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Comment by next_xibalba | Hacker News Reader

To wit, during the BLM riots of 2020, NPR published a piece on how looting was a legitimate form of protest. I mark that as the moment they lost both my trust and my attention. A very sad, eye opening moment for me.

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What in the world are you on about? They published an interview with an author who had - admittedly - controversial takes looting. You make it sound like they were telling people to go smash windows.

It's telling that you chose not to link the actual piece: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...

The “admission” was not part of the original publication. They added both that note and changed the title well after the fact.

https://archive.is/2020.08.27-191914/https://www.npr.org/sec...

The mere fact that they platformed such an extreme, insane viewpoint is the issue. If you can find a similarly sympathetic platforming of a far right nutter by NPR, maybe I’ll take you seriously. Show me one NPR story about the J6 riots that contorts this far to justify and I’ll concede the point entirely.

I listened to NPR for over 20 years and the bias became gag worthy toward the end.

If the best you can do is that they occasionally interview left leaning authors with out-there views, I don’t know what to tell you.

The core programming, things like The Sound of Ideas, Marketplace, Morning Edition, the hourly news updates, etc hardly have “gag worthy” bias.

Regarding platforming a J6 insurrectionist: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/21/g-s1-29188/new-npr-series-a-g...

bad media literacy. they even included a trigger warning for readers like that:

> This story was updated on Sept. 1, 2020. The original version of this story, which is an interview with an author who holds strong political views and ideas, did not provide readers enough context for them to fully assess some of the controversial opinions discussed.

The "admission" is irrelevant and was plainly included to appease readers like yourself. Did you actually read the piece? It's unmistakably an interview - not an article, and certainly not an editorial. It's difficult to understand how anyone could read it and arrive at such a distorted conclusion.

Right — they’re lending credibility that leftwing extremism is a valid viewpoint, but you’re unable to name a similar example of rightwing extremism they’ve hosted.

That’s classic bias.

Your assertion that I am "unable to name a similar example" is as baseless as it is puzzling, given that no such request was made. Regardless, it took me roughly eight seconds to find an interview with a Christian fundamentalist expressing an equally "extreme" viewpoint.

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/31/nx-s1-5077780/extremely-ameri...

Giving an interview isn't "lending credit" to. By that logic, the best media would be one that repeatedly tries to hide the truth, because showing the truth must be giving credence to it. This is a kind of doublespeak - freedom is censorship.

Part of whole, unbiased programming is giving interviews to people on the edges, to extremists. If you don't do that, you're intentionally augmenting the story. People do this with the right all the time. They'll purposefully ignore the extremists, which in turn creates an image that such groups are completely rational. For example, news did this constantly with covid denialists like Qanon. They seem just like skeptics of the government... when you ignore the jewish space lasers and 5G covid vaccine. And then that backfired when Qanon attempted a coup. Um, oops!

Surely if you are concerned about platforming you'd be concerned about the literal actual self-described fascists and white supremacists platformed by various now mainstream right wing news outlets, right?

The replies to this comment are untruthful. The journalist was clearly sympathetic to the author's ideology, which NPR later tried to conceal. As the diff from original to latest shows:[1]

  "hand-wringing about looting" -> "condemnation of looting"
  "bemoaned the property damage" -> "denounced the property damage"
  "Korean small-business owner murdering 15-year-old Latasha Harlins" -> "Korean small-business owner [killing] 15-year-old Latasha Harlins"

IMO, you've been downvoted to cover up the journalist's bias and, arguably, the bias of NPR's audience.

[1] https://www.diffchecker.com/CJz1Bn51/

Was it this? On August 27, 2020, Natalie Escobar for Code Switch interviewed Vicky Osterweil about her book In Defense Of Looting. The segment was titled "One Author's Argument 'In Defense Of Looting'", and was subsequently retitled "One Author's Controversial View: 'In Defense Of Looting'".

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/vicky-osterweil/in-...

Here's a link to the diff between first publication and today: https://www.diffchecker.com/CJz1Bn51/

That's an awesome tool

Lol.

"because they had to appeal to all these new Black and Brown nations all over the world" was updated to "because they had to appeal to all these new Black and brown nations all over the world".

Glad that they clarified that for me.

Are you sure that article wasn't an interview with an author who wrote a book that took that stance? Having a conversation with someone who has arguably extremist views is very different from holding that extremist view.

Funny, I was told "if a Nazi sits down at a table of ten people, there are eleven Nazis at that table" for years (and in particular by NPR listeners), but suddenly there's now a use/mention distinction for platforming extremist views when it's your side that does it? Color me shocked at the hypocrisy.

> platforming extremist views when it's your side that does it?

Irony it's called "viewpoint diversity" when your side does it, and "platforming extremist views" when the other side does it.

Sorry, but exactly what point are you trying to make here? Are you suggesting that NPR has never interviewed - say - Christian fundamentalists (they have)? Are you suggesting that they should interview more of them? What, precisely, would make you happy here?

As I've been told for the last decade, "everything is political" therefore NPR can't provide unbiased or neutral coverage of anything, therefore there should be no federal funding of NPR or PBS. Ideologues and corpirations donate more than enough money to sustain both without the pretense of impartiality provided by federal funding.

If "everything is political", then eliminating federal funding from NPR and PBS doesn’t solve the problem - it guarantees that only corporate and ideological interests shape the narrative. Public funding exists not to claim perfect neutrality, but to create a space where journalism isn’t entirely driven by profit motives or partisan agendas. Strip that away, and you’re not removing bias - you’re institutionalizing it.

Journalism, and specifically NPR, is already driven entirely by corporate and ideological interests. Your supposition that federal funding helps remove bias is trivially disproven by the last decade of coverage of NPR, where I literally (literally!) have not been able to turn it on without race, gender, or Trump being mentioned within a minute (it became a game). To be fair, there was one exception. and that was a replay of a David Foster Wallace interview from 2003. Which was immediately followed by a current interview with two women talking about white men's obsession with Infinite Jest and how their podcast was helping deconstruct toxic masculinity or something like that. The comparison in quality was stark.

The time for caring about and preserving civic-level notions of neutrality and objectivity was a decade ago. I don't care anymore. If wingnuts want to unduly influence Americans through broadcasting, they can do it like everyone else--without taxpayer dollars.

If your position is "I don't care anymore", then you're not making a principled argument - you're venting. That's fine, just don't pretend it's a policy stance.

"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles." likewise isn't a policy stance, it's naked hypocrisy.

It's a free country so people are afforded the right to be hypocrites, but nobody is entitled to receive public funding when doing so.

You're not actually critiquing hypocrisy - you're just deciding whose version of it gets a microphone. Pulling public funding doesn't eliminate bias, it just ensures the only voices left are the ones with capital to shout the loudest.

Is it? Show me a similarly soft pedaled, deferential NPR interview of a right wing extremist.

Someone else in this thread posted a diffed view of the interview demonstrating how NPR reshaped the article a week after publication. Very, very instructive.

> Show me a similarly soft pedaled, deferential NPR interview of a right wing extremist.

not making a very good argument with this

> Show me a similarly soft pedaled, deferential NPR interview of a right wing extremist.

Steve Inskeep did 30 minutes with Steve Bannon this week. They did a piece with Chris Rufo yesterday (he's the guy that got right wing media to start freaking out about CRT, and then DEI). But please, do go on clutching your pearls about the WORST POSSIBLE THING EVER: PROPERTY DAMAGE!! Nope, not civil rights violations or gleefully platforming some of the most objectively harmful viewpoints on modern politics, nope, it's PROPERTY DAMAGE that is absolutely the most important possible thing to get upset about.

Harvard and UNC lost at the Supreme Court when sued over their DEI programs being illegal discrimination.

Comparing calling out that illegal bigotry to people trying to justify looting is precisely what people are saying is biased.

If true, that is insane and if presented as factual those involved should be fired. But throwing the baby out with the bath water is not sensible.

Oh and to my original point, why is this not cited or linked to in the executive order? I think it would strengthen it if anything.

I can’t be sure but I assume they’re talking about this: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...

This is an interview with an author that NPR acknowledges as controversial, not NPR presenting the author’s opinions as fact. But I doubt the distinction matters in the current rhetorical environment.

peoples' media literacy is so bad

That acknowledgement was tacked on well after publication. Even interviewing this person was an absurdity and revelatory of the kind of bias at npr. Truly insane.

> revelatory of the kind of bias at NPR

I could happily cherry-pick any of the multiple times they’ve interviewed controversial, evangelical Christian leaders and come to the opposite “revelation.”

> That acknowledgement was tacked on well after publication.

Retractions and postscripts are an accepted feature of journalism.

> That acknowledgement was tacked on well after publication.

The original title was "One Author's Argument 'In Defense Of Looting'".

https://web.archive.org/web/20200827191914/https://www.npr.o...

> Even interviewing this person was an absurdity and revelatory of the kind of bias at npr.

So news organizations should not cover things which may seem sensational, especially those which are being actively talked about in the context of the current news cycle?

Right, these people are essentially arguing in favor of censorship. Basically, we should water down views and filter out extremists. Which is a great way to make insane people seem rational... which I think is a media phenomena we should all be familiar with by now.

I'm not sure what article about looting is being referenced, but NPR did interview author Vicky Osterweil about her book "In Defense of Looting". It would be extremely surprising to hear that NPR endorsed looting as a form of protest. The interview was definitely not an endorsement.

You don’t have to agree with this take, but it has historical precedent and merits discussion. In popular culture, “Do The Right Thing” (controversially?) posed the question back in 1989. And Black leaders have been talking about it since the 60s: https://jacobin.com/2020/09/martin-luther-king-riots-looting...

That was not the official position of NPR the organization or even an opinion piece by an NPR employee, it was an interview with an author.

This is known as platforming

That’s true, they had someone on for an interview. If that’s your biggest gripe, some random topical interview they had several years ago, then I’m not really sure what you’re looking for.

A similar rightwing interview.

Sure, here you go: https://www.npr.org/2024/08/31/nx-s1-5077780/extremely-ameri...

Ah yes, one piece of free speech justifies deleting the entire station.

Also, I mean... They were right actually?

That, or the Boston Tea Party should be reframed as an illegitimate form of protest against His Majesty and His Majesty's Representatives In the New World.

When, oh when, will American classrooms stop teaching that those looters were just honest young men fighting for their freedoms? I'm tired of this propaganda in our public schools. /s

It doesn’t have to be deleted. It just shouldn’t be funded by taxpayers.

I suppose you’d feel the same if Fox News said J6 was a legitimate political protest, right.

Which branch of government is Fox News taking EOs from again? Ah, no, it's the other way round.

Completely irrelevant and unfounded. I was responding to this:

> Ah yes, one piece of free speech justifies deleting the entire station.

Well, they did say that and continue to say that. And, the president has literally pardoned the insurrectionists... so...

How is interviewing an author, and explicitly saying this is one author's view, the same as the three biggest hosts on Fox explicitly saying J6 was a peaceful protest and not an insurrection, even as they privately decry it as a disgusting and dangerous day for the GOP.

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