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comment by cliffelam
cliffelam  ·  4650 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Jay Rosen: NPR Tries to Get its Pressthink Right
Good lord. Meethinks they doth protest too much.

Basically, NPR is Talk Radio for Volvo owners now - commercials for everything but goldline and transparently stacked "panels" who aren't quite ready to start shouting at each other.

I do like Click and Clack.





thenewgreen  ·  4650 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Hey now, I've never owned a Volvo. -Always seemed like such a dirty word.

Tomorrows Friday News Roundup on the DR show:

  Naftali Bendavid national correspondent, The Wall Street Journal.
  Shawna Thomas White House producer, NBC News.
  David Welna congressional correspondent, NPR.
Seems like a balanced group. I very rarely ever hear anyone get to the point where they even remotely close to thinking about "shouting" in the sense that popular talk radio does. It's good stuff. As for the commercials, not sure what you're listening to but I'll take a few nods to such and such charitable fund and the occasional bloomberg shout out over actual Goldline ad's any day.

-Click and Clack definitely kick ass.

cliffelam  ·  4650 days ago  ·  link  ·  
As I said, short of shouting. Shouting is less effective on radio, I guess.

NPR has commercials for TV shows on Fox (yeah, I was startled), car dealerships, charities (they may be not-for-profit, but the exec's profit and they pay for spots), summer camps, private schools, etc, etc. They to try to keep only high-tone stuff in there, but as the man said, "we've already established what kind of person you are, now we are just haggling over the price."

mk  ·  4650 days ago  ·  link  ·  
    Basically, NPR is Talk Radio for Volvo owners now - commercials for everything but goldline and transparently stacked "panels" who aren't quite ready to start shouting at each other.

You kid, right? I mean, that's the stereotype, but...

I admit, if you are going to get a bias on NPR, it is going to have a liberal slant more often than not. However, I can't think of one major news organization that has a more even-keel analysis of events. I mean, seriously, what better option do I have? Cable is complete shit, and I don't have TV.

cliffelam  ·  4650 days ago  ·  link  ·  
The reason people use stereotypes is because they are so often accurate. When I lived in England I was unable, for a long time, to map reporting to political positions because their "labor," "liberal," and "conservative" don't map to how we think about that in the US. Double-ditto, weirdly, for when we lived in Oz. Plus their hot-button issues either don't exist in the US (ex: Aboriginal rights) or ours don't exist there (ex: "free" healthcare). But sometimes freeing yourself from the details helps you see that there is a thread running through the news you see from Newspaper A versus Newspaper B.

So it's not "if you are going to get a bias" it is how big is the bias. Looks pretty big to me. But then the pro-business side of the WSJ looks pretty big to me too, as does the conservative slant on Fox. I can't recall, actually, a media organization that didn't look pretty slanted to me.

-XC

mk  ·  4650 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Well, I'll give you that NPR has a liberal slant, but IMO it pales in comparison the the conservative slant of Fox. Actually, I wouldn't even call what happens on Fox a slant (or what happens on MSNBC to the other extreme).

But, I don't have a Volvo, and I voted for a GOP governor last election, I don't support affirmative action, and NPR is the best mainstream news source I've found. It's far from perfect, but even if you step back and compare, it does a better job than most.

Still, I do wish we had a US media discourse that allowed for more pluralism and nuance. IMO the team politics and ideologies that dominate make fools of us all.

cliffelam  ·  4650 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Well, on Fox I try to distinguish between the opinion pieces and the news side and the blurry bits inbetween. But as I only see it when I'm in a public place, or during an election period, I'm not actually an expert on what those guys are doing.

NPR, like all news organizations, makes gigantic mistakes on topics I know well, and that means they do the same on topics where I have little/no knowledge.

As for perception of bias, well, we all think we're centrists. :-)