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NPR is in the news lately. First because they have a new CEO, who tweets like a parody of white liberal women. OK those were "in the past" but they were only 4-8 years ago... has she matured at all since then? So far no sign of that.
Secondly was this essay by Uri Berliner, their longtime senior business editor, creator of the popular "Planet Money" podcast, and one of the very few white males/not-super-liberals still in a position of authority at NPR. I really recommend this essay. He lays it out how, sure, NPR was always left-leaning, but it had intelligence and integrity. It's changed.
...
He was suspended for writing that essay (edited- he has since been made to resign: https://archive.is/YR3LB). NPR claims it's not about the content, they just don't allow their workers to write for outside publications without permission. Benjamin Mullin has the story in the New York Times
(edited to remove something wrong)
For my own part, I grew up listening to NPR and I used to love it. The voices, the production value, the journalism, all of it was high-quality. It really stood out in the world of FM radio, where everything else is staticky, ad-filled garbage, and tends to play the same basic pop-classic rock-rap top 40 garbage over and over. In the world before podcasts and sattelite Radio, NPR was the only halfway intellectual content on the radio. Now it just feels like a podcast from some random student activists who have been triggered by Trump to the point that they're on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. I seriously can't stand listening to it anymore, it's just amazing how deranged and annoying it's become.
If you want more examples, Peter Boghossian has a series of podcasts about it: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYNjnJFU-62s5cNuqeB-D-7QPymF6myk_. I'm guessing that most of this won't be very shocking to the people here. But still, it's nice to feel like "I'm not alone. there really are a lot of other people who used to like NPR and now hate it."
NPR is too far left? That's certainly a take.
I have the impression of NPR as their spin being similar to NYT: representing the most milquetoast "centrist" corporate Dem position possible, with token discussions of "diversity" or minority rights while completely eliding any structural issues or suggestions for real leftist/progressive reform. Often so blatantly that it feels like the editor deleted the paragraph discussing them and immediately hit publish.
You actual experience of NPR varies a great deal by the specific member station you listen to. Here in Appalachia its just the standard news programs, classical music, and bluegrass/old time country music. There is a cooking show on the weekends. I've lived in blue cities though, and driven through even more of them; its basically completely different station in those areas and imo deserves the criticism it gets.
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There's nothing "token" about it, that's their central framing for basically every single story. It's relentless. I do agree that they elide any real structural issues or serious suggestions for reform, but that's because it's all so stupid that they don't think to ask those questions.
My working assumption has always been that not having to have those difficult discussions about class/real structural issues is one of the big reasons for the focus on privilege and identity issues. If you're looking at reality, a redneck from Appalachia whose local economy got destroyed by outsourcing and now has a massive fentanyl problem is actually substantially less privileged (in the actual sense of the word) than a pretty young girl going to an elite university. Focusing on the fact that the redneck is a white male allows people to ignore their own actual privilege, and while I'm not going to claim that that's the entire reason for those beliefs, I think that use gave it a lot of staying power.
It also allows them to continue harboring their intense classism and hatred of people like white appalachians and poor southerners. I agree there are some criticisms you can make of those groups -- some of those very hard-hitting -- but the criticisms made by elites are often far more gutteral and contemptuous than grounded and sympathetic. I would not be surprised to hear some references to "scum of the universe".
The real thing that distinguishes this to me, though, is how it contrasts powerfully with the attitude towards other poor groups; I can't tell you how many middle class+ white people I know will talk endlessly and with great care about being respectful towards AAVE speakers, and then in the next breath make fun of backcountry white dialects that are similar in many respects. It's not the kindness or politeness that grates me, but how selective it is. I dislike the sort of smorgasbord contempt you get from some of our more... elitist posters, but I can at least respect the consistency.
Poor white people are the only people you get to be prejudiced against nowadays, and people are eager to use them to fulfill their innate desire to look down on and insult people they see as lower than them. Compare the valence of the phrases "white trash" and "black trash."
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I don't think it's that they're stupid, it's that talking concretely about reforms invites infighting. Everyone in those orgs can agree racism is bad / the problem, but they've learned that talking about specific mitigations is a recipe for drama.
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During the Trump admin, I had a job with a really long 1-hour commute and I would keep NPR on. I played a game "is it possible for me to do my commute without NPR doing a story on Russiagate heavily insinuating that Trump colluded with Russia", and there were only 2 or 3 days where that happened. That is my anecdote, remembering how Russiagate took all the oxygen out of political news for a solid 2 years.
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What a take, indeed. What exactly would NPR have to do to qualify as 'too left' in your book? Softly recommending guillotines for the rich in the coming socialist revolution? I bet even that wouldn't count!
Look, we get it. There's about a dozen principled leftists that are keeping laser-focused on 'real issues' who don't truck with facile wokeness. They never count for shit, and the ones who do show up are seemingly always Squad-type woke/socialist hybrids, but they have my sympathies. However, wokeness is a thing absolutely concentrated on the Left, and I don't think you get to cleave yourself from it so cleanly just because you too don't like their company.
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I honestly cannot even fathom being unable to see NPR's shift in the past 8 years. Someone has to have a bare minimum of observational skills and long-term memory, and then it should just be patently obvious.
Thank god Uri brought some actual statistics to bear. Otherwise, this sort of gaslighting would perhaps have some effect because even after being constantly deployed in far less obvious cases.
I listened to NPR almost every day in the car. I fucking donated! It's now an intolerable shitshow of constant white-guilt signaling shoehorned into every single story. It went from being a bit too dry about too-boring topics to matching the hysteria level of MSNBC with maybe a half-step richer language.
Nothing is left there; it's just another empty mouthpiece I'm being forced to pay for.
I've never had a car commute, so I haven't listened to NPR on radio regularly since I was a child. My exposure to their current slant is mainly by reading articles and occasionally listening to podcasts. So I don't know what their day-to-day news coverage is like for the most part, which makes it harder for me to notice a change. But my interpretation of their bias is from articles of theirs I've read in the past few months.
If you’re consuming articles and not shows it might be hard to see the difference. Their articles tend to differ little from what you’d see coming from one of the wire services.
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"Looting as praxis to demolish late stage capitalism" is centrist now?
I am beyond frustrated at dealing with "nothing is ever leftist" deflections. It never seems to matter how far an institution falls into embracing leftist dogma, you will always be told "that land acknowledgement where they called you a settler colonist of Turtle Island whose whiteness is violence isn't real leftism according to this week's redefinition."
NPR has objectively moved so far to the left that its current editorial positions would look like cringe parody to its 2014 listeners. It doesn't matter that whatever progressives you hang out with have gone even more mask-off re. "settler children get the bullet too" (see Ian Golash and the hezbollah-flag waving demos); a fringe demographic of online leftists is not allowed to dictate where the center is.
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This was true, but even then, NPR would be "too far to the left" since it is selling itself as a politically neutral, government funded non-profit and so ostensibly would be taking a position at the American political center, not the Democratic party center.
But even to the extent your critique was true, it is a stale critique.
The entire 'corporate Dem' position has moved sharply to the left in the past ten years (that is, it has moved left of where the American center was in 2010), and these political positions have enormous real world impacts. It's not just cheap signaling. For instance, the massive inflow of migrants we see are all downstream of NPR et al spending years denouncing necessary border enforcement as being inhumane in some way. We also see stats like how percent of white men among TV writers has declined from around 60% to 35% in the past 10 years. That is a major change with major impact for the media environment we all live in. There were many policy changes around police stops and bail reform and public order enforcement, etc, all downstream of NPR/NY Times media coverage on police shootings, and those policy changes have had massive real world impact. I could go on and on.
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For better or worse, DEI identity slop is now considered left wing, and NPR has oodles of that, regardless of whatever other establishment propaganda it peddles.
The DEI stuff is built around internet fads, upper-middle-class pretensions/narcissism, and establishment imperatives. The terms left and right are malleable and relative, so it's both left-wing and not-left-wing. In any case, it's very convenient for the knowledge worker class and the giant institutions they serve, as it not only leaves their deeper structures and economic advantages uncontested (while merely arguing for superficial alterations), it also argues for increased power to be given to these people and institutions, as their credentials, HR departments, teams of lawyers and such are put forward as the necessary cures for 'systemic' bigotry or whatever.
What 'true' leftists, which exist only as fully as true rightists, lament is that there aren't strong working-class involvements in this new left, and indeed it lacks much revolutionary spark at all. It's not about solving or changing modern society so much as it's about keeping things in place and expanding the purvue of some of its most powerful factions. I think it deserves to be treated as a process of its own, best understood as a unique development that began around the 1960's, rather than something that matches patterns as broad as 'leftism'. Although, I can see the propagandistic appeal of accusing them of being false leftists, given that the term left enjoys positive valence with many of the people who would benefit from more working class, economically focused initiatives, such that it's a way of signaling to them that they are missing out. It's a matter of brand manipulation rather than objective understanding.
I'll grant you that there's like, 3 trotskyists and a tanky who lament the lack of working class involvement in the modern left. But the mainstream of the modern left has no love lost with the people who stand up to work. Uncharitably, it's a class interest movement for people who believe that possessing a college degree entitles them to baaskaap over the less enlightened masses, more charitably it still doesn't want any contributions from people who sweep floors or turn wrenches because leftism really believes in the value of the institutional academy, including the parts that were pulled out of someone's ass to declare himself an expert in it, and doesn't think that it's possible to have an informed opinion about anything at all without thorough knowledge of rape culture in dog parks.
It sounds like you're talking about "social justice" progressives, i.e. the group RedRegard is contrasting with "true leftists" (sarcasm quotes his).
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The left does not want working class involvement, they want working class buy-in. The presence of the working class as adherents serves to launder the appeal of DEI paeans, hence the lumping of 'class economics' as a reason to support DEI on the surface. NPR like NYT serves as a sanity washing machine, packaging untenable ideas with somewhat reasonable or appealing ones and textdrowning readers in softly persuasive language to slowly edge the overton window one article at a time.
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In other words, progressivism is a highly right wing (conservative) movement. The meta-level of statements like DR3 is that the correct model for progressives is the one they claim owns the world, and given their attitudes towards things like development of resources and blocking any meaningful reform of any kind that doesn't come from their own tribe (as in, things conservatives do to hold onto their privilege past its expiration date), well.
The dominant left wing (progressive) movement today is what's commonly called "the alt-right". The leftist goal in the 1900s was equalizing the playing field between men and women because women are objectively the more oppressed/discriminated against gender in an industrial economy. The leftist goal in the 2000s is doing the same thing, as men are objectively the more oppressed/discriminated against gender in a service economy.
As for why the woke don't realize it... difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it, and that describes half the nation for various reasons. As for why the alt-right don't realize it... well, that's mostly to do with co-ordination and the fact their enemy [falsely] describes themselves as being on the side of progress (which is effective at confusing the moderates/liberals/the people who are doing most of the work).
"The competency crisis" is calling out a problem created by conservative privilege. It is a leftist meme.
...Are you Hlynka?
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When wasn’t it?
It’s fine if you want to distinguish between the parts of the culture war that do and don’t directly relate to material issues, like overthrowing the capitalistic system we’ve all come to know and love, but don’t pretend there isn’t a correlation there that’s been left-coded for decades, and that NPR has moved down that path significantly in the last decade.
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I appreciate you for being here.
I think your take on this is remarkable in 2024, long after “nice polite Republicans” was what NPR could be accused of.
It’s interesting to consider what NPR would have to do such that you would not accuse them of being centrist as opposed to actually progressive.
Is there a relatively prominent media source they could model themselves on?
I'd say ProPublica, The Atlantic, and The Economist are all mainstream left-leaning news sources I expect to do a better job of analysis than NPR. With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP which I expect to be relatively trustworthy on the facts (of course with some bias on which facts they report and precisely how they present them), but analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.
I do note that Economist and Atlantic have more authors pushing back against DEI slop, usually couching their counterarguments in some hard numbers before going 'this is not how we help (insert chosen minority)'. Still ostensibly on Team DEI, but less wedded to the distasteful tactics normally employed.
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You expect ProPublica to do a good job of analysis? They're the ones that broke my faith in in-depth journalism with this article. I'd recommend reading it yourself to see if you can find their trick.
Spoilers:The tool works perfectly. 25% of "risk 1" and 80% of "Risk 10" offenders go on to reoffend, regardless of race. They then calculated "Of the [Race] criminals, X% of the [non-|re-]offenders were labelled [high|low] risk" to obscure that fact. I went into it more here, on the old site.
They certainly know how to tell a compelling story, but that's all it is: a story.
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I used to read The Atlantic fairly regularly, but that was a while back and so I don’t know how they are in recent years. I know they have some quite left and still some not-so-left writers.
I’m quite surprised you list The Economist here, since they are typically considered fairly neoliberal in their stances, and so not leftist friendly. The fairly recent not-pro-trans article they had rocked the world of a lot of /r/neoliberal.
https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/v5d0hp/executive_editor_of_the_economist_on_eliminating/
https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/uo2ghw/the_economists_record_on_trans_issues_setting_the/
Like I agree that a lot of NPR analysis is pretty shallow, even if you stripped out any overt political valence, but I guess I don’t quite understand your complaint and/or your particular progressive stances on any given issue.
(For context, I used to be an Obama-loving left neoliberal and now I’m a ~Romney-loving right neoliberal, but I’ve always been annoyed with progressives.)
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Technically, Reuters does have an opinion section, Breakingviews.
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I have never heard of Nice Polite Republicans til today; that's a fun bacronym. My favorite is Neutered Pacifica Radio.
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