I don't expect the audience cares very much about this, though, which is sort of to OPs implied point. We've reached a place where each side of the political spectrum is not only happily ignorant of the other side's good points, but in fact, fearful of even having the discussion. If you go too far afield from the party line, you will be punished, and public radio (along with non-public radio, cable, broadcast news, and most other forms of legacy media) is a shrinking market, unwilling to alienate the core audience.
(The shorthand term for this is "audience capture", and IMO, This American Life has a death grip on a very particular sort of audience, which even if you set partisan politics aside, is representative only of itself.)
But they're still far from actually balanced. As a frequent listener, I'd characterize their overall coverage of conservatives as "a bemused, curious foreign tourist".
Mostly because the people who would be able to do that have "chosen" to retire.
Partisans would much rather that they only hear about the ugly parts of the opposition, and never hear about the ugly parts of their own tribe.
OP said it's a "slice", not a "statistically accurate representation". I think his intent was to say "They cover everything", not "They cover everything in due proportion".
And, BTW, I've yet to find any show (news or entertainment) that is even close to being statistically accurate representation of society. Such shows will not survive - not enough people will listen.
> Such shows will not survive - not enough people will listen.
Well yes, exactly. TAL has an editorial voice, it's clear what that voice is (even if it's difficult to describe in conventional political terms), but it's not inaccurate to say that the voice is left of center. Moreover, it must be, because that is the market for the show.
That even if a show is apolitical (or mostly apolitical like TAL), it will inherently have some political bias because the creators are inherently biased.
This will create a “niche” for the show, whether it’s intentional or not. Thanks for expanding my perspective on this.
Reminds me of a recent quote from a scientist interviewed by the NYT, who said that science is inherently political, because the system and people it’s built on are political.
Recievers of such messages might see it as political when you speak about covid/masks, climate change, etc. no matter how hard you try to be unbiased. Unfortunately, anything can be a political symbol and you can either choose to accept their bias and avoid the symbol to stay "apolitical" or accept the "niche" you have been put into.
"99% of climatologist agree on ... yet, joining us, guru shananda, opposing it with equal air time" is a noble but net-negative attempt to address that bias.
I agree, but I'd extend with one other observation: a show can be rigorously unbiased in its coverage of any particular topic, but extremely biased in the decision of what to cover. The "editorial whitespace" is almost invisible, but perhaps more important than what gets covered. If you never cover the good points of the other side, its easier to make them look like uneducated extremists.
For example, while writing one of the other comments on this thread I wondered what a "TAL for conservatives" would look like, and it started to become interesting. While I'm sure that a great many people on the right would initially react harshly to the stereotypical affectations of TAL (tinkly emo music, emotional narratives, soft speech, etc.), you could easily imagine a show where you borrowed this style, and applied it to stories about families losing their multi-generation business to overregulation, bureaucratic interactions with big government, veterans affairs, etc. It could even be quite powerful, because there's clearly a human story that drives all forms of political belief.
TAL touches on some of this, but I bet there's more than enough content to fill a TAL-sized niche on the right.
Their good points are repeated all the time and their bad ppints are sanewashed. Their really bad points are ignored and you are called names when you accursately deacribe them. Until actually get their way at which point we blame the democrats for not opposing them strongly enough or for being supposed cause of backslash.
But, media and shows are afraid to show conservatives truthfully or in truly critical way.
In any case I think the "going and talking to real people" storytelling method is hard to beat. Just a couple weeks ago they did some stories about the immediate impacts of USAID cuts. And their episode about the "remain in Mexico" policy for asylum-seekers won the first-ever Pulitzer prize for radio reporting!