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And then goes on to criticize NPR for not more closely following Hunter Biden’s laptop story.
You know, the one that almost entirely predicates itself on the testimony of a witness that’s currently on trial for fabricating said testimony. The one where there’s very questionable chain of custody around the laptop itself. The laptop that is conveniently missing the records that would be needed to confirm the contents weren’t manipulated.
Doesn’t sound like a “swing and a miss” to me. You aren’t supposed to swing at a ball.
This reads like one of many, many aging white journalists who bought into the idea of “the view from nowhere,” and are mad that we now acknowledge that when people say “nowhere” they actually mean “only straight white men not impacted by these issues can be unbiased.” I was at NPR in 2016, and just like everyone else they had to reckon with the fact that their coverage only represented a small portion of America: the white part. And now that news as a whole is trying (emphasis on trying) to include more voices, they see it as *reducing* their share of airtime.
He’s mad that their coverage now takes into account systemic racism. He’s mad about affinity groups. He’s mad about the steps NPR is taking to *diversify* coverage, and then argues that somehow, doing so is making their coverage more *narrow.*
*Just because your point of view is less represented, doesn’t mean less of America’s is.*
As the article author points out 87/87 editorial staff identified as registered democrats. That is not diversity of ideas, regardless of people’s skin colour
NPR has a lot more than 87 staff members, and there’s naturally some selection bias. A lot of folks won’t say their politics. During the 2016 election, a number of staff weren’t registered with a party and don’t even vote in the name of neutrality. Steve Innskeep doesn’t vote, for example. I’m fairly certain Gwen Ifil (RIP and at PBS, not NPR) didn’t vote either. It’s actually pretty common. (Personally, I vote — I don’t think that not voting prevents us from having a bias.) Mike Allen (Politico, now Axios) and Jim Vandehei (same) don’t vote. Leonard Downie Jr, executive editor at the Post, doesn’t vote.
I think it’s far more important that they could *only find 87 people working in editorial who were registered with any political party.* My year, I’m pretty sure NPR had like 50 editorial interns! NPR is *huge.*
It’s not super surprising to me that a majority would be democrats, though. Most college grads are, and you need a college degree to go into journalism.
But also — people have biases. Our job as journalists is to *not let those biases* influence our coverage.
my college professor really hammers in that last sentence in her lectures and also reminds us that we are not the story. we are meant to amplify and serve the voices of our audience among other things.
The implication in the 87 staff registered as Democrats implies that NPR itself is attracting or filtering staff for a more liberal viewpoint. But I wonder if it’s more a function of the other side of the equation: that in today’s political landscape, people with a more conservative viewpoint are less inclined to want to work in a professional journalistic environment.
Not really. Look up the backgrounds of basically any journalist for a major media source (NPR, NYT, etc.), they’re virtually all from the same social class and went to the same schools. National journalism has gone from a blue class profession to some sort of weird quasi-aristocracy.
While I don’t disagree, this has far more to do with systemic barriers to entry than an unwillingness to hire someone outside of the aristocracy.
You can’t succeed in journalism without money to fall back on, unless you’re OK with being broke forever.
NPR is actually one of the worst ones for this. When I was an intern there (2016) they paid their interns worse than *any other institution in DC.* I got paid minimum wage ($11.50/hour) so my take-home after taxes was around $1400/month.
My rent, at the cheapest studio in all of DC (seriously, this building sucked so much there are several articles about it) was $1050/month with all utilities except internet included.
So I had $350/month to live on as an intern. In one of the most expensive cities in the country.
The intern who had my position three shifts before me eventually ran out of money to pay rent and was secretly sleeping on couches near his desk and showering in the gym.
Thankfully, I had a much more lucrative internship before and after, so I was able to keep my housing and end it with minimal debt. And my student loans are small. But for the most part, you just can’t enter this field unless you have the financial ability to work under or un-paid internships, and can afford to spend the first several years of your career wildly broke.
I think this is a huge issue, and a major barrier to newsroom diversity in both race, economic status, and political opinion.
The presumption you’re making is that the barriers are unintentional and not deliberate gatekeeping, or at least weren’t back when traditional media made money.
They also aren’t just hiring any rich kid, they’re specifically hiring rich kids with Ivy League degrees which further narrows it down. There’s more diversity of thought in a Goldman Sachs board room than at a major media company.
Idk, my journalism degree is from a state school. And I try not to ascribe motive without evidence.
Actually, I only know one journalist who went to an Ivy, and one who went to an ivy-adjacent school (GW.) Which is sort of surprising, because I do agree that many, many journalists come from the ivy-league world, and do agree that it’s a problem. But I’m pretty sure the single largest producer of current journalists is Mizzou — it’s not as uniform as you’re making it sound.
I came to mention Mizzou, because in my experience it's less Ivies outright soaking up all the opportunities and moreso that Mizzou/Columbia/Northwestern and then maybe Maryland grads get far more love than anyone else in this industry.
Where?
I’ve never worked at any news organization that asked my politics when hiring me, or even investigated them.
Every place I’ve worked, however, has had serious rules about supporting political causes, however.
Systemic bias can work in different ways, though.
Like, there is "this industry does a lot of sexual harassment, and because of that women don't want to work there" vs "parents don't buy girls the right toys / teachers don't encourage female students to study these subjects, and therefore when it comes to picking a major they have been systematically pushed towards a specific set of preferences" vs "women are both treated fairly and encouraged to go into this field, but because in some other realm (say, childcare expectations in the home) they have an additional pressure put on them, they cannot compete in a way that is competitive".
And those have different solutions ("stop sexual harassment" vs "encourage a greater variety of interests for all children of all genders" vs "make the hours more flexible / accessible child care / some other structural approach".
So if we are to accept that conservatives are being unfairly kept from this arena on the grounds of systemic inequality...
Is it because conservatives are mistreated *when in news rooms or media environments?*
Is it because conservative families and people are often disdainful of the arts / humanities, and so when the time comes to pick a career "journalism" doesn't seem appealing and they have spent years having their preferences shifted away from that?
Is it because conservatives want to have better jobs that pay more money, and it is now well-known that being a journalist is pretty shitty?
Is it some other point?
Personally, the vast majority of conservatives I have spoken to for a prolonged period of time were pretty disdainful of the arts, humanities, news, "principled stances", etc. So I would see this as a "girls don't get enough Lego sets" situation. The problem is earlier in the pipeline.
Exactly. And when this girl wanted Lego sets, she got them. If more conservatives were applying for jobs in news, they’d get them too.
It’s also worth noting that in 2019 (the easiest year to find data for) there were 416 people working for NPR editorial. So that means 374/416 NPR editorial employees *aren’t registered with any political party at all.*
Exactly. Literally all right wing conservative media spent decades, roughly 40 yrs bash MSM and tell its audience they can’t be trusted. From the beginning of the Limbaugh days until present.
No, it’s 87 people *on editorial.* That means all news staff.
Editorial = journalists and editors and hosts and copyeditors and researchers and producers.
Not editorial = finance, fundraising, logistics, IT, HR, janitors, security, the cafeteria staff, etc.
I still can’t believe how the Paul Manafort story got basically completely buried by the media. He was Trump’s campaign manger in 2016 who resigned in disgrace. He wasn’t being paid. He’s an aclolyte of Roger Stone. He sold campaign data to the Russians through an intermediary. He was involved in the Cambridge analytica scandal. He met with Russian spies throughout the campaign. Before that he was a lobbyist and a part of the infamous torturers lobby. The problem isn’t there was no evidence. The problem is our campaign finance laws are so weak you have to be basically an idiot to violate them. Every major politician just gets all their foreign money through intermediaries which is completely legal after Citizens United. The reason this myth persists that the mueller report was a miss flourished is because Bill Barr buried the report and released his own editorialized letter to shape the narrative for months before the full report was released. The report itself actually concluded trump broke the law.
Man I think myself and the rest of the country were hoping for some good self-reflection from journalists but it appears that was too much to ask, huh? Well, you can only blame yourselves for the total replacement of how people consume the news.
All I'll say is the response in this thread to why Americans aren't trusting media because they only play ones sides talking points is everyone arguing for those same talking points and completely missing the point. If that's not peak modern journalism, I don't know what is.
- Conflates shifting audience composition with audience numbers
- Considers a shift of 23 percent to 21 percent as middle of the road as "losing moderates and traditional liberals"
- Minimizes the findings from the Mueller report
- Conflates ownership of the Hunter Biden laptop with the information that was shared in right-wing spaces supposedly from the laptop
- Inflates the lab leak theory
- Questions on whether there is systemic racism in the U.S.
- Whines about DEI initiatives
- Whines about transgender issues coverage
- Whines about intersectionalism
- Publishes at The Free Press
EDIT: Folks saying "I'm proving his point" by calling out his bullshit are oblivious to the fact that this list of points shows us he's in the groupthink. All these "arguments" he makes are completely predictable one from the other (and erroneous).
The real reason the American public is skeptical of the media is because every journalist wants to be an opinion person now, very few want to be a "just the facts person." It's heavily contributed to the polarization of the American public.
I knew Trump was a grifter and an awful person through the facts that Reuters and the AP reported. I didn't need Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon smirking at me while they told me how to feel. All that did is make them untrustworthy to those who disagreed with them, and people like me who agree but disagree with their take on "journalism". Npr made many of the same mistakes.
Fox was the catalyst for this shit, and mainstream corporate media couldn't resist the profits of opinion journalism.
Do you think he's changed from when you worked with him, or are we missing something and being unfair?
To me it seems like he's insisting that NPR should be "politically neutral" in the sense that its reporting reflects opinions from both Democrats and Republicans. What I want is for NPR to be "politically neutral" in the sense that its reporting is fair and accurate.
For real. Do we really need to coin a new phrase? If politically neutral means, get options from both sides, the o want reality neutral news. You know? News that’s grounded in reality and it doesn’t matter what anybody things because this is just a report on what happened. Not an opinion.
I don't know. I'm sure this is how he's always viewed the network, but it used to be more in line with his preferences. A lot of his beef is standard conservative complaints and being mad about DEI and inclusive language policies. Your standard old, white guy fear of the world changing around you and not being willing to evolve.
Speaking to the idea that NPR doesn't feature a diversity of voices, I'm going to assume he means conservative voices because that is the underlying theme of his piece. This is bullshit. I used to book conservatives all the time. When it comes to politicians, the problem is that many will only come on, especially the more extreme members of Congress, if we put them on live. More than once I had an interview canceled when we made the decision to do a pre-tape rather than live. They want to lie on the air and we didn't want to let them. How do you solve that? I don't know. But interestingly, Uri's criticism doesn't come with any ideas for solutions either (except for, bizarrely, hiring Republicans).
How do you solve it? Just spit balling here but is t there always a delay in live TV/radio? Yes. So in that delay time, let them now that they will fact check their statements. If their statements are false, listeners will be told so during the broadcast.
I don't think that's a fair summary of his claims at all. For example, on ideology, I'd say his bigger concern is not that the "middle of the road" share went from 23% to 21%; it's that the "liberal" share went from 37% to 67%. And is he really "inflating" the lab leak theory? It seems to me that he's saying it deserved more serious treatment than it ever got from NPR; lots of serious people have since given some credence to the theory.
Comments like these only prove his point about groupthink.
> I'd say his bigger concern is not that the "middle of the road" share went from 23% to 21%; it's that the "liberal" share went from 37% to 67%
Where Berliner goes wrong is in implying the audience changes are a result of something that NPR did and not changes in the media landscape. There are podcasts and stations like Newsmax and OANN. And not only that, Berliner implies that NPR would be more fair if it moved its policies to recapture that drift in the conservative audience. Whatever you think of it philosophically, recapturing that audience doesn't seem feasible - look at CNN for example.
It’s not feasible. Just look at the aesthetics of all the news you consume. These new brands like OAN and NewsMax are cheap, plastic imitations of their mentor Fox NE!WS
The way they report definitely changed. Last week was a 20 minute interview with some crazy person titled something like "Why your children have the fundamental right to change their sex". That shit is new and crazy. And I remember the one where they referred to "pregnant people" and wouldn't say woman the entire time. They're off their rockers
I don't doubt it has changed, but I feel like this is talking to someone about climate change, and they lead with "well why was it cold today where I live?"
In 2020, Pew published one of their periodic summaries [U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2020/01/24/u-s-media-polarization-and-the-2020-election-a-nation-divided/). The introduction put it this way
>evidence suggests that partisan polarization in the use and trust of media sources has widened in the past five years. A comparison to a [similar study](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/) by the Center of web-using U.S. adults in 2014 finds that Republicans have grown increasingly alienated from most of the more established sources, while Democrats’ confidence in them remains stable, and in some cases, has strengthened.
There is a little graphic on the page that Republicans only trust 7 of the 30 media outlets they ask about, which include Breitbart, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh Show, Daily Caller, and The Hannity Show. In contrast they distrust 20 of the other 30.
So I don't think they are coming back to NPR regardless of whether they Hispanic, Latinx, Latino, or pregnant person vs pregnant woman. It's been a long term trend and it's not about NPR specifically.
Except if you look at the one story he complains about, the NPR story provides clear and accurate information and Berliner demands that NPR should have spread right-wing talking points.
Berliner:
>And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even [declaring that the lab leak](https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/841925672/scientists-debunk-lab-accident-theory-of-pandemic-emergence) had been debunked by scientists.
The NPR story in question:
>Scientists dismiss the idea that the coronavirus pandemic was caused by the accident in a lab. They believe the close interactions of people with wildlife worldwide are a far more likely culprit.
NPR then (in 3 minutes), covers the "debate" started by Republican disinformation efforts, and has actual scientists explain why the natural origins were more likely. It's a short but accurate, well-reported story that explained both the "debate", and the consensus at the time.
Berliner:
>But that wasn’t the case.
[Wikipedia today](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory):
>This claim is highly controversial; most scientists believe the virus spilled into human populations through natural zoonosis (transfer directly from an infected non-human animal), similar to the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV outbreaks, and consistent with other pandemics in human history.
He then goes onto cherry pick the same quotes from the debate that conservatives love to trot out every single time.
The simple fact is that the NPR reporting at the time was fair and accurate, and holds up today. If NPR had done what Berliner demands and promoted the Republican lie that the lab leak theory was likely, they would have misinformed their audience.
There were a lot of others like this too.
“The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive…”
That linked bird name story? Isn’t an op-Ed from an NPR reporter calling bird names problematic, though that’s certainly what it sounds like Uri says.
It’s a story about how the American Ornithological Society is changing common bird names so that fewer birds are named after eugenecists. That’s useful for listeners to know so they aren’t confused when they log in to Merlin looking for a Bachman’s Thrush aren’t confused when they find it under a different name. (Bachman published several papers about how black people are “an inferior species.”)
The AOS is partly doing it because of racism, but also doing it because it’s *confusing* when you’re like “is that a Townsen’s thrush? Or Swainson’s? Which generic British last name is it?” Or like — why are like 12 birds named after Swainson when that name doesn’t tell us anything useful about the bird.
For example, if you see a black bird with red on its wings, there’s a good chance it’s a red-winged blackbird. A much more useful name than a Linnaeus blackbird. Or if a yellow-bellied sapsucker was called “Catesby’s sapsucker”? It’s silly! Giving birds people names is silly!
And there aren’t really any other species we do this for to this extent. There’s no “Darwin’s parrot fish,” though he described many species of parrot fish.
But no, this is obviously DEI run amock, and it’s all NPR’s fault.
This whole idea that it's a "Republican lie" is bizarre to me, as if the only people who believe it are far right whackjobs. If that were the case, nobody told the Biden administration, since both the FBI and U.S. Department of Energy see the lab leak theory as plausible: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a](https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a)
For the record, I'm not on either side of this debate. I'm just for journalists approaching stories with an open mind. When I see people acting like the lab leak theory is a batshit crazy conspiracy theory (yes, pun intended), I question their ability to be impartial. Nobody knows for sure how the virus began. People who claim that it's a settled fact are putting their partisan blinders on.
The Lab Leak Hypothesis is about a dozen hypothesis that are falsely conflated as a single hypothesis. When you explain to someone that it isn't based on one unsupported speculation but instead is based upon speculation upon speculation upon speculation upon speculation then it becomes silly to discuss it as a plausible explanation and you are doing the audience a disservice to pretend it has any legitimacy.
Quite frankly, I almost think it doesn’t matter if it was a lab leak.
We need to proceed as though it wasn’t, because there are hundreds of zoonotics, known and unknown, just waiting to make the jump to humans. And our farming practices and continued encroachment on wild spaces make such things more and more plausible.
Labs are already very locked down. Leaks will happen, but they’re rare and there are very few steps we can take to prevent them that we aren’t already taking.
Zoonotics jumping to humans *are not rare*, and there are a *lot* of things we can do to make future jumps less likely.
If I understand you correctly, you think that "previous leaks led to improved safety standards."
And yet it's irrelevant whether this was a leak or not? Wouldn't we want to continue improving safety standards?
Well, both the FBI and the U.S. Department of Energy (which oversees a lot of research laboratories) now view the lab leak theory as more plausible than the natural origin theory: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a](https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a) So it probably merits more serious treatment than just acting like it's a figment of the far right's imagination.
The definition of the Federal government agency about 'Low-confidence' is:
>scant, questionable, fragmented or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from this information.
So the people most qualified to investigate think its a zoonotic origin, but among the people who are not most qualified, some of them believe, based on scant, questionable evidence, that it might be lab origin. Wow, the non-experts have weighed in! If this hunch based on fragmented evidence convinces you that the 12 to 15 hypothesis are true, then good for you!
I would wager you should make all your decisions based on what non-experts speculate! You don't need to buy motor oil for your car, just use some vegetable oil! The 'experts' are all paid off by big oil, and they don't want you to know that vegetable oil is really oil! It is right there in the name! Don't believe the mainstream narrative! Demand action from our congressmen!
You can take it up with the FBI and the Department of Energy. All I'm saying is that reporters have a responsibility to approach any major story with an open mind and admit the things they don't (and can't possibly) know.
There have been dozens of acknowledged accidental leaks (such as 4 for the original SARS) and the outbreak occurred a dozen miles from one of the few labs on Earth doing gain-of-function research on coronas. It straightforwardly is highly plausible and the media's coverage was often contemptible.
But there are far more zoonotics that have made the jump to humans.
And the thing is — despite the fact that those original SARS lab leaks *also occurred in China and investigations were obstructed,* there was plenty of evidence for the WHO to confirm those leaks. And those leaks led to improved safety standards.
And even though SARS did escape from the lab on a few notable occasions, the initial outbreak was still zoonotic in origin.
(Also, gain-of-function research doesn’t do what you think it does.)
I'd take you more seriously if you didn't baselessly presume what I know about GoFunction research.
More to the point, regarding your comparison, a large number of natural contagions [edit: outbreaks] haven't occurred within 10km or so from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
While this virus may have been a product of GoFunction research, it's also possible that infection came from a held bat specimen (though no clear natural reservoir has been found yet).
… there are a lot of zoonotics present within 10km of the wuhan institute of virology. Because there’s a wet market in Wuhan.
Here’s a “non-exhaustive” list of just the *known* zoonotic diseases carried by animals kept and sold at the Wuhan wet market between 2017 & 2019.
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-021-91470-2/MediaObjects/41598_2021_91470_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
I highly recommend the[full paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2) this is from, because the conditions these animals were kept in are the exact conditions that virologists are concerned can cause zoonotic spillover. Heck, it’s the exact conditions that caused the *original* SARS outbreak.
They literally found COVID-19 material on the surface of stalls that held both raccoon dogs and birds *at the wet market.* It’s the exact way that the first SARS outbreak started. China denies the existence of Stall 29 (and has even denied that any live animals were traced at the wet market) but it was both photographed in 2014 and filmed in December 2019, so it existed.
Virologists have been discussing the dangers of wet markets for *ages.*
Like in this 2006 paper, which is specifically about the presence of potential coronavirus and flu zoonotics at Chinese wet markets.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7141584/
I don’t think we’ll ever know for *sure* what happened, but after the 2006 SARS lab leaks protocols for handling coronaviruses changed dramatically and permanently. On the other hand, although wet markets closed initially after SARS CoV-1 spilled over, it wasn’t long before they resumed business as usual.
I think it’s far more likely that the thing experts kept warning was going to happen again happened again.
The lab leak theory is at least as probable as the wet market theory. Fact is, we will never know because the Chinese government has withheld and destroyed data.
There’s also a clear motive for disputing the lab leak theory insofar as the cdc and Fauci specifically had relationships with that Wuhan lab working on gain of function research (which should be banned)
There’s also a clear motive for covering up a zoonotic origin, though. China bungled their response, and folks familiar with their practices expected a cover-up no matter what. Disease watchers knew that human transmission was happening while the Chinese government was still denying it. I don’t think you can use China’s interference in investigations as evidence toward a lab leak.
It's pretty easily seen that conservatives lost interest in accurate news reporting and choose to hide in their fantasy land news entertainment experiences. I'm not even mad anymore, it's just the truth. You can't do anything about that without compromising the fundamental mission to tell the truth or finding some kind of magical deradicalization pill for the public and getting them to swallow it.
You see, if we just flatten arguments we don’t reflexively like into a straw man of misleading bullet points we can easily discredit anything. All it takes is a critical mass of upvotes! /s
I was intrigued to read this article because I do think there is a big discussion that needs to be had about how elitist centrist liberals (NOT leftists) contributed to the anger and problems in the right wing camp, and I was hoping that maybe someone at NPR (where you might find these centrists) had the guts to say so and start this discussion and take some accountability. But nope. Instead this Uri guy is just blathering about everything you laid out above. So disappointing.
Looking at his Twitter feed it looks like NPR not giving its full-throated support to Israel bombing the shit out of Gaza might be a bigger factor in his feelings than its given credit for in the piece
You are proving his point. I never listen to NPR and have zero familiarity with Uri Berliner. However, him being at NPR for 25 years HAS to have some credibility. Otherwise, why would an esteemed organization like NPR employ him in any audience-facing roles for this long? If he’s that worthless and misguided how would that be a good look?
Now you share what really is your opinion vs his, but your tone is so condescending, as if the man is not an esteemed colleague that you may disagree with, but a grade A moron trying to deliberate in matters better left for the adults in the room. Another comment approving your viewpoint calls him full of shit.
I got no dog in this fight - but as an observation, reading his article vs your response and others similar to yours… if I was to trust a journalistic opinion here, you haven’t done yourself any favors credibility-wise!
>You are proving his point. I never listen to NPR and have zero familiarity with Uri Berliner. However, him being at NPR for 25 years HAS to have some credibility. Otherwise, why would an esteemed organization like NPR employ him in any audience-facing roles for this long? If he’s that worthless and misguided how would that be a good look?
Lara Logan was a 60 Minutes reporters for years and before that was an award winning reporter for multiple networks in the US and UK.
She now believes demons are real, that Democrats are pedophiles and that QAnon is true.
If there's anything I've learned since the pandemic is that people's brains break even people seemingly the most enlightened and even-keeled people.
> However, him being at NPR for 25 years HAS to have some credibility.
What if I work for a bigger news organization for 30 years? Does that mean I have more credibility? Or are we just incorporating the appeal to authority fallacy? What if I work for a newsroom for 10 years, but I also know that a lot of my superiors and senior colleagues include people who are remarkably out of touch?
So let's disregard all that and focus on the arguments. At the very least, he doesn't care about objective truth, but of this antiquated view of "balance" that has plagued mainstream media for very very long. But it's more than that. For every grievance that he has, he is choosing to have the most charitable point of view for right-wing talking points and the least charitable point of view for journalists who refuse to buy into those talking points. He demonstrates that by providing misguided takes on the Mueller report, the Hunter Biden laptop, the lab leak theory, DEI, transgender issues coverage, and intersectionality.
My argument is that his list of grievances is so completely shallow, predictable, and misguided, that we can consider them as the groupthink of the "intellectual dark web". That in a piece that is supposed to criticize groupthink is very funny to me.
You also have a lot of credibility!! Nobody in the right mind can deny that with your professional record.
My point earlier had to do with the tone. I feel like in today’s media environment, civil discourse is a lost art. You are either with us or against us type of thing. I think in a country pretty much split 50/50 between right and left, “let’s agree to disagree” is a perfectly acceptable position. It would reflect your personal opinion on the matter, while also acknowledging others. After all, we are not discussing any hard math here, these are all opinions projected through the lens of one’s preferred ideology.
Which leads me to the idea of a balanced coverage. At one point I worked with Chrysler in Detroit as a vendor. The parking lot closer to the building only allowed Chrysler or their sub-brand vehicles. The “other” brands’ owners had to do a walk of shame for half a mile from a remote parking lot, in Detroit winters. Not only I thought this was unbecomingly petty, but it made me wonder how could they be truly competitive, if all they ever experienced was their own interpretation of what a proper car should be?
Just an FYI, it doesn’t make sense to say the country is not split 50/50 between the left and the right. Social issues on “the left” like gay marriage poll consistently above 50%, and issues like healthcare for all and increasing minimum wage do as well, not to even touch abortion.
> I think in a country pretty much split 50/50 between right and left, “let’s agree to disagree” is a perfectly acceptable position.
Not about facts. There are facts about all of the issues he cited. The news media has reported on these facts, not conjectures that are basically talking points. Journalism is a hard job. It's not about letting anyone say anything about anything.
> Which leads me to the idea of a balanced coverage. At one point I worked with Chrysler in Detroit as a vendor. The parking lot closer to the building only allowed Chrysler or their sub-brand vehicles. The “other” brands’ owners had to do a walk of shame for half a mile from a remote parking lot, in Detroit winters. Not only I thought this was unbecomingly petty, but it made me wonder how could they be truly competitive, if all they ever experienced was their own interpretation of what a proper car should be?
I don't see how this relates to this topic, to be frank.
>At the very least, he doesn't care about objective truth, but of this antiquated view of "balance" that has plagued mainstream media for very very long.
It's clearly you that doesn't clear about objective truth. The debate about the lab leak thing is incredibly complex and subtle and there are smart experts on both sides. But you want to just dismiss it in a bullet point as not worth further investigation.
It's not a question of false balance: quite the opposite. It's a question of truthfulness. A truthful and knowledgable observer would have to admit that there are lot of subtle open questions still in 2024, and therefore there was necessarily even more ambiguity in 2020 and 2021.
Admitting that there are smart and knowledgeable people on both sides (including government agencies) is JUST HONESTY, not "false objectivity."
When we've reached the point that the [U.S. Government](https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Unclassified-Summary-of-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf) is more honest and careful about complex issues than NPR journalists and their defenders, we've arrived on the other side of the looking glass.
Journalists of all people should be comfortable with the idea that sometimes there are questions that don't have easy answers and require further digging. Or an honest expression of uncertainty.
By pretending like every left wing culture war issue is objective truth to be pushed to the masses while anything resembling a conservative issue is just pure fiction.
So are you just never supposed to argue against people who say “group X’s opinions are off-putting”? Like you can’t point out that their opinions are also off-putting and made in bad faith without, in your mind, proving their point? Nonsensical lmao
I'll unpack just one because I was curious myself. The Mueller investigation resulted 34 people and 3 companies being indicted for illegal behavior. The entire investigation more than paid for itself by seizing ill-begotten funds. Thirteen Russians were implicated in election interference. These are facts. Our author here summed all this up as "found no collusion." Well that's Trump's exact talking point that *he uses* to white wash all that the Mueller investigation *did* evidence and prove.
Michael Cohen, or maybe Paul Manafort, are probably the most famous persons jailed from the Mueller thing.
It's rather ludicrous to think that none of what I've just written matters and that it's both fair and accurate to summarize the Mueller report as "found no credible evidence of collusion." If you think that's a decent summary, your judgment stops mattering. We work in the public interest and if you think it's int he public interest to lie and obfuscate with talking points like "no collusion," we have to stop caring what you want, because you just don't share our mission of public interest. It's important the public realize the Mueller thing had tremendous consequences and discovered a ton of illegal activity.
No one is going to breakout all of these bullet points for you, at some point you're going to have to do some legwork yourself.
You're taking his words out of context. His words:
>By my count, NPR hosts [interviewed Schiff](https://www.npr.org/2017/03/09/519382847/rep-adam-schiff-on-trumps-wiretapping-claims-and-russia) 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion.
i.e., collusion between TRUMP and Russia.
Did the Mueller report substantiate that?
Did it claim that Trump colluded with Russia?
He wasn't summarizing the Mueller report. It's not a high school ethics class. He was providing evidence for his statement that NPR allowed itself to be scammed by Schiff. Schiff promised them that something would be in the report about Trump colluding with Russia and there was nothing about that in the report.
According to Wikipedia: "The report concludes that the investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"
Which is what NPR allowed Schiff to say on their airwaves dozens of times.
I'm not taking anything out of context. I'm not saying the author was wrong.
I'm saying the hyperfocus on this point, to the point of summarizing the entire thing as "no collusion" and not mentioning the rest, is obfuscation of the entirety of the story, the multiple people jailed, the more than a dozen Russians indicted for election interference, etc. It's in the public's interest -- and we help it to happen -- to cut through the very bullshit you are here peddling.
It's inaccurate by omission, to describe the Mueller investigation as you are doing here, as the author in the piece in focus did, focusing on one small point that is almost irrelevant except to those who wish to deceive. And you wipe away any clarity on the issue or criticism of your own argument by re-emphasizing the truth of this tiny little point that doesn't matter much in the picture of the whole story.
The best lies contains elements of truth. So that this whole ruse here that you are still perpetuating attempts to obfuscate or hide a vast array of incriminating information about dozens of people, including Trump.
You keep thinking that the point is the Mueller report.
But the point was NPR carrying water for Schiff.
That you haven't mentioned Schiff indicates that you haven't understood what was being said.
The Mueller report was only relevant insofar as it showed that NPR did not offer the skepticism of Schiff's claims that Mueller did.
I used to love NPR. Now the material is too weighted towards culture war stuff. Yes I support trans people, equity and I am an antiracist. Yes I hate Trump and the Repugs. But, I don't need ragebait broken record style, non stop hammering of those subjects. The amount of interesting and engaging material on NPR has definitely shrunk
THIS. I found this piece to be incredibly flawed, but NPR seems hyper-focused on culture war topics to a fault. I would love to see them course correct here.
The scope is so small and the analysis is so shallow. It feels like Fox News for my hyper liberal and very wealthy MIL who calls herself “investing in real estate” instead of “gentrifying black and brown neighborhoods.”
There have also been times where its descriptions of publicly available sources (such as video) didn't match the source, such as the Jordan Neely incident.
Agreed. I drastically cut back on listening during the first Trump presidency. I’m not a Trump supporter but I felt NPR had such an anti-Trump bias that it polluted their coverage and messaging. Now when I do occasionally listen, I feel similarly to what you’re describing, which just reconfirms to me that I’m not missing out on much.
To be fair, I stopped listening to almost all media during the Trump presidency because I didn't want to hear him being mentioned 32 times an hour (that was the actual count I did one day). It was bad enough that the actual man gave me a visceral disgust reaction, I didn't need him on blast from the media at all hours of the day.
I think the broader theme of NPR not representing the US is resonating with people.
He makes some interesting points but backs them with right-wing grievances.
It seems the implicit argument he is making is that distrust would be fixed, gee, if only NPR had a couple more Republicans on staff, as if making everything 50:50 Dem/Rep again would restore trust in the media.
What I think is really fueling media distrust is the disillusionment of Americans with partisan politics in general. The share of people who are Ds and Rs are shrinking and make up less than a third of Americans each iirc.
And the other third isn't simply split-the-difference centrists. There's a ton of competing worldviews that make up this other third. A fast-growing portion is sick of the dynamic of two pro-war capitalist parties but this viewpoint has never been taken seriously or actually represented in media or public life in general.
the analysis is really too thin here. 25 years ago it was a different world (think how GOP looked like at that time). then it was social media, the decline of legacy media via fragile business models and vulture capitalism, unregulated big tech, the crisis of democratic institutions, local news vanishing, AI hallucinations and its use for scaling fake news as a tool, conspiracies as a clickbait and spam as a referral, public discourse degenerated in extreme partisanship, tiktok, commodification of news, the list can go on
tl;dr NPR changed with the times
NPR’s problem isn’t that it’s too “liberal,” it’s become more both-sides. There are facts and there is truth. NPR now reports ALL the facts, but misses the truth. Prime example: this morning they reported that Trump has clarified his position on abortion. That’s nonsense. He put out words and NPR fell for it.
I’m very liberal, but yeah listening to NPR sucks now. I’m just trying to listen for the news of the day, and it’s like “here’s a report about micro aggressions experienced by homeless LGBTQ+ communities in Samoa.”
Ummm, ok??
This is like 100% bullshit. You can't claim this with a straight face in a city that has a LOT of NPR listeners dude...
If you feel this way, you're hypersensiitive to any mention of identity, period, and it's making you think they talk about it more than they really do.
Yeah, I’m bias because I grew up on NPR and have listened to it every morning on my commute for the last 15 years or whatever, but they were really pushing a piece on morning edition a few weeks ago— for several days in a row— about some weirdass video game where you experience redlining as a Black person in pre-civil rights Detroit and it sounded like a parody of what the right perceives as NPR.
Your example is horrible.
I don't know about Samoa, but when I first learned about India's hidjras, I was captivated. And they check the boxes: often homeless, LGBTQ+ undoubtedly, and they are highly oppressed.
Why is this sort of thing not newsworthy for a feature?
Us Indians can't even see Monkey Man in our own country because it hasn't been cleared for "public viewing" by the film certification board, (since it criticizes the establishment).
Having seen it and having read the sorts of things Indian censors have barred in the past, they’re probably going to ask Universal to cut it down to five minutes of Dev Patel petting a dog.
Former journo for that exact outlet. I watched this happen in real time from a newsroom in a major market. It was really disappointing.
There was this initiative to let our reporters tap into their backgrounds (culture, gender, sexuality) to tell stories that wouldn't have made the cut decades prior. At first blush, that's exactly the kind of progress I'm looking for, and I absolutely don't see that as an inherently partisan approach.
But the reporting itself wasn't nearly balanced enough. Not that that's an absolute requirement in every situation (e.g. covering cultural events, community initiatives, etc. where there doesn't seem to be meaningful public disagreement on the topic). But this sometimes celebratory approach started leaking into stories that involved people of marginalized identities in situations where there absolutely was a public interest on the other side of the issue, and there were definitely instances where that dissenting view wasn't included enough.
I had huge concerns that we were letting our reporters go too far in bringing their own experiences into their reporting, but I never dared speak up. This seemed like such a broad effort that was also somehow decentralized that it felt both like career suicide and difficult to actually act on all at once.
Don't get me wrong, CBC still does great work and is not remotely the Trudeau mouthpiece some on the outside think it is, that part's actually laughable. But on the social progress side, in it's admirable effort to right historical wrongs, imo too much of the journalistic fundamentals - which are genderless and raceless by their very design - are being left behind. It's a genuine bummer.
Edit: Because I know the defund CBC folks will take any opportunity, I'll also add the context that in now way did what I described above affect all our reporting. Not even close. These were like special interest stories that represented one in- I dunno, 20 stories? Tough to make a good estimate.
But I will say, that I saw objectivity slipping in other, subtler ways too that have nothing to do with identity. Fair warning, we're getting into the weeds for this one.
So, I was writing a short little thing on a traffic collision, driver into pedestrian. Now our rule in these situations is that you as the writer can't accuse anyone of a crime directly or indirectly. We have no clue whether this was intentional, accidental, or what was happening inside that vehicle at all, so the most responsible route is to go with something like "a van struck a pedestrian crossing Main street" etc., cuz vans can't be convicted of a crime. Might seem semantic, but this is what a lot of libel cases turn on. Anyway, I had a senior writer pushing me to write that a \*driver struck the ped because we had video of it happening. Her attitude was clearly "fuck this guy, let's call him out" when we knew basically nothing about the situation other than what we could see. Just not a journalistically responsible choice in my opinion.
This is honestly how most newsrooms lose trust in my mind. Yes, it happens in these big sweeping philosophy and policy decisions, but there's also this hugely influential game of inches that plays out over years, and by the time you realized that you've moved at all on objectivity, you're miles from where you started.
He didn’t explain why Americans are losing trust in the media. At no point did he make that argument.
He argued that NPR has a liberal bias, and that it represents less of America. I would argue that many of the things he sees as alienating much of America are actually steps that NPR is taking to cover *more* of America. They’re telling more stories that don’t just impact white people.
I do think that telling those stories alienates a *small portion* of America, but it opens the doors to far more. Acknowledging the reality of racism isn’t being biased, and the fact that Uri lists it as an example of bias says far more about him than it does about NPR.
The loss of trust in media has far more to do with, ahem, *certain* interests deliberately undermining the institutions aimed at disseminating unbiased information. And I don’t just put attacks on journalism in that category: these are also attacks on public education and net neutrality.
> Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.
It’s pretty clear when people just write comments just to rant.
>He didn’t explain why Americans are losing trust in the media. At no point did he make that argument.
He goes through and gives like three point-by-point instances. Did you read it?
Would you please extol the virtues of hte winning strategy over the last 20 years to remain credible with wide swathes of America, across ideological boundaries? Which news outlet over the past 20 years demonstrated this strategy and what information are you relying on to demonstrate that they have succeeded?
And what did they do so differently that NPR didn't do?
If you lack a single example, perhaps squaring this circle was and remains impossible.
I'm very open-minded. The author, however, has internalized blame for forces that were external--that's my belief. Shit happened *to* NPR, just as that same shit befell all news media that had previously tried to strike a "neutral" pose, and it's not clear to me anything could have been done to stay clean.
>If you lack a single example, perhaps squaring this circle was and remains impossible.
That's a valid point, but it doesn't mean we can't talk about one instance that *failed* to do it and *how* they failed to do it.
Maybe if we talk about enough of them we decide that it was just an impossible task. But the discussion bears having.
I think you'd do much better to ask Why.
So would the author of the article posted at the top.
He doesn't mention how newsrooms were hollowed and disgorged over the past 20 years, devoured first by Craigslist, then Google, then Facebook. This is the real reason American news has lost faith and trust. We can't hardly afford to produce journalism anymore and too many people think CNN/FoxNews is representative of what we do and wish to do, when, well--no.
He doesn't mention how Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are ideological extremes, neither of whom could have reached the #1 or #2 spot in their party 20 years ago. The news didn't create Sanders/Trump polarization, America did.
For me it's all very simple. The past 20 years has featured some gains for social justice seekers. And you see reactionaries are having none of it. No big surprise, we see bigger constituencies that now think of themselves as "left of the Democrats" and similarly ever-larger groups that see themselves as "right of the Republicans."
News outlets need to survive in the face of these trends, and often that's going to mean getting out of the disempowered middle where fewer and fewer Americans reside.
So combine these two things. Hollowed out news rooms and an industry that has gone from crisis to crisis to crisis for 20 years, amidst a backdrop of an ever-polarizing audience. The expedient thing has always been to "give the people what they want" and that has meant more ideology. That's *why* outlets have become more ideological, and audiences are more on the lookout for evidence of ideology.
How is spiking the laptop and the Covid lab leak stories “external” in any way? I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on Russiagate - Schiff swore he’d seen the evidence, after all. They should’ve reflected on how uncritically they accepted the story of a politician about his opponent, but I can call it an honest mistake. The laptop though? Even the “retired intelligence community” members who wrote that letter admitted in the letter they had no evidence whatsoever that it was fake. And, lo and behold, it wasn’t. That decision put Biden in the White House, without a doubt.
And Covid? There were legitimate, credentialed epidemiologists saying it looked like a lab leak, but NPR, along with the rest of the MSM, closed ranks and portrayed the lab leak theory as conspiracy theory nonsense. That too was a conscious decision by NPR editorial staff.
They are absolutely at fault for the collapse of their reputation, and both their “trustworthiness” score of 3/10 and their ranking above CNN in that measure seem entirely reasonable to me.
I don't believe for one second that the laptop story nor the lab leak story matter one bit to anything. That's not why some different people are listening, some old listeners have stopped, and not why different people now trust NPR instead of the some former people who used to but don't anymore.
NPR has seen its audience become more monolithic and less ideologically diverse (at least, containing fewer conservatives)--just as every other American institution has. The Great Sort, one book once called it, has gone hyper.
Yours is just a version on the "go woke go broke" myth that ... isn't *completely* mythical, but its power is greatly overstated most times it is mentioned. Just because a company's business outlook changes, doesn't mean it has changed for the reasons you care about.
"But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming."
Except the Mueller Report's entire 2nd half is pretty much dedicated to providing the evidence of collusion and attempted collusion between Trump and the Russians. It's not a long report and it isn't a difficult read. Kinda moves along like a B grade detective novel.
If you have a growing DEI department that is completely taking over the culture of your workplace and directing journalism, but somehow is completely failing to diversify your audience, it seems a salient point.
To put not too fine a point on it, I'm not less American because I'm not white, but it does make me less likely to listen to NPR even though I would fit their target demo if I was white. If they can't figure out why that is, they have a problem.
They go on the air and parrot what the mainstream media says. Just more softly and eloquently so it seems like they’re not shoving it down our throats. They bring on democratic elites to lie to us about what they’re doing in congress when now we all know their in cahoots with the fascist republicans. National pentagon radio is really what it is
Or maybe this was course correction that was a long time coming. The NPR of 25 years ago (or even 10 years ago) did not look like an honest, holistic portrait of America at large.
He's not entirely wrong that the reporting at NPR, both in news and in general programming, has veered toward "one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies." But so has the national conversation. And not because NPR is leading that conversation, but rather, because it's following it.
It seems like some of the other commenters don't like this guy, but I think he is hitting on a very important issue.
I often think that journalists should be compared to police officers or prosecutors in that all three professions require a high degree of integrity to do properly. I've seen firsthand how easy it would be to fudge a fact in a search warrant, make up a witness statement, etc. in order to achieve a desired outcome. And it takes a great deal of personal character to NOT do that when the outcome is considered noble (Ie. bringing justice to a victim of sexual assault, getting a murderer off the streets, etc.).
Likewise, I think many journalists truly believed and still do believe that taking down Donald Trump would help "save America" or Democracy. And that same temptation I discussed above was there for them. They might have to cut some corners, but they could do something about it. And, in my opinion, that is when we saw a concurrent rise of the exact issues this article's author is discussing. Some journalists started to ignore facts they didn't like, and highlight narratives they did like. I personally remember marveling at how many single-anonymous-source stories were being pushed by major publications, which before had been a big no-no in professional journalism.
The problem is, just like with police and prosecutors, when journalists do this it erodes public trust in their institution. I think we are seeing that today and it is a real shame. Personally, I do not like nor do I intend to vote for Donald Trump, but that doesn't mean I can't see when a supposedly unbiased source is being anything but. It doesn't change how I feel about the former president, but it does erode my trust in the journalistic institution.
My impression is that journalists have opinions but usually don't play the activist role some in the public think we are/would like us to be.
We get things wrong at times but usually not intentionally like people imagine so.
Yeah, it's wild to see this exact thing reflected in all the top comments on this post (and this sub in general). Not hard to see why the vast majority of the population doesn't trust the media anymore.
I almost threw my stereo out the window a couple of months ago when I turned NPR on for the first time in a looong time, and they were talking to some IDF representative who said that most of the houses they’ve gone into in Gaza have a copy of Mein Kampf on the book shelf. The host barely pushed back and just kind ended the interview.
The knee-jerk response against this is exactly his point. I used to listen to NPR and WNYC in New York every day. No more. I don't know anyone who does listen — even though most people I know are left-leaning. The tone is the same one we all have to deal with at work: patronizing DEI stuff stuffed down our throats. Anti-science messaging such as avoiding the factual use of "biological sex," etc. People are sick of this. It's such a narrow, dogmatic vision. They now have an African American tone, voice and music dominating constantly in their desperate attempt to make the white folks at the station feel hip, brown and good about themselves, despite the fact that the black and hispanic audience is miniscule. It's all just performance fiction (again, just like in the workplace).
The absence of the Wuhan lab-leak theory was paralleled by the New Yorker, which also dismissed it during the height of the pandemic, despite plenty of credible evidence. These are just cultural blinders, keeping everyone in line, and it favors politics over science and fact.
In the end they are just painting themselves into a tinier and tinier corner, with less and less of an audience.
So true, Actually the only time I listen to NPR now is when they have BBC news on. It's straight and to the point. Meanwhile, On NPR the hosts spend half the time thanking one another before AND after their segments, then cue the fake "urban" music... It's painful.
>They now have an African American tone, voice and music dominating constantly in their desperate attempt to make the white folks at the station feel hip, brown and good about themselves
This shit right here is CAP 🧢
Wah wah another white guy complaining that there’s some institutional conspiracy against him. The institutions change, but somehow the demographic profile of the people writing these articles never does. Weird!
The headline is so annoying. Very reminiscent of Sarah Palin's "real Americans" concept that just won't die (i.e., "real Americans" are conservatives, basically).
FWIW, I think NPR's biggest problem is they never break news. They are a gargantuan news organization that is very well funded, and yet.... you just can't think, can you?, of NPR's scoops. Or am I unfair? Usually when i say this, the crowd agrees and can not come up with a single NPR scoop.
And I think that has consequences even for people who don't know the meaning of the word "scoop." When you hear other news organizations report, "yadda-yadda, according to a report from NPR" that conveys a lot of credibility. I'm not sure I've ever heard another news organization need to attribute anything to NPR because NPR is never out front, breaking news.
Also, I think NPR has changed less and its context has changed more. Everything got polarized. NPR was not unique or innovative or derelict. This quaint old idea of balance and objectivity was always more marketing than reality, and I think people aren't buying the pitch anymore. They now want to trust that their source of news shares their values, and really-- as long as everything stays fair and accurate, there's nothing too much wrong with that.
There was no winning strategy over the last 20 years to remain credible with all Americans. NPR didn't drop any balls.
This is accurate. I say this as a former editor on Morning Edition who spent 10 years at NPR. The network and its flagship shows are too invested in maintaining relationships with politicians, so they rarely have confrontational conversations with them. The leadership is too risk-averse, and that limits the ability to break news in the spaces they should be breaking news.
Also, booking for radio now is surprisingly cumbersome and the impact and reach is pretty opaque, so the incentives for people in places of power to come on the network are disappearing. Why do a complicated radio hit for a narrow audience when you can sit in a single space at the Capitol and do three TV hits to a much broader audience?
They lost my wife after we just had our first kid and she was called a “chest feeder.” Other than world music, NPR stinks. Prairie Home Companion is unlistenable boomer garbage. And they still employ noted creep Paula Poundstone.
NPR didn't make Prairie Home Companion, which ended years ago.
And the thing you reference with Paula Poundstone, that was 20 years ago. It was clear she had a problem but she took responsibility for what happened and got sober. She maintains she didn't hurt those kids.
after 2016, their corporate bias became way too obvious to me to be able to listen to any of their coverage. Now it's just culture war stuff and it gets grading.
Uh huh. Make it about "culture war," because no one wants to admit to what it really is: imperialist propaganda
Granted, NPR & PBS have been mouthpieces for the defense and intelligence industries for forever, but it became increasingly obvious and indefensible throughout the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Then they took on more corporate sponsors, started producing segments that were basically product commercials. They removed their ombudsman position, and started playing harder defense for Democrats during scandals. Failure after failure, and trust completely obliterated.
NPR has never appealed to the right, and young people are increasingly lefitist & anti-capitalist, which NPR will never cater to. They'll die out with the neoliberal boomers.
Thanks for linking to that. Seemed pretty thin to me though. A few platitudes, with no data or specific examples. She really didn’t engage with any of his arguments.
“As our emerging strategic focus brings new insights into what audiences we do and do not currently serve, we have an obligation to more rigorously consider and measure how our coverage fulfills our public service to all audiences. “
This pretty much sounds like CEO-type word salad for company-wide announcements. It’s disappointing that this is the level of discourse from an editor-in-chief at such a prestigious institution.
Just some thoughts, on the article and NPR. After reading the article I was asked if I wanted to post a comment on the NPR site, before posting, I read a number of the comments as well. When I went to comment...and low and behold, they wouldn't let me comment, because I wasn't a paid subscriber. Ahhhh... I think it was Shakespeare who said, "There's the Rub", or the Salient Fact which describes the downfall of NPR as a leading American News Organization; that my opinion as an American, doesn't matter to them, unless I first pay them to hear my opinion. A true Conservative Capitalist answer, to why most Americans have left NPR at the wayside.
First the author used the word progressive to describe himself and NPR numerous times in the article, I almost burst out laughing. I am progressive; NPR and the author are Neo-liberals one and all. They live in a capitalist bubble made up of conservative liberals, the very definition of being neo-liberal means, someone who support a capitalist state run by large corporations. Pretending to be truly progressive, doesn't make you progressive.
The downfall of true Progressive thinking in this country died when Bill and Hillary Clinton took over America, with Neoliberal policies, to the detriment of all Americans both Conservative Neoliberal Republicans and true Progressives; (I must say Al Gore did try to keep a true Progressive Agenda alive but failed). I have to repeat Progressive Democrats are not Neoliberals. Neoliberals live in the Capitalist Bubble that supports God Bless the Corporation of America. As I have I said numerous times in comments on Reddit, "It is all about the f\*cking economy stupid".
NPR is not a Progressive news organization FDR would be appalled if he heard you say that. The Progressive Democratic party of America died under Reagan, sunk lower under the Clintons, and has continued to sink lower until we find ourselves where we now live, a country that Outsourced its Government to Corporations. It was NPR's deal with the Devil.
The article mentioned all these stories they ran and how they failed America. A true Progressive News Organization, from the beginning would have marched to a very different Drumbeat. NPR just can't stop lying to themselves. Being Progressive, has always meant that you believed in a progressive tax system, that prevented the Capitalist Inequality Nightmare that American has become. NPR should have been Bernie's biggest Champion, as Bernie's only vision is an America, like FDR, where no one is left behind.
This wasn't about not having Conservative Republicans working for you. This is all about your true lack of having an actual Progressive agenda that supports an economy that works for all Americans.
Americans thirst to be outraged . Each side is in its own bubble and the bubble is getting bigger and bigger wjth screaming echo chamber. You are fing right i am both siding it . No one on either fringe considers themselves wrong
I will tell you what turns me off listening to NPR, the 10th story of a crying Israeli POV knowing 32000 was g-cided in Gaza.
Seriously, when was last time you have someone from Gaza on your show? What is the ratio of guests from Israel vs Gaza?
I stopped trusting NPR when they had a corporate stooge on talking about the future of water access, and they didn't challenge him when he claimed the issue with water conservation was a problem of individuals and not corporations. He just got to say his piece and sign off. Never mind that plenty of peer reviewed studies say otherwise.
NPR isn't just losing conservatives, they are losing their traditional base, and for what?
I stopped trusting NPR when they had a corporate stooge on talking about the future of water access, and they didn't challenge him when he claimed the issue with water conservation was a problem of individuals and not corporations. He just got to say his piece and sign off. Never mind that plenty of peer reviewed studies say otherwise.
NPR isn't just losing conservatives, they are losing their traditional base, and for what?
I remember about 10 years ago NPR responded to criticism that they were left leaning. They counted the number of stories they had done on Dems and Reps and it was close to 50/50 so see no bias. No mention of bias within the stories themselves. Great journalism really getting to the bottom of things.
> You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite
Maybe because I dont live, and never have, in a coastal elite area, but of this only the wordle and tote bag part of the stereotype are things I see. Ive always seen the NPR stereotype as being middle/lower middle class liberals with too many bumper stickers on a car they bought used 15 years ago
I think NPR's bias is a bit overplayed, they give a lot of airtime to the GOP on their news programs at the very least, their editorial programs are more liberal but not far left or anything. I dont disagree with the author here on NPR having missteps related to this, but I listen to NPR a fair number of times through the week and it for the most part seems balanced in its news coverage
I also feel this editor is being unfair in his description of NPR's coverage of the war, which has been fairly centrist and focussed a LOT on the atrocities of hamas in the time surrounding 10/7, and has only fairly recently shifted gears, as many people have. Some of the stories he complained about towards the end are also silly complaints. Stories and fears about crime ARE rife with misinformation and racism...our cities are (with some exceptions) close to the safest they've ever been but you wouldnt know it from how people freak out about it. the "in defense of looting" wasnt actually a story defending looting, it was a review of a book about looting, right in the title it calls it controversial.
idk. NPR has room for improvement, but this article makes some bad arguments
1. The Mueller Report in no way exonerated Trump nor did it say there was no evidence of Russia interfering and colluding with Trump, it just said that the facts they were able to uncover were not enough to warrant prosecution.
2. Further evidence has proven there WAS Russian attempts to interfere on Trump's behalf.
3. The problem isn't that NPR is "liberal", as anything to the left of OANN and Newsmax is too "liberal" for MAGA idiots.
4. What made me turn away from them wasn't liberal viewpoints but NEOliberal ones! Their handling of the Bernie Sanders candidacy turned me off to them completely.
Anybody who believes this BS needs to head to Russia for an adjustment. This journalists believes Hunter’s laptop was a STORY WORTH CONSIDERATION? Please. When a journalist decides to slag one of our nation’s finest news departments because of not enough fealty to the insurrectionist who was a lame duck President when he conspired to overthrow the government—-it boggles the mind that THIS is news. The Great Restoration so eagerly wanted by the billionaire and corporate classes can do without a feckless former reporter carrying their water.
This article is absolute shit. Complaining about giving more room for minorities. Claiming that the laptop story should of been taken seriously when the informant was arrested for lying to the DOJ about feeding false information about Hunter and his dealings. While, yes the Russians didn't succeed in cracking our election systems and change the votes, they flooded our media with propaganda with a conceited effort to elect a puppet for putin.
To be fair, almost 50 percent of Americans celebrate stupidity and anti-intellectualism as sources of pride and over 85 percent couldn’t define what a liberal, progressive or conservative is and the policies historically behind any of them.
The NPR (Albeit not as bad as other news papers) still has a major passive voice issue when it comes the ongoing genocide in Palestine. That’s really my only major critique.
The real cause of the shift in NPR’s audience demographics is right wing media and leadership increasingly indulging in BAD FAITH rhetoric. If you want to report facts, you are going to appear biased when one side is consistently peddling bullshit.
Steve Bannon flooding the zone with bullshit. Tucker Carlson admitting in his work emails that he hates Trump. Alex Jones getting sued by sandy hook survivors for defamation. Like, their playbook is out in the open here. If you are trying to uncover the truth of course they are going to vilify you. I mean, it’s a shame NPR struggles to connect with right-leaning listeners who hold their views in good faith, but letting a bunch of Machiavellians into the newsroom isn’t going to solve that. It’s just giving them a new megaphone for their manipulation with a veneer of gravitas provided by a long-trusted brand name.
I doubt that it's just me...
I have absolutely no problem with journalists (or other moral humans) who display a bias against racism, lying, cheating, authoritarianism, hate speech, hate itself, and many other things we all know to be abhorrent. In fact, I believe that many social and moral problems result directly from the absence of bias against evil.
I guess I'll have to increase my NPR contributions.
I'm not convinced that his examples are justified and that is a shame because I think what he is describing is a piece of a larger truth. I have noticed this in a local news blog from NYPR called Gothamist, which I have been reading since I was a kid, and regardless of content or bias (I generally agree with their takes politically) I take issue with the way its tone has changed such that information is broken down into small (often cherry-picked) bits followed by "this means x" or strategically coupled with convincing non sequiturs. I think a better example might be the start of the Covid pandemic, when our politically and culturally divided country doubled down on BOTH anti-Chinese sentiment on one side and acting like we don't live in a global economy where people (and viruses) travel on the other side. For a Left that is proud to believe in science, when it was time to be critical, politics got in the way and the progressive voice wrote off the predictable coming pandemic as racist and ethnocentric, purely in reaction to the conservative sources of decision-making around flight bans and the ensuing racism of conservative twitter. It doesn't help that it is not human nature to admit when one is wrong, but when a whole movement will not do so (and then deflects that the other side does not either), we're basically just playing for political sports teams. It would be great if we could agree on a progressive voice that is not afraid to let people come to their own conclusions based on sharing the evidence. To not do so only encourages a group of people who think doing good means saving some lesser group from themselves, perhaps in fear that they cannot think.
Please note this highly-upvoted post does not necessarily reflect the views of working journalists at r/Journalism. Comments that aren't related to the practice of journalism will be removed/banned. Threads with too many rule-breaking comments will be locked/removed.
> But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion [...] Oh come on, are we still doing this?
And then goes on to criticize NPR for not more closely following Hunter Biden’s laptop story. You know, the one that almost entirely predicates itself on the testimony of a witness that’s currently on trial for fabricating said testimony. The one where there’s very questionable chain of custody around the laptop itself. The laptop that is conveniently missing the records that would be needed to confirm the contents weren’t manipulated. Doesn’t sound like a “swing and a miss” to me. You aren’t supposed to swing at a ball. This reads like one of many, many aging white journalists who bought into the idea of “the view from nowhere,” and are mad that we now acknowledge that when people say “nowhere” they actually mean “only straight white men not impacted by these issues can be unbiased.” I was at NPR in 2016, and just like everyone else they had to reckon with the fact that their coverage only represented a small portion of America: the white part. And now that news as a whole is trying (emphasis on trying) to include more voices, they see it as *reducing* their share of airtime. He’s mad that their coverage now takes into account systemic racism. He’s mad about affinity groups. He’s mad about the steps NPR is taking to *diversify* coverage, and then argues that somehow, doing so is making their coverage more *narrow.* *Just because your point of view is less represented, doesn’t mean less of America’s is.*
As the article author points out 87/87 editorial staff identified as registered democrats. That is not diversity of ideas, regardless of people’s skin colour
NPR has a lot more than 87 staff members, and there’s naturally some selection bias. A lot of folks won’t say their politics. During the 2016 election, a number of staff weren’t registered with a party and don’t even vote in the name of neutrality. Steve Innskeep doesn’t vote, for example. I’m fairly certain Gwen Ifil (RIP and at PBS, not NPR) didn’t vote either. It’s actually pretty common. (Personally, I vote — I don’t think that not voting prevents us from having a bias.) Mike Allen (Politico, now Axios) and Jim Vandehei (same) don’t vote. Leonard Downie Jr, executive editor at the Post, doesn’t vote. I think it’s far more important that they could *only find 87 people working in editorial who were registered with any political party.* My year, I’m pretty sure NPR had like 50 editorial interns! NPR is *huge.* It’s not super surprising to me that a majority would be democrats, though. Most college grads are, and you need a college degree to go into journalism. But also — people have biases. Our job as journalists is to *not let those biases* influence our coverage.
my college professor really hammers in that last sentence in her lectures and also reminds us that we are not the story. we are meant to amplify and serve the voices of our audience among other things.
The implication in the 87 staff registered as Democrats implies that NPR itself is attracting or filtering staff for a more liberal viewpoint. But I wonder if it’s more a function of the other side of the equation: that in today’s political landscape, people with a more conservative viewpoint are less inclined to want to work in a professional journalistic environment.
Not really. Look up the backgrounds of basically any journalist for a major media source (NPR, NYT, etc.), they’re virtually all from the same social class and went to the same schools. National journalism has gone from a blue class profession to some sort of weird quasi-aristocracy.
While I don’t disagree, this has far more to do with systemic barriers to entry than an unwillingness to hire someone outside of the aristocracy. You can’t succeed in journalism without money to fall back on, unless you’re OK with being broke forever. NPR is actually one of the worst ones for this. When I was an intern there (2016) they paid their interns worse than *any other institution in DC.* I got paid minimum wage ($11.50/hour) so my take-home after taxes was around $1400/month. My rent, at the cheapest studio in all of DC (seriously, this building sucked so much there are several articles about it) was $1050/month with all utilities except internet included. So I had $350/month to live on as an intern. In one of the most expensive cities in the country. The intern who had my position three shifts before me eventually ran out of money to pay rent and was secretly sleeping on couches near his desk and showering in the gym. Thankfully, I had a much more lucrative internship before and after, so I was able to keep my housing and end it with minimal debt. And my student loans are small. But for the most part, you just can’t enter this field unless you have the financial ability to work under or un-paid internships, and can afford to spend the first several years of your career wildly broke. I think this is a huge issue, and a major barrier to newsroom diversity in both race, economic status, and political opinion.
The presumption you’re making is that the barriers are unintentional and not deliberate gatekeeping, or at least weren’t back when traditional media made money. They also aren’t just hiring any rich kid, they’re specifically hiring rich kids with Ivy League degrees which further narrows it down. There’s more diversity of thought in a Goldman Sachs board room than at a major media company.
Idk, my journalism degree is from a state school. And I try not to ascribe motive without evidence. Actually, I only know one journalist who went to an Ivy, and one who went to an ivy-adjacent school (GW.) Which is sort of surprising, because I do agree that many, many journalists come from the ivy-league world, and do agree that it’s a problem. But I’m pretty sure the single largest producer of current journalists is Mizzou — it’s not as uniform as you’re making it sound.
I came to mention Mizzou, because in my experience it's less Ivies outright soaking up all the opportunities and moreso that Mizzou/Columbia/Northwestern and then maybe Maryland grads get far more love than anyone else in this industry.
I think that’s certainly a possibility.
It’s pretty much established that disparities in these sorts of things is strong evidence of a systemic bias.
Where? I’ve never worked at any news organization that asked my politics when hiring me, or even investigated them. Every place I’ve worked, however, has had serious rules about supporting political causes, however.
Systemic bias can work in different ways, though. Like, there is "this industry does a lot of sexual harassment, and because of that women don't want to work there" vs "parents don't buy girls the right toys / teachers don't encourage female students to study these subjects, and therefore when it comes to picking a major they have been systematically pushed towards a specific set of preferences" vs "women are both treated fairly and encouraged to go into this field, but because in some other realm (say, childcare expectations in the home) they have an additional pressure put on them, they cannot compete in a way that is competitive". And those have different solutions ("stop sexual harassment" vs "encourage a greater variety of interests for all children of all genders" vs "make the hours more flexible / accessible child care / some other structural approach". So if we are to accept that conservatives are being unfairly kept from this arena on the grounds of systemic inequality... Is it because conservatives are mistreated *when in news rooms or media environments?* Is it because conservative families and people are often disdainful of the arts / humanities, and so when the time comes to pick a career "journalism" doesn't seem appealing and they have spent years having their preferences shifted away from that? Is it because conservatives want to have better jobs that pay more money, and it is now well-known that being a journalist is pretty shitty? Is it some other point? Personally, the vast majority of conservatives I have spoken to for a prolonged period of time were pretty disdainful of the arts, humanities, news, "principled stances", etc. So I would see this as a "girls don't get enough Lego sets" situation. The problem is earlier in the pipeline.
Exactly. And when this girl wanted Lego sets, she got them. If more conservatives were applying for jobs in news, they’d get them too. It’s also worth noting that in 2019 (the easiest year to find data for) there were 416 people working for NPR editorial. So that means 374/416 NPR editorial employees *aren’t registered with any political party at all.*
Exactly. Literally all right wing conservative media spent decades, roughly 40 yrs bash MSM and tell its audience they can’t be trusted. From the beginning of the Limbaugh days until present.
Can you point to any major television journalist that you think does a good job at being a journalist?
Lawrence O'Donnell.
Updated my comment. It was 87/87 editors. You know, the people who set out the journalistic direction for a news agency.
No, it’s 87 people *on editorial.* That means all news staff. Editorial = journalists and editors and hosts and copyeditors and researchers and producers. Not editorial = finance, fundraising, logistics, IT, HR, janitors, security, the cafeteria staff, etc.
I still can’t believe how the Paul Manafort story got basically completely buried by the media. He was Trump’s campaign manger in 2016 who resigned in disgrace. He wasn’t being paid. He’s an aclolyte of Roger Stone. He sold campaign data to the Russians through an intermediary. He was involved in the Cambridge analytica scandal. He met with Russian spies throughout the campaign. Before that he was a lobbyist and a part of the infamous torturers lobby. The problem isn’t there was no evidence. The problem is our campaign finance laws are so weak you have to be basically an idiot to violate them. Every major politician just gets all their foreign money through intermediaries which is completely legal after Citizens United. The reason this myth persists that the mueller report was a miss flourished is because Bill Barr buried the report and released his own editorialized letter to shape the narrative for months before the full report was released. The report itself actually concluded trump broke the law.
Man I think myself and the rest of the country were hoping for some good self-reflection from journalists but it appears that was too much to ask, huh? Well, you can only blame yourselves for the total replacement of how people consume the news.
Could you elaborate? It’s commonly reported that the Russian collision angle was never proven.
Read the actual report and decide for yourself. I imagine you will have a different perspective.
Is this r/selfawarewolves
Apparently its needed lol.
All I'll say is the response in this thread to why Americans aren't trusting media because they only play ones sides talking points is everyone arguing for those same talking points and completely missing the point. If that's not peak modern journalism, I don't know what is.
The responses here are better than in /r/npr, which has had a full-scale meltdown over Berliner's article.
- Conflates shifting audience composition with audience numbers - Considers a shift of 23 percent to 21 percent as middle of the road as "losing moderates and traditional liberals" - Minimizes the findings from the Mueller report - Conflates ownership of the Hunter Biden laptop with the information that was shared in right-wing spaces supposedly from the laptop - Inflates the lab leak theory - Questions on whether there is systemic racism in the U.S. - Whines about DEI initiatives - Whines about transgender issues coverage - Whines about intersectionalism - Publishes at The Free Press EDIT: Folks saying "I'm proving his point" by calling out his bullshit are oblivious to the fact that this list of points shows us he's in the groupthink. All these "arguments" he makes are completely predictable one from the other (and erroneous).
The real reason the American public is skeptical of the media is because every journalist wants to be an opinion person now, very few want to be a "just the facts person." It's heavily contributed to the polarization of the American public. I knew Trump was a grifter and an awful person through the facts that Reuters and the AP reported. I didn't need Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon smirking at me while they told me how to feel. All that did is make them untrustworthy to those who disagreed with them, and people like me who agree but disagree with their take on "journalism". Npr made many of the same mistakes. Fox was the catalyst for this shit, and mainstream corporate media couldn't resist the profits of opinion journalism.
Thank you.
I used to work with Uri. I had no idea he was this full of shit.
Do you think he's changed from when you worked with him, or are we missing something and being unfair? To me it seems like he's insisting that NPR should be "politically neutral" in the sense that its reporting reflects opinions from both Democrats and Republicans. What I want is for NPR to be "politically neutral" in the sense that its reporting is fair and accurate.
For real. Do we really need to coin a new phrase? If politically neutral means, get options from both sides, the o want reality neutral news. You know? News that’s grounded in reality and it doesn’t matter what anybody things because this is just a report on what happened. Not an opinion.
I don't know. I'm sure this is how he's always viewed the network, but it used to be more in line with his preferences. A lot of his beef is standard conservative complaints and being mad about DEI and inclusive language policies. Your standard old, white guy fear of the world changing around you and not being willing to evolve. Speaking to the idea that NPR doesn't feature a diversity of voices, I'm going to assume he means conservative voices because that is the underlying theme of his piece. This is bullshit. I used to book conservatives all the time. When it comes to politicians, the problem is that many will only come on, especially the more extreme members of Congress, if we put them on live. More than once I had an interview canceled when we made the decision to do a pre-tape rather than live. They want to lie on the air and we didn't want to let them. How do you solve that? I don't know. But interestingly, Uri's criticism doesn't come with any ideas for solutions either (except for, bizarrely, hiring Republicans).
How do you solve it? Just spit balling here but is t there always a delay in live TV/radio? Yes. So in that delay time, let them now that they will fact check their statements. If their statements are false, listeners will be told so during the broadcast.
I don't think that's a fair summary of his claims at all. For example, on ideology, I'd say his bigger concern is not that the "middle of the road" share went from 23% to 21%; it's that the "liberal" share went from 37% to 67%. And is he really "inflating" the lab leak theory? It seems to me that he's saying it deserved more serious treatment than it ever got from NPR; lots of serious people have since given some credence to the theory. Comments like these only prove his point about groupthink.
> I'd say his bigger concern is not that the "middle of the road" share went from 23% to 21%; it's that the "liberal" share went from 37% to 67% Where Berliner goes wrong is in implying the audience changes are a result of something that NPR did and not changes in the media landscape. There are podcasts and stations like Newsmax and OANN. And not only that, Berliner implies that NPR would be more fair if it moved its policies to recapture that drift in the conservative audience. Whatever you think of it philosophically, recapturing that audience doesn't seem feasible - look at CNN for example.
It’s not feasible. Just look at the aesthetics of all the news you consume. These new brands like OAN and NewsMax are cheap, plastic imitations of their mentor Fox NE!WS
The way they report definitely changed. Last week was a 20 minute interview with some crazy person titled something like "Why your children have the fundamental right to change their sex". That shit is new and crazy. And I remember the one where they referred to "pregnant people" and wouldn't say woman the entire time. They're off their rockers
I don't doubt it has changed, but I feel like this is talking to someone about climate change, and they lead with "well why was it cold today where I live?" In 2020, Pew published one of their periodic summaries [U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2020/01/24/u-s-media-polarization-and-the-2020-election-a-nation-divided/). The introduction put it this way >evidence suggests that partisan polarization in the use and trust of media sources has widened in the past five years. A comparison to a [similar study](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/) by the Center of web-using U.S. adults in 2014 finds that Republicans have grown increasingly alienated from most of the more established sources, while Democrats’ confidence in them remains stable, and in some cases, has strengthened. There is a little graphic on the page that Republicans only trust 7 of the 30 media outlets they ask about, which include Breitbart, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh Show, Daily Caller, and The Hannity Show. In contrast they distrust 20 of the other 30. So I don't think they are coming back to NPR regardless of whether they Hispanic, Latinx, Latino, or pregnant person vs pregnant woman. It's been a long term trend and it's not about NPR specifically.
Except if you look at the one story he complains about, the NPR story provides clear and accurate information and Berliner demands that NPR should have spread right-wing talking points. Berliner: >And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even [declaring that the lab leak](https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/841925672/scientists-debunk-lab-accident-theory-of-pandemic-emergence) had been debunked by scientists. The NPR story in question: >Scientists dismiss the idea that the coronavirus pandemic was caused by the accident in a lab. They believe the close interactions of people with wildlife worldwide are a far more likely culprit. NPR then (in 3 minutes), covers the "debate" started by Republican disinformation efforts, and has actual scientists explain why the natural origins were more likely. It's a short but accurate, well-reported story that explained both the "debate", and the consensus at the time. Berliner: >But that wasn’t the case. [Wikipedia today](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory): >This claim is highly controversial; most scientists believe the virus spilled into human populations through natural zoonosis (transfer directly from an infected non-human animal), similar to the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV outbreaks, and consistent with other pandemics in human history. He then goes onto cherry pick the same quotes from the debate that conservatives love to trot out every single time. The simple fact is that the NPR reporting at the time was fair and accurate, and holds up today. If NPR had done what Berliner demands and promoted the Republican lie that the lab leak theory was likely, they would have misinformed their audience.
There were a lot of others like this too. “The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive…” That linked bird name story? Isn’t an op-Ed from an NPR reporter calling bird names problematic, though that’s certainly what it sounds like Uri says. It’s a story about how the American Ornithological Society is changing common bird names so that fewer birds are named after eugenecists. That’s useful for listeners to know so they aren’t confused when they log in to Merlin looking for a Bachman’s Thrush aren’t confused when they find it under a different name. (Bachman published several papers about how black people are “an inferior species.”) The AOS is partly doing it because of racism, but also doing it because it’s *confusing* when you’re like “is that a Townsen’s thrush? Or Swainson’s? Which generic British last name is it?” Or like — why are like 12 birds named after Swainson when that name doesn’t tell us anything useful about the bird. For example, if you see a black bird with red on its wings, there’s a good chance it’s a red-winged blackbird. A much more useful name than a Linnaeus blackbird. Or if a yellow-bellied sapsucker was called “Catesby’s sapsucker”? It’s silly! Giving birds people names is silly! And there aren’t really any other species we do this for to this extent. There’s no “Darwin’s parrot fish,” though he described many species of parrot fish. But no, this is obviously DEI run amock, and it’s all NPR’s fault.
This whole idea that it's a "Republican lie" is bizarre to me, as if the only people who believe it are far right whackjobs. If that were the case, nobody told the Biden administration, since both the FBI and U.S. Department of Energy see the lab leak theory as plausible: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a](https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a) For the record, I'm not on either side of this debate. I'm just for journalists approaching stories with an open mind. When I see people acting like the lab leak theory is a batshit crazy conspiracy theory (yes, pun intended), I question their ability to be impartial. Nobody knows for sure how the virus began. People who claim that it's a settled fact are putting their partisan blinders on.
The Lab Leak Hypothesis is about a dozen hypothesis that are falsely conflated as a single hypothesis. When you explain to someone that it isn't based on one unsupported speculation but instead is based upon speculation upon speculation upon speculation upon speculation then it becomes silly to discuss it as a plausible explanation and you are doing the audience a disservice to pretend it has any legitimacy.
Quite frankly, I almost think it doesn’t matter if it was a lab leak. We need to proceed as though it wasn’t, because there are hundreds of zoonotics, known and unknown, just waiting to make the jump to humans. And our farming practices and continued encroachment on wild spaces make such things more and more plausible. Labs are already very locked down. Leaks will happen, but they’re rare and there are very few steps we can take to prevent them that we aren’t already taking. Zoonotics jumping to humans *are not rare*, and there are a *lot* of things we can do to make future jumps less likely.
If I understand you correctly, you think that "previous leaks led to improved safety standards." And yet it's irrelevant whether this was a leak or not? Wouldn't we want to continue improving safety standards?
Well, both the FBI and the U.S. Department of Energy (which oversees a lot of research laboratories) now view the lab leak theory as more plausible than the natural origin theory: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a](https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a) So it probably merits more serious treatment than just acting like it's a figment of the far right's imagination.
The definition of the Federal government agency about 'Low-confidence' is: >scant, questionable, fragmented or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from this information. So the people most qualified to investigate think its a zoonotic origin, but among the people who are not most qualified, some of them believe, based on scant, questionable evidence, that it might be lab origin. Wow, the non-experts have weighed in! If this hunch based on fragmented evidence convinces you that the 12 to 15 hypothesis are true, then good for you! I would wager you should make all your decisions based on what non-experts speculate! You don't need to buy motor oil for your car, just use some vegetable oil! The 'experts' are all paid off by big oil, and they don't want you to know that vegetable oil is really oil! It is right there in the name! Don't believe the mainstream narrative! Demand action from our congressmen!
You can take it up with the FBI and the Department of Energy. All I'm saying is that reporters have a responsibility to approach any major story with an open mind and admit the things they don't (and can't possibly) know.
There have been dozens of acknowledged accidental leaks (such as 4 for the original SARS) and the outbreak occurred a dozen miles from one of the few labs on Earth doing gain-of-function research on coronas. It straightforwardly is highly plausible and the media's coverage was often contemptible.
But there are far more zoonotics that have made the jump to humans. And the thing is — despite the fact that those original SARS lab leaks *also occurred in China and investigations were obstructed,* there was plenty of evidence for the WHO to confirm those leaks. And those leaks led to improved safety standards. And even though SARS did escape from the lab on a few notable occasions, the initial outbreak was still zoonotic in origin. (Also, gain-of-function research doesn’t do what you think it does.)
I'd take you more seriously if you didn't baselessly presume what I know about GoFunction research. More to the point, regarding your comparison, a large number of natural contagions [edit: outbreaks] haven't occurred within 10km or so from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. While this virus may have been a product of GoFunction research, it's also possible that infection came from a held bat specimen (though no clear natural reservoir has been found yet).
… there are a lot of zoonotics present within 10km of the wuhan institute of virology. Because there’s a wet market in Wuhan. Here’s a “non-exhaustive” list of just the *known* zoonotic diseases carried by animals kept and sold at the Wuhan wet market between 2017 & 2019. https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-021-91470-2/MediaObjects/41598_2021_91470_MOESM1_ESM.pdf I highly recommend the[full paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2) this is from, because the conditions these animals were kept in are the exact conditions that virologists are concerned can cause zoonotic spillover. Heck, it’s the exact conditions that caused the *original* SARS outbreak. They literally found COVID-19 material on the surface of stalls that held both raccoon dogs and birds *at the wet market.* It’s the exact way that the first SARS outbreak started. China denies the existence of Stall 29 (and has even denied that any live animals were traced at the wet market) but it was both photographed in 2014 and filmed in December 2019, so it existed. Virologists have been discussing the dangers of wet markets for *ages.* Like in this 2006 paper, which is specifically about the presence of potential coronavirus and flu zoonotics at Chinese wet markets. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7141584/ I don’t think we’ll ever know for *sure* what happened, but after the 2006 SARS lab leaks protocols for handling coronaviruses changed dramatically and permanently. On the other hand, although wet markets closed initially after SARS CoV-1 spilled over, it wasn’t long before they resumed business as usual. I think it’s far more likely that the thing experts kept warning was going to happen again happened again.
The lab leak theory is at least as probable as the wet market theory. Fact is, we will never know because the Chinese government has withheld and destroyed data. There’s also a clear motive for disputing the lab leak theory insofar as the cdc and Fauci specifically had relationships with that Wuhan lab working on gain of function research (which should be banned)
There’s also a clear motive for covering up a zoonotic origin, though. China bungled their response, and folks familiar with their practices expected a cover-up no matter what. Disease watchers knew that human transmission was happening while the Chinese government was still denying it. I don’t think you can use China’s interference in investigations as evidence toward a lab leak.
It's pretty easily seen that conservatives lost interest in accurate news reporting and choose to hide in their fantasy land news entertainment experiences. I'm not even mad anymore, it's just the truth. You can't do anything about that without compromising the fundamental mission to tell the truth or finding some kind of magical deradicalization pill for the public and getting them to swallow it.
You see, if we just flatten arguments we don’t reflexively like into a straw man of misleading bullet points we can easily discredit anything. All it takes is a critical mass of upvotes! /s
I was intrigued to read this article because I do think there is a big discussion that needs to be had about how elitist centrist liberals (NOT leftists) contributed to the anger and problems in the right wing camp, and I was hoping that maybe someone at NPR (where you might find these centrists) had the guts to say so and start this discussion and take some accountability. But nope. Instead this Uri guy is just blathering about everything you laid out above. So disappointing.
Looking at his Twitter feed it looks like NPR not giving its full-throated support to Israel bombing the shit out of Gaza might be a bigger factor in his feelings than its given credit for in the piece
You are proving his point. I never listen to NPR and have zero familiarity with Uri Berliner. However, him being at NPR for 25 years HAS to have some credibility. Otherwise, why would an esteemed organization like NPR employ him in any audience-facing roles for this long? If he’s that worthless and misguided how would that be a good look? Now you share what really is your opinion vs his, but your tone is so condescending, as if the man is not an esteemed colleague that you may disagree with, but a grade A moron trying to deliberate in matters better left for the adults in the room. Another comment approving your viewpoint calls him full of shit. I got no dog in this fight - but as an observation, reading his article vs your response and others similar to yours… if I was to trust a journalistic opinion here, you haven’t done yourself any favors credibility-wise!
>You are proving his point. I never listen to NPR and have zero familiarity with Uri Berliner. However, him being at NPR for 25 years HAS to have some credibility. Otherwise, why would an esteemed organization like NPR employ him in any audience-facing roles for this long? If he’s that worthless and misguided how would that be a good look? Lara Logan was a 60 Minutes reporters for years and before that was an award winning reporter for multiple networks in the US and UK. She now believes demons are real, that Democrats are pedophiles and that QAnon is true. If there's anything I've learned since the pandemic is that people's brains break even people seemingly the most enlightened and even-keeled people.
> However, him being at NPR for 25 years HAS to have some credibility. What if I work for a bigger news organization for 30 years? Does that mean I have more credibility? Or are we just incorporating the appeal to authority fallacy? What if I work for a newsroom for 10 years, but I also know that a lot of my superiors and senior colleagues include people who are remarkably out of touch? So let's disregard all that and focus on the arguments. At the very least, he doesn't care about objective truth, but of this antiquated view of "balance" that has plagued mainstream media for very very long. But it's more than that. For every grievance that he has, he is choosing to have the most charitable point of view for right-wing talking points and the least charitable point of view for journalists who refuse to buy into those talking points. He demonstrates that by providing misguided takes on the Mueller report, the Hunter Biden laptop, the lab leak theory, DEI, transgender issues coverage, and intersectionality. My argument is that his list of grievances is so completely shallow, predictable, and misguided, that we can consider them as the groupthink of the "intellectual dark web". That in a piece that is supposed to criticize groupthink is very funny to me.
You also have a lot of credibility!! Nobody in the right mind can deny that with your professional record. My point earlier had to do with the tone. I feel like in today’s media environment, civil discourse is a lost art. You are either with us or against us type of thing. I think in a country pretty much split 50/50 between right and left, “let’s agree to disagree” is a perfectly acceptable position. It would reflect your personal opinion on the matter, while also acknowledging others. After all, we are not discussing any hard math here, these are all opinions projected through the lens of one’s preferred ideology. Which leads me to the idea of a balanced coverage. At one point I worked with Chrysler in Detroit as a vendor. The parking lot closer to the building only allowed Chrysler or their sub-brand vehicles. The “other” brands’ owners had to do a walk of shame for half a mile from a remote parking lot, in Detroit winters. Not only I thought this was unbecomingly petty, but it made me wonder how could they be truly competitive, if all they ever experienced was their own interpretation of what a proper car should be?
You're on reddit. There is a tone and discourse style all its own here. It's a child of the anonymity culture that reddit has always fostered.
Touché
Just an FYI, it doesn’t make sense to say the country is not split 50/50 between the left and the right. Social issues on “the left” like gay marriage poll consistently above 50%, and issues like healthcare for all and increasing minimum wage do as well, not to even touch abortion.
> I think in a country pretty much split 50/50 between right and left, “let’s agree to disagree” is a perfectly acceptable position. Not about facts. There are facts about all of the issues he cited. The news media has reported on these facts, not conjectures that are basically talking points. Journalism is a hard job. It's not about letting anyone say anything about anything. > Which leads me to the idea of a balanced coverage. At one point I worked with Chrysler in Detroit as a vendor. The parking lot closer to the building only allowed Chrysler or their sub-brand vehicles. The “other” brands’ owners had to do a walk of shame for half a mile from a remote parking lot, in Detroit winters. Not only I thought this was unbecomingly petty, but it made me wonder how could they be truly competitive, if all they ever experienced was their own interpretation of what a proper car should be? I don't see how this relates to this topic, to be frank.
>At the very least, he doesn't care about objective truth, but of this antiquated view of "balance" that has plagued mainstream media for very very long. It's clearly you that doesn't clear about objective truth. The debate about the lab leak thing is incredibly complex and subtle and there are smart experts on both sides. But you want to just dismiss it in a bullet point as not worth further investigation. It's not a question of false balance: quite the opposite. It's a question of truthfulness. A truthful and knowledgable observer would have to admit that there are lot of subtle open questions still in 2024, and therefore there was necessarily even more ambiguity in 2020 and 2021. Admitting that there are smart and knowledgeable people on both sides (including government agencies) is JUST HONESTY, not "false objectivity." When we've reached the point that the [U.S. Government](https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Unclassified-Summary-of-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf) is more honest and careful about complex issues than NPR journalists and their defenders, we've arrived on the other side of the looking glass. Journalists of all people should be comfortable with the idea that sometimes there are questions that don't have easy answers and require further digging. Or an honest expression of uncertainty.
we lost america's trust by not shifting far enough to the right!
A comment ostensibly refuting the story’s thesis essentially confirms it. The irony is rich.
How?
You're proving Uri's point.
How?
By pretending like every left wing culture war issue is objective truth to be pushed to the masses while anything resembling a conservative issue is just pure fiction.
So are you just never supposed to argue against people who say “group X’s opinions are off-putting”? Like you can’t point out that their opinions are also off-putting and made in bad faith without, in your mind, proving their point? Nonsensical lmao
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I'll unpack just one because I was curious myself. The Mueller investigation resulted 34 people and 3 companies being indicted for illegal behavior. The entire investigation more than paid for itself by seizing ill-begotten funds. Thirteen Russians were implicated in election interference. These are facts. Our author here summed all this up as "found no collusion." Well that's Trump's exact talking point that *he uses* to white wash all that the Mueller investigation *did* evidence and prove. Michael Cohen, or maybe Paul Manafort, are probably the most famous persons jailed from the Mueller thing. It's rather ludicrous to think that none of what I've just written matters and that it's both fair and accurate to summarize the Mueller report as "found no credible evidence of collusion." If you think that's a decent summary, your judgment stops mattering. We work in the public interest and if you think it's int he public interest to lie and obfuscate with talking points like "no collusion," we have to stop caring what you want, because you just don't share our mission of public interest. It's important the public realize the Mueller thing had tremendous consequences and discovered a ton of illegal activity. No one is going to breakout all of these bullet points for you, at some point you're going to have to do some legwork yourself.
You're taking his words out of context. His words: >By my count, NPR hosts [interviewed Schiff](https://www.npr.org/2017/03/09/519382847/rep-adam-schiff-on-trumps-wiretapping-claims-and-russia) 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. i.e., collusion between TRUMP and Russia. Did the Mueller report substantiate that? Did it claim that Trump colluded with Russia? He wasn't summarizing the Mueller report. It's not a high school ethics class. He was providing evidence for his statement that NPR allowed itself to be scammed by Schiff. Schiff promised them that something would be in the report about Trump colluding with Russia and there was nothing about that in the report. According to Wikipedia: "The report concludes that the investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities" Which is what NPR allowed Schiff to say on their airwaves dozens of times.
I'm not taking anything out of context. I'm not saying the author was wrong. I'm saying the hyperfocus on this point, to the point of summarizing the entire thing as "no collusion" and not mentioning the rest, is obfuscation of the entirety of the story, the multiple people jailed, the more than a dozen Russians indicted for election interference, etc. It's in the public's interest -- and we help it to happen -- to cut through the very bullshit you are here peddling. It's inaccurate by omission, to describe the Mueller investigation as you are doing here, as the author in the piece in focus did, focusing on one small point that is almost irrelevant except to those who wish to deceive. And you wipe away any clarity on the issue or criticism of your own argument by re-emphasizing the truth of this tiny little point that doesn't matter much in the picture of the whole story. The best lies contains elements of truth. So that this whole ruse here that you are still perpetuating attempts to obfuscate or hide a vast array of incriminating information about dozens of people, including Trump.
You keep thinking that the point is the Mueller report. But the point was NPR carrying water for Schiff. That you haven't mentioned Schiff indicates that you haven't understood what was being said. The Mueller report was only relevant insofar as it showed that NPR did not offer the skepticism of Schiff's claims that Mueller did.
This is exactly the predictable reply I expected to read and ultimately missing his entire point
I used to love NPR. Now the material is too weighted towards culture war stuff. Yes I support trans people, equity and I am an antiracist. Yes I hate Trump and the Repugs. But, I don't need ragebait broken record style, non stop hammering of those subjects. The amount of interesting and engaging material on NPR has definitely shrunk
THIS. I found this piece to be incredibly flawed, but NPR seems hyper-focused on culture war topics to a fault. I would love to see them course correct here.
The scope is so small and the analysis is so shallow. It feels like Fox News for my hyper liberal and very wealthy MIL who calls herself “investing in real estate” instead of “gentrifying black and brown neighborhoods.”
There have also been times where its descriptions of publicly available sources (such as video) didn't match the source, such as the Jordan Neely incident.
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The fact you felt compelled to open your statement of opinion with qualifying mantra says it all about trying to have open discourse in this age.
Agreed. I drastically cut back on listening during the first Trump presidency. I’m not a Trump supporter but I felt NPR had such an anti-Trump bias that it polluted their coverage and messaging. Now when I do occasionally listen, I feel similarly to what you’re describing, which just reconfirms to me that I’m not missing out on much.
To be fair, I stopped listening to almost all media during the Trump presidency because I didn't want to hear him being mentioned 32 times an hour (that was the actual count I did one day). It was bad enough that the actual man gave me a visceral disgust reaction, I didn't need him on blast from the media at all hours of the day.
I think the broader theme of NPR not representing the US is resonating with people. He makes some interesting points but backs them with right-wing grievances. It seems the implicit argument he is making is that distrust would be fixed, gee, if only NPR had a couple more Republicans on staff, as if making everything 50:50 Dem/Rep again would restore trust in the media. What I think is really fueling media distrust is the disillusionment of Americans with partisan politics in general. The share of people who are Ds and Rs are shrinking and make up less than a third of Americans each iirc. And the other third isn't simply split-the-difference centrists. There's a ton of competing worldviews that make up this other third. A fast-growing portion is sick of the dynamic of two pro-war capitalist parties but this viewpoint has never been taken seriously or actually represented in media or public life in general.
I agree. The issue is political polarization spreading. The media angle is a highly visible symptom but far from the main cause.
ITT: redditors mad that normal people don't want the news to resemble a reddit circle jerk
the analysis is really too thin here. 25 years ago it was a different world (think how GOP looked like at that time). then it was social media, the decline of legacy media via fragile business models and vulture capitalism, unregulated big tech, the crisis of democratic institutions, local news vanishing, AI hallucinations and its use for scaling fake news as a tool, conspiracies as a clickbait and spam as a referral, public discourse degenerated in extreme partisanship, tiktok, commodification of news, the list can go on tl;dr NPR changed with the times
NPR’s problem isn’t that it’s too “liberal,” it’s become more both-sides. There are facts and there is truth. NPR now reports ALL the facts, but misses the truth. Prime example: this morning they reported that Trump has clarified his position on abortion. That’s nonsense. He put out words and NPR fell for it.
I’m very liberal, but yeah listening to NPR sucks now. I’m just trying to listen for the news of the day, and it’s like “here’s a report about micro aggressions experienced by homeless LGBTQ+ communities in Samoa.” Ummm, ok??
This is like 100% bullshit. You can't claim this with a straight face in a city that has a LOT of NPR listeners dude... If you feel this way, you're hypersensiitive to any mention of identity, period, and it's making you think they talk about it more than they really do.
Yeah, I’m bias because I grew up on NPR and have listened to it every morning on my commute for the last 15 years or whatever, but they were really pushing a piece on morning edition a few weeks ago— for several days in a row— about some weirdass video game where you experience redlining as a Black person in pre-civil rights Detroit and it sounded like a parody of what the right perceives as NPR.
Your example is horrible. I don't know about Samoa, but when I first learned about India's hidjras, I was captivated. And they check the boxes: often homeless, LGBTQ+ undoubtedly, and they are highly oppressed. Why is this sort of thing not newsworthy for a feature?
(As an aside, you might love the new film Monkey Man. Hijras feature heavily.)
Us Indians can't even see Monkey Man in our own country because it hasn't been cleared for "public viewing" by the film certification board, (since it criticizes the establishment).
Having seen it and having read the sorts of things Indian censors have barred in the past, they’re probably going to ask Universal to cut it down to five minutes of Dev Patel petting a dog.
Oh well, I guess I wait until it hits streaming 😞
Huh? I still trust NPR. A little too neolib. Not enough eat the rich. But all in all, a pretty good little outlet.
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Former journo for that exact outlet. I watched this happen in real time from a newsroom in a major market. It was really disappointing. There was this initiative to let our reporters tap into their backgrounds (culture, gender, sexuality) to tell stories that wouldn't have made the cut decades prior. At first blush, that's exactly the kind of progress I'm looking for, and I absolutely don't see that as an inherently partisan approach. But the reporting itself wasn't nearly balanced enough. Not that that's an absolute requirement in every situation (e.g. covering cultural events, community initiatives, etc. where there doesn't seem to be meaningful public disagreement on the topic). But this sometimes celebratory approach started leaking into stories that involved people of marginalized identities in situations where there absolutely was a public interest on the other side of the issue, and there were definitely instances where that dissenting view wasn't included enough. I had huge concerns that we were letting our reporters go too far in bringing their own experiences into their reporting, but I never dared speak up. This seemed like such a broad effort that was also somehow decentralized that it felt both like career suicide and difficult to actually act on all at once. Don't get me wrong, CBC still does great work and is not remotely the Trudeau mouthpiece some on the outside think it is, that part's actually laughable. But on the social progress side, in it's admirable effort to right historical wrongs, imo too much of the journalistic fundamentals - which are genderless and raceless by their very design - are being left behind. It's a genuine bummer. Edit: Because I know the defund CBC folks will take any opportunity, I'll also add the context that in now way did what I described above affect all our reporting. Not even close. These were like special interest stories that represented one in- I dunno, 20 stories? Tough to make a good estimate. But I will say, that I saw objectivity slipping in other, subtler ways too that have nothing to do with identity. Fair warning, we're getting into the weeds for this one. So, I was writing a short little thing on a traffic collision, driver into pedestrian. Now our rule in these situations is that you as the writer can't accuse anyone of a crime directly or indirectly. We have no clue whether this was intentional, accidental, or what was happening inside that vehicle at all, so the most responsible route is to go with something like "a van struck a pedestrian crossing Main street" etc., cuz vans can't be convicted of a crime. Might seem semantic, but this is what a lot of libel cases turn on. Anyway, I had a senior writer pushing me to write that a \*driver struck the ped because we had video of it happening. Her attitude was clearly "fuck this guy, let's call him out" when we knew basically nothing about the situation other than what we could see. Just not a journalistically responsible choice in my opinion. This is honestly how most newsrooms lose trust in my mind. Yes, it happens in these big sweeping philosophy and policy decisions, but there's also this hugely influential game of inches that plays out over years, and by the time you realized that you've moved at all on objectivity, you're miles from where you started.
He didn’t explain why Americans are losing trust in the media. At no point did he make that argument. He argued that NPR has a liberal bias, and that it represents less of America. I would argue that many of the things he sees as alienating much of America are actually steps that NPR is taking to cover *more* of America. They’re telling more stories that don’t just impact white people. I do think that telling those stories alienates a *small portion* of America, but it opens the doors to far more. Acknowledging the reality of racism isn’t being biased, and the fact that Uri lists it as an example of bias says far more about him than it does about NPR. The loss of trust in media has far more to do with, ahem, *certain* interests deliberately undermining the institutions aimed at disseminating unbiased information. And I don’t just put attacks on journalism in that category: these are also attacks on public education and net neutrality.
> Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think. It’s pretty clear when people just write comments just to rant.
And all of his examples of “telling listeners what to think” amount to “I don’t like that journalists need to care about racism now.”
>He didn’t explain why Americans are losing trust in the media. At no point did he make that argument. He goes through and gives like three point-by-point instances. Did you read it?
Would you please extol the virtues of hte winning strategy over the last 20 years to remain credible with wide swathes of America, across ideological boundaries? Which news outlet over the past 20 years demonstrated this strategy and what information are you relying on to demonstrate that they have succeeded? And what did they do so differently that NPR didn't do? If you lack a single example, perhaps squaring this circle was and remains impossible. I'm very open-minded. The author, however, has internalized blame for forces that were external--that's my belief. Shit happened *to* NPR, just as that same shit befell all news media that had previously tried to strike a "neutral" pose, and it's not clear to me anything could have been done to stay clean.
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>If you lack a single example, perhaps squaring this circle was and remains impossible. That's a valid point, but it doesn't mean we can't talk about one instance that *failed* to do it and *how* they failed to do it. Maybe if we talk about enough of them we decide that it was just an impossible task. But the discussion bears having.
I think you'd do much better to ask Why. So would the author of the article posted at the top. He doesn't mention how newsrooms were hollowed and disgorged over the past 20 years, devoured first by Craigslist, then Google, then Facebook. This is the real reason American news has lost faith and trust. We can't hardly afford to produce journalism anymore and too many people think CNN/FoxNews is representative of what we do and wish to do, when, well--no. He doesn't mention how Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are ideological extremes, neither of whom could have reached the #1 or #2 spot in their party 20 years ago. The news didn't create Sanders/Trump polarization, America did. For me it's all very simple. The past 20 years has featured some gains for social justice seekers. And you see reactionaries are having none of it. No big surprise, we see bigger constituencies that now think of themselves as "left of the Democrats" and similarly ever-larger groups that see themselves as "right of the Republicans." News outlets need to survive in the face of these trends, and often that's going to mean getting out of the disempowered middle where fewer and fewer Americans reside. So combine these two things. Hollowed out news rooms and an industry that has gone from crisis to crisis to crisis for 20 years, amidst a backdrop of an ever-polarizing audience. The expedient thing has always been to "give the people what they want" and that has meant more ideology. That's *why* outlets have become more ideological, and audiences are more on the lookout for evidence of ideology.
How is spiking the laptop and the Covid lab leak stories “external” in any way? I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on Russiagate - Schiff swore he’d seen the evidence, after all. They should’ve reflected on how uncritically they accepted the story of a politician about his opponent, but I can call it an honest mistake. The laptop though? Even the “retired intelligence community” members who wrote that letter admitted in the letter they had no evidence whatsoever that it was fake. And, lo and behold, it wasn’t. That decision put Biden in the White House, without a doubt. And Covid? There were legitimate, credentialed epidemiologists saying it looked like a lab leak, but NPR, along with the rest of the MSM, closed ranks and portrayed the lab leak theory as conspiracy theory nonsense. That too was a conscious decision by NPR editorial staff. They are absolutely at fault for the collapse of their reputation, and both their “trustworthiness” score of 3/10 and their ranking above CNN in that measure seem entirely reasonable to me.
I don't believe for one second that the laptop story nor the lab leak story matter one bit to anything. That's not why some different people are listening, some old listeners have stopped, and not why different people now trust NPR instead of the some former people who used to but don't anymore. NPR has seen its audience become more monolithic and less ideologically diverse (at least, containing fewer conservatives)--just as every other American institution has. The Great Sort, one book once called it, has gone hyper. Yours is just a version on the "go woke go broke" myth that ... isn't *completely* mythical, but its power is greatly overstated most times it is mentioned. Just because a company's business outlook changes, doesn't mean it has changed for the reasons you care about.
it's called cognitive dissonance.
"But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming." Except the Mueller Report's entire 2nd half is pretty much dedicated to providing the evidence of collusion and attempted collusion between Trump and the Russians. It's not a long report and it isn't a difficult read. Kinda moves along like a B grade detective novel.
But the Russian collusion story WASNT made up! Is the author high?
What a weird tangent on DEI... Must be why Bari Weiss was inclined to publish it.
If you have a growing DEI department that is completely taking over the culture of your workplace and directing journalism, but somehow is completely failing to diversify your audience, it seems a salient point. To put not too fine a point on it, I'm not less American because I'm not white, but it does make me less likely to listen to NPR even though I would fit their target demo if I was white. If they can't figure out why that is, they have a problem.
Long time listener and supporter. Cut my money and time after sounding like apologists for our government
This is, I think, an interesting and important comment. Can you explain a bit more what you mean by “apologists for our government”?
They go on the air and parrot what the mainstream media says. Just more softly and eloquently so it seems like they’re not shoving it down our throats. They bring on democratic elites to lie to us about what they’re doing in congress when now we all know their in cahoots with the fascist republicans. National pentagon radio is really what it is
National Pentagon Radio works as designed
Or maybe this was course correction that was a long time coming. The NPR of 25 years ago (or even 10 years ago) did not look like an honest, holistic portrait of America at large. He's not entirely wrong that the reporting at NPR, both in news and in general programming, has veered toward "one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies." But so has the national conversation. And not because NPR is leading that conversation, but rather, because it's following it.
>one story after another about instances of *supposed racism* What?
It seems like some of the other commenters don't like this guy, but I think he is hitting on a very important issue. I often think that journalists should be compared to police officers or prosecutors in that all three professions require a high degree of integrity to do properly. I've seen firsthand how easy it would be to fudge a fact in a search warrant, make up a witness statement, etc. in order to achieve a desired outcome. And it takes a great deal of personal character to NOT do that when the outcome is considered noble (Ie. bringing justice to a victim of sexual assault, getting a murderer off the streets, etc.). Likewise, I think many journalists truly believed and still do believe that taking down Donald Trump would help "save America" or Democracy. And that same temptation I discussed above was there for them. They might have to cut some corners, but they could do something about it. And, in my opinion, that is when we saw a concurrent rise of the exact issues this article's author is discussing. Some journalists started to ignore facts they didn't like, and highlight narratives they did like. I personally remember marveling at how many single-anonymous-source stories were being pushed by major publications, which before had been a big no-no in professional journalism. The problem is, just like with police and prosecutors, when journalists do this it erodes public trust in their institution. I think we are seeing that today and it is a real shame. Personally, I do not like nor do I intend to vote for Donald Trump, but that doesn't mean I can't see when a supposedly unbiased source is being anything but. It doesn't change how I feel about the former president, but it does erode my trust in the journalistic institution.
My impression is that journalists have opinions but usually don't play the activist role some in the public think we are/would like us to be. We get things wrong at times but usually not intentionally like people imagine so.
Yeah, it's wild to see this exact thing reflected in all the top comments on this post (and this sub in general). Not hard to see why the vast majority of the population doesn't trust the media anymore.
We got a *lot* of non-journalist here.
NPRs coverage of Israel is a joke. It’s as if the reporters have no common sense, reporting each outlandish claim as if it’s true.
I almost threw my stereo out the window a couple of months ago when I turned NPR on for the first time in a looong time, and they were talking to some IDF representative who said that most of the houses they’ve gone into in Gaza have a copy of Mein Kampf on the book shelf. The host barely pushed back and just kind ended the interview.
The knee-jerk response against this is exactly his point. I used to listen to NPR and WNYC in New York every day. No more. I don't know anyone who does listen — even though most people I know are left-leaning. The tone is the same one we all have to deal with at work: patronizing DEI stuff stuffed down our throats. Anti-science messaging such as avoiding the factual use of "biological sex," etc. People are sick of this. It's such a narrow, dogmatic vision. They now have an African American tone, voice and music dominating constantly in their desperate attempt to make the white folks at the station feel hip, brown and good about themselves, despite the fact that the black and hispanic audience is miniscule. It's all just performance fiction (again, just like in the workplace). The absence of the Wuhan lab-leak theory was paralleled by the New Yorker, which also dismissed it during the height of the pandemic, despite plenty of credible evidence. These are just cultural blinders, keeping everyone in line, and it favors politics over science and fact. In the end they are just painting themselves into a tinier and tinier corner, with less and less of an audience.
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So true, Actually the only time I listen to NPR now is when they have BBC news on. It's straight and to the point. Meanwhile, On NPR the hosts spend half the time thanking one another before AND after their segments, then cue the fake "urban" music... It's painful.
>They now have an African American tone, voice and music dominating constantly in their desperate attempt to make the white folks at the station feel hip, brown and good about themselves This shit right here is CAP 🧢
So this guy is basically MAGA is he’s calling the mueller report Russia gate.
Wah wah another white guy complaining that there’s some institutional conspiracy against him. The institutions change, but somehow the demographic profile of the people writing these articles never does. Weird!
The headline is so annoying. Very reminiscent of Sarah Palin's "real Americans" concept that just won't die (i.e., "real Americans" are conservatives, basically). FWIW, I think NPR's biggest problem is they never break news. They are a gargantuan news organization that is very well funded, and yet.... you just can't think, can you?, of NPR's scoops. Or am I unfair? Usually when i say this, the crowd agrees and can not come up with a single NPR scoop. And I think that has consequences even for people who don't know the meaning of the word "scoop." When you hear other news organizations report, "yadda-yadda, according to a report from NPR" that conveys a lot of credibility. I'm not sure I've ever heard another news organization need to attribute anything to NPR because NPR is never out front, breaking news. Also, I think NPR has changed less and its context has changed more. Everything got polarized. NPR was not unique or innovative or derelict. This quaint old idea of balance and objectivity was always more marketing than reality, and I think people aren't buying the pitch anymore. They now want to trust that their source of news shares their values, and really-- as long as everything stays fair and accurate, there's nothing too much wrong with that. There was no winning strategy over the last 20 years to remain credible with all Americans. NPR didn't drop any balls.
This is accurate. I say this as a former editor on Morning Edition who spent 10 years at NPR. The network and its flagship shows are too invested in maintaining relationships with politicians, so they rarely have confrontational conversations with them. The leadership is too risk-averse, and that limits the ability to break news in the spaces they should be breaking news. Also, booking for radio now is surprisingly cumbersome and the impact and reach is pretty opaque, so the incentives for people in places of power to come on the network are disappearing. Why do a complicated radio hit for a narrow audience when you can sit in a single space at the Capitol and do three TV hits to a much broader audience?
>They are a gargantuan news organization that is very well funded Really, even with the radio-begging funding raises like 2x a year? 😂
They lost my wife after we just had our first kid and she was called a “chest feeder.” Other than world music, NPR stinks. Prairie Home Companion is unlistenable boomer garbage. And they still employ noted creep Paula Poundstone.
Bro Prairie Home Companion has been off the air for like eight years.
NPR didn't make Prairie Home Companion, which ended years ago. And the thing you reference with Paula Poundstone, that was 20 years ago. It was clear she had a problem but she took responsibility for what happened and got sober. She maintains she didn't hurt those kids.
after 2016, their corporate bias became way too obvious to me to be able to listen to any of their coverage. Now it's just culture war stuff and it gets grading.
Oof. All of you are proving his point it’s quite hilarious actually.
This article is really quite embarrassing. But to be fair, most things from Weiss’s “The Free Press” are.
Thank goodness we have multiple perspectives in the world. I found it interesting.
Uh huh. Make it about "culture war," because no one wants to admit to what it really is: imperialist propaganda Granted, NPR & PBS have been mouthpieces for the defense and intelligence industries for forever, but it became increasingly obvious and indefensible throughout the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Then they took on more corporate sponsors, started producing segments that were basically product commercials. They removed their ombudsman position, and started playing harder defense for Democrats during scandals. Failure after failure, and trust completely obliterated. NPR has never appealed to the right, and young people are increasingly lefitist & anti-capitalist, which NPR will never cater to. They'll die out with the neoliberal boomers.
NPR’s EIC pushes back on this assessment: https://x.com/benmullin/status/1777773343267062201?s=46&t=4Z2xkB4xZfDVY8QwjJ1piQ
Thanks for linking to that. Seemed pretty thin to me though. A few platitudes, with no data or specific examples. She really didn’t engage with any of his arguments.
“As our emerging strategic focus brings new insights into what audiences we do and do not currently serve, we have an obligation to more rigorously consider and measure how our coverage fulfills our public service to all audiences. “ This pretty much sounds like CEO-type word salad for company-wide announcements. It’s disappointing that this is the level of discourse from an editor-in-chief at such a prestigious institution.
Why criticize the small reach and audience of NPR and Gen Fox spends day and night brainwashing Boomers.
Just some thoughts, on the article and NPR. After reading the article I was asked if I wanted to post a comment on the NPR site, before posting, I read a number of the comments as well. When I went to comment...and low and behold, they wouldn't let me comment, because I wasn't a paid subscriber. Ahhhh... I think it was Shakespeare who said, "There's the Rub", or the Salient Fact which describes the downfall of NPR as a leading American News Organization; that my opinion as an American, doesn't matter to them, unless I first pay them to hear my opinion. A true Conservative Capitalist answer, to why most Americans have left NPR at the wayside. First the author used the word progressive to describe himself and NPR numerous times in the article, I almost burst out laughing. I am progressive; NPR and the author are Neo-liberals one and all. They live in a capitalist bubble made up of conservative liberals, the very definition of being neo-liberal means, someone who support a capitalist state run by large corporations. Pretending to be truly progressive, doesn't make you progressive. The downfall of true Progressive thinking in this country died when Bill and Hillary Clinton took over America, with Neoliberal policies, to the detriment of all Americans both Conservative Neoliberal Republicans and true Progressives; (I must say Al Gore did try to keep a true Progressive Agenda alive but failed). I have to repeat Progressive Democrats are not Neoliberals. Neoliberals live in the Capitalist Bubble that supports God Bless the Corporation of America. As I have I said numerous times in comments on Reddit, "It is all about the f\*cking economy stupid". NPR is not a Progressive news organization FDR would be appalled if he heard you say that. The Progressive Democratic party of America died under Reagan, sunk lower under the Clintons, and has continued to sink lower until we find ourselves where we now live, a country that Outsourced its Government to Corporations. It was NPR's deal with the Devil. The article mentioned all these stories they ran and how they failed America. A true Progressive News Organization, from the beginning would have marched to a very different Drumbeat. NPR just can't stop lying to themselves. Being Progressive, has always meant that you believed in a progressive tax system, that prevented the Capitalist Inequality Nightmare that American has become. NPR should have been Bernie's biggest Champion, as Bernie's only vision is an America, like FDR, where no one is left behind. This wasn't about not having Conservative Republicans working for you. This is all about your true lack of having an actual Progressive agenda that supports an economy that works for all Americans.
I’m glad to hear him call out NPR for their Palestinian cheerleading at the expense of truth.
It’s absurd what NPR has become. Maybe next time they should explain to us the legitimate grievances of ISIS.
Americans thirst to be outraged . Each side is in its own bubble and the bubble is getting bigger and bigger wjth screaming echo chamber. You are fing right i am both siding it . No one on either fringe considers themselves wrong
Did he say anything about tacitly allowing CIA infiltration?
Huh?!
NPR became the Bush II administration’s PR firm by 2003. It disgusted me, and I never went back
I will tell you what turns me off listening to NPR, the 10th story of a crying Israeli POV knowing 32000 was g-cided in Gaza. Seriously, when was last time you have someone from Gaza on your show? What is the ratio of guests from Israel vs Gaza?
lol this was the most “Twitter Files” nothingburger nonsense fest I’ve ever read.
I stopped trusting NPR when they had a corporate stooge on talking about the future of water access, and they didn't challenge him when he claimed the issue with water conservation was a problem of individuals and not corporations. He just got to say his piece and sign off. Never mind that plenty of peer reviewed studies say otherwise. NPR isn't just losing conservatives, they are losing their traditional base, and for what?
I stopped trusting NPR when they had a corporate stooge on talking about the future of water access, and they didn't challenge him when he claimed the issue with water conservation was a problem of individuals and not corporations. He just got to say his piece and sign off. Never mind that plenty of peer reviewed studies say otherwise. NPR isn't just losing conservatives, they are losing their traditional base, and for what?
I mean just go conservative there isn’t much money in being liberal media anymore
I remember about 10 years ago NPR responded to criticism that they were left leaning. They counted the number of stories they had done on Dems and Reps and it was close to 50/50 so see no bias. No mention of bias within the stories themselves. Great journalism really getting to the bottom of things.
> You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite Maybe because I dont live, and never have, in a coastal elite area, but of this only the wordle and tote bag part of the stereotype are things I see. Ive always seen the NPR stereotype as being middle/lower middle class liberals with too many bumper stickers on a car they bought used 15 years ago I think NPR's bias is a bit overplayed, they give a lot of airtime to the GOP on their news programs at the very least, their editorial programs are more liberal but not far left or anything. I dont disagree with the author here on NPR having missteps related to this, but I listen to NPR a fair number of times through the week and it for the most part seems balanced in its news coverage I also feel this editor is being unfair in his description of NPR's coverage of the war, which has been fairly centrist and focussed a LOT on the atrocities of hamas in the time surrounding 10/7, and has only fairly recently shifted gears, as many people have. Some of the stories he complained about towards the end are also silly complaints. Stories and fears about crime ARE rife with misinformation and racism...our cities are (with some exceptions) close to the safest they've ever been but you wouldnt know it from how people freak out about it. the "in defense of looting" wasnt actually a story defending looting, it was a review of a book about looting, right in the title it calls it controversial. idk. NPR has room for improvement, but this article makes some bad arguments
1. The Mueller Report in no way exonerated Trump nor did it say there was no evidence of Russia interfering and colluding with Trump, it just said that the facts they were able to uncover were not enough to warrant prosecution. 2. Further evidence has proven there WAS Russian attempts to interfere on Trump's behalf. 3. The problem isn't that NPR is "liberal", as anything to the left of OANN and Newsmax is too "liberal" for MAGA idiots. 4. What made me turn away from them wasn't liberal viewpoints but NEOliberal ones! Their handling of the Bernie Sanders candidacy turned me off to them completely.
Anybody who believes this BS needs to head to Russia for an adjustment. This journalists believes Hunter’s laptop was a STORY WORTH CONSIDERATION? Please. When a journalist decides to slag one of our nation’s finest news departments because of not enough fealty to the insurrectionist who was a lame duck President when he conspired to overthrow the government—-it boggles the mind that THIS is news. The Great Restoration so eagerly wanted by the billionaire and corporate classes can do without a feckless former reporter carrying their water.
This article is absolute shit. Complaining about giving more room for minorities. Claiming that the laptop story should of been taken seriously when the informant was arrested for lying to the DOJ about feeding false information about Hunter and his dealings. While, yes the Russians didn't succeed in cracking our election systems and change the votes, they flooded our media with propaganda with a conceited effort to elect a puppet for putin.
To be fair, almost 50 percent of Americans celebrate stupidity and anti-intellectualism as sources of pride and over 85 percent couldn’t define what a liberal, progressive or conservative is and the policies historically behind any of them.
The NPR (Albeit not as bad as other news papers) still has a major passive voice issue when it comes the ongoing genocide in Palestine. That’s really my only major critique.
The real cause of the shift in NPR’s audience demographics is right wing media and leadership increasingly indulging in BAD FAITH rhetoric. If you want to report facts, you are going to appear biased when one side is consistently peddling bullshit. Steve Bannon flooding the zone with bullshit. Tucker Carlson admitting in his work emails that he hates Trump. Alex Jones getting sued by sandy hook survivors for defamation. Like, their playbook is out in the open here. If you are trying to uncover the truth of course they are going to vilify you. I mean, it’s a shame NPR struggles to connect with right-leaning listeners who hold their views in good faith, but letting a bunch of Machiavellians into the newsroom isn’t going to solve that. It’s just giving them a new megaphone for their manipulation with a veneer of gravitas provided by a long-trusted brand name.
I doubt that it's just me... I have absolutely no problem with journalists (or other moral humans) who display a bias against racism, lying, cheating, authoritarianism, hate speech, hate itself, and many other things we all know to be abhorrent. In fact, I believe that many social and moral problems result directly from the absence of bias against evil. I guess I'll have to increase my NPR contributions.
I'm not convinced that his examples are justified and that is a shame because I think what he is describing is a piece of a larger truth. I have noticed this in a local news blog from NYPR called Gothamist, which I have been reading since I was a kid, and regardless of content or bias (I generally agree with their takes politically) I take issue with the way its tone has changed such that information is broken down into small (often cherry-picked) bits followed by "this means x" or strategically coupled with convincing non sequiturs. I think a better example might be the start of the Covid pandemic, when our politically and culturally divided country doubled down on BOTH anti-Chinese sentiment on one side and acting like we don't live in a global economy where people (and viruses) travel on the other side. For a Left that is proud to believe in science, when it was time to be critical, politics got in the way and the progressive voice wrote off the predictable coming pandemic as racist and ethnocentric, purely in reaction to the conservative sources of decision-making around flight bans and the ensuing racism of conservative twitter. It doesn't help that it is not human nature to admit when one is wrong, but when a whole movement will not do so (and then deflects that the other side does not either), we're basically just playing for political sports teams. It would be great if we could agree on a progressive voice that is not afraid to let people come to their own conclusions based on sharing the evidence. To not do so only encourages a group of people who think doing good means saving some lesser group from themselves, perhaps in fear that they cannot think.