is also High, so while there may be editorial subjectivity in what they choose to publish, the stuff they do publish is generally high quality and truthful.

For some other examples, Pink News is listed as Left with Mixed factuality. Fox News holds Right and also Mixed.

There are nearly no reputable media outlets with no amount of bias at all. I certainly wouldn't stop consuming NPR for having a slight lean to the left.

I don't think the OP was pointing to it as a example of positivity but an example of a business model (donation supported)

NPR does a fabulous job not sounding like CNN or Fox News with their breathlessness. Sure like 1 in 100 stories from them would be meh, but I use them and APNews as my primary source and it doesn’t feel like a panic attack when I go to their pages as compared to most mainstream news.

They lack the alarmism of CNN, but the way that outlets like NPR were so comfortable to tow obvious political lines during the pandemic (such as even entertaining the possibility of a “lab leak” hypothesis, painting it to be insanely conspiratorial and/or racist, despite the Wuhan lab being supported by NIH grants) — the most clear and dangerous version of manufactured consent I’ve seen in American media this generation.

Most media outlets (including NPR) begrudgingly accepted this as a strong likelihood for the initial source of the virus only a year or two later, once they had political approval.

Journalists and editors in these larger institutions no longer have any courage to actually be a “fourth estate” or think independently of government.

The Wuhan lab is still not the likely source for the SARS-CoV-2, despite what you want to believe.

They didn't write that it was likely, just that NPR willingly participated in the Establishment campaign to suppress and distort the lab leak hypothesis.

My understanding is that expert opinion in recent months have been converging towards the lab leak theory. Consider this opinion piece[0], which points out some notable differences between the previous outbreaks of coronaviruses that had natural origins to Covid.

I'm not sure whether GP really wants to believe that Covid has man-made origins like you claim, but I think by now with all the evidence that has been released into the behind-the-scenes workings of Dr. Fauci et al[1] we can all agree that in the early days, a consensus was deliberately manufactured away from the lab leak theory. Moreover, there is clear public interest in discovering the true origin as well as preventing this type of politicization of the scientific process in the future.

What is your theory as to the most likely source?

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid...

[1]: https://www.public.news/p/fauci-diverted-us-government-away

I think people forget that initially the lab leak was being pushed -hard- by the far right with zero evidence other than speculation and rather than stir up the masses lots of new orgs abstained from it with no clear evidence. After more data came out and more analysis then it became much more credible theory with experts having looked over it rather than the bot armies on twitter/Facebook/etc.

driving

get bored

remember I have a radio

turn on NPR

in this episode we're going to investigate the relationship between consensual undocumented migrant men and underage boys who want to seem older, on this hour of the Latino story hour

click

repeat every 4-6 months

Or, repeat never having done the above with a carful of 8 year olds

I'm just wondering, is this a true episode that happened to you or are you being hyperbolic and fabricating this so-called experience, because frankly I don't think this story is based in reality, where I like to operate. Sources, if you have them though.

I'm sure GP is being facetious, though perhaps with an allusion to stories like "How climate change is hitting vulnerable Indonesian trans sex workers"[0]. It's neither from NPR nor about Latinos as in GP's (unlikely to be real) example, but nevertheless emblematic of what one may come across frequently in left-leaning media sources: combine as many subject matters as possible that are currently in vogue in the progressive thought landscape, without much relevance to the broader public.

[0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/indonesian...

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