“And I said, ‘Well, so why don’t you stop listening?’” Murphy continued. “And he says, ‘I can’t, because it’s the only station that will go on mile after mile and I can pick it up again.’”
Just drove from IA to MI and it's true. Between 90.3 and 92.7 FM there's always an NPR station waiting.
Or I could just download their app and listen anywhere / anytime.
If a station signal goes weak, the radio could scan the FM stations for another station which is known to broadcast the same signal (according to, say, an internal cross-matching database, or some other means).
I live in Poland. Every car radio I have ever owned did this, and every station that is available on more than a single frequency (that I'm aware of) can be followed using RDS. I can also listen to a CD or other media [1] and let it scan for traffic news in the background, it switches to any station that currently airs traffic news. It held true on road trips to other European countries.
[1] I rarely do this, for me listening to radio is an integral part of driving. Especially when I have commuted to/from work, I was able to tell if I'm running late based on what segment has been airing when driving past particular intersection or landmark.
That's how it works in Europe where RDS is widely deployed. Even for the regionalized channels where the programming may vary a little your radio will keep you in the network.
It certainly can, however OTA radio is very localized - to the city usually, by tradition - so it wouldn't make much sense to build such a network.
NPR is probably the only radio network that could do a common band cross country, but even then, NPR just syndicates itself to other stations so it's not really in their interest to do so.
There's a network called K-Love that broadcasts contemporary Christian music across the United States[1]. It's the same programming in every market, apart from the occasional regional flavor in advertising and/or pledge drives.
I didn't search to confirm this, but I'm pretty sure that federal regulations prevent fully syndicated radio stations across markets, but they don't apply to nonprofits. That's why you'll have an iHeartRadio Top 40 station in every metropolitan area but they all have their own talent.
Yes, well there are many different networks that are syndicated everywhere. The question is if they could control the same frequency everywhere, which I don't think makes sense with how our radio stations are structured.
Just as banter, what other networks are syndicated everywhere? I drive a fair bit and will hear K-Love and NPR everywhere. Sports talk will sometimes syndicate later at night, and of course the political talk stations will have programming from elsewhere. But apart from the Christian stuff, I've never heard music syndication as I go between markets.
Well the biggest ones are on AM, though they seem to be starting to cross over to FM more recently. So Premiere Networks, Salem etc... all syndicate the conservative talk guys and things like Coast to Coast AM.
By the way Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell is how I got into radio in the first place and was probably the widest reaching single AM show worldwide.
This is quickly changing. The Brew is the same everywhere, Nash FM is the same everywhere, and I'm pretty sure you can get Sixx Sense or Free Beer and Hot Wings in basically every market. Clear Channel/I Heart Radio is pushing hard to make every radio station the same across the country.
> I'm pretty sure you can get Sixx Sense or Free Beer and Hot Wings in basically every market
I had never heard of any of those, so I decided to look them up.
Sixx Sense, nearest station is in Sacramento. about 70 miles as the crow flies, and over some small mountains (large hills, really). Next closest station is ~110 miles in Modesto. They look to actually hit the central corridor fairly well, just not the coast.
Free Beer and Hot Wings (ha, I first through this was two different stations), doesn't even have a station carrying them in CA.
Also new car radios seem to use SDR for FM reception and simply downconvert whole FM band to 20MHz wide IF and sample that with ADC and then do all the FM demodulation in software. This causes the radio to simply known all stations that are available and have RDS metadata (on VW's radios pressing the scroll knob in the radio screen gets you menu of visible stations that is shown essentially instantly) and to be able to do such handoff without any scanning essentially instantly. The handoff is so fast that it gets very annoying when the transmitters involved have different delay (at least in Europe radio stations tend to compensate for this by introducing delays on their end so the whole network is synchronized) or when it happens in middle of advertisement (which are usually different for each transmitter). When either of these annoying effects happen you can hear that the radio is perfectly willing and capable of switching the transmitter several times per second.
In Canada CBC Radio is the public broadcaster sort of a cross between the BBC and NPR.
There are multiple stations from coast to coast and I think a person could hop from one to the other but it would have to be done manually not automatically. Quebec may be the wildcard but there may be a CBC English station there too, I think?
I drove quite a bit when I was in my teens and 20s when I worked for a coin-op video game/grey area slot machines. You get tired listening to music even if you like it at first your favourite song ten times in a row is ugh. But interesting talk radio is better it's food for the mind.
Now with satellite and the Internet it's different. It was such a subtle change I don't think it was noticed how radio died and was replaced by the Internet and satellite radio.
Yeah RDS does that, and it can do a lot more with proper metadata. In Sweden it has been running with at least basic functions - traffic announcements, channel following, and station names - since 1990.
The NPR app was pretty good when I first used it (~2014?
Whenever they started advertising it on-air). But lately it seems like it gets really messed up during playback: arbitrarily rewinding back to earlier point within the current show, e.g. When that happens, the cue/seek mechanism is totally useless and doesn't match the show's playback at all. It's rarely a problem for 3-4 minute news segments of ME, ATC, etc. It's totally unbearable for "Ask Me Another", "Wait, wait, don't tell me...", etc.
my dad is a fox news republican, a few years back we were driving for 5 hours and were listening to npr. he was basically waiting for the overt liberal bias, but instead we listened to a bunch of fascinating stories and interesting shows about a variety of topics. I read somewhere that npr isn't liberally biased, but their fan base is mostly liberal, because liberals tend to prefer news that has no bias. It's also not loud and obnoxious, which they like.
> I read somewhere that npr isn't liberally biased, but their fan base is mostly liberal, because liberals tend to prefer news that has no bias.
You don't need to "read somewhere" about whether a news source is biased. You just need to read news across a spectrum of sources. And you will realize that NPR definitely has a liberal bias if you have enough breadth in your sources. I'm a far-left liberal but I'm not afraid to admit when a liberal news source is biased. Everyone loves to point out the obvious bias at Fox News and Breitbart and Drudge but then delude themselves that there are no liberally biased news sources.
If liberal is defined as "not alt-right" then sure.
But if you expect to find prominent socialists or leftist political activists or their ideas on NPR, you'll be waiting a long time. Chomsky, nader, said, hedges, parenti ... none of them get mentioned or make an appearance. Who teamed up with Richard Wolff's radio show? NPR? Nope, it was iHeartMedia. You can find these people on Al Jazeera, the CBC, RussiaToday, the BBC... Essentially the public media of every country BUT the USA.
On NPR, you'll get Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, the Heritage foundation, the Hoover institute, and other prominent vested interests and orthodox free market fundamentalism thinktanks.
The reality is the Alex Jones ilk are so out there that if you want to call anything that's not like that as liberal, you have a giant space to work with. That pejorative label corrals and prods everyone else closer to the Hannity and Michael Savages and what we get is a dedicated right and a not-so-committed, more gentle right.
When actual "not on the right" politicians rise, they get ignored, dismissed, or ridiculed by all the mainstream media. Whether it's Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders or Mélenchon. NPR was dismissive of Corbyn, who picked up the largest legislative gain in over 70 years, even on election day as trouble for Labor and mismanaging a failing divided party with old broken ideas...
It's important to remember what a non-skewed left would actually look like since it effectively doesn't exist in the mainstream us media.
As a swede I have a hard time understanding what liberal and conservative is. Here we talk about Left and Right politics. I get the impression USA only has Right and Right+ in swedish terms.
Left would be social security, right would be free market / privatise everything.
I have to admit that I wasn't paying much attention to politics in my schoolyears but I did try to read some political comic book (comedy central?) from USA...
in practice, liberal is the city-life and conservative is the country-life.
This really helps in gerrymandering districts and subdividing the population into two easily manageable groups since they don't talk with one another a lot.
I think the definitions are intentionally designed to keep the public fighting itself with one group always trying to take away the rights of the other so in practice it's slow impoverishment of the commons and a forfeiture of political capital.
Essentially it's a huge scam (or a "scheme" if you think that sounds too conspiratorial). It's not a new scam, and not the first time it's been done - not even the first time in this country. The history of and tactics of union busting in the 1800s and 1900s essentially worked on the same divide-and-conquer techniques of pitting groups of workers against each other.
Going back further, the Indian wars worked in a similar manner ... feigning favoritism or some entitlement to one tribe to create a tribal conflict and prevent the indigenous from being a unified front.
This is the same game ... we call it "democrats" and "republicans" in this version.
The most effective Roman emperors were very good at playing frontier tribes against each other, and the plebeian, equestrian, and senatorial classes against each other. This is not a new tactic. :)
The equivalent in Sweden is having a discussion about immigration. Liberal Sweden won't even talk about it in any way that could be perceived as critical. Conservative Sweden would.
Whatever. Most people who identify as "liberal" in the US would not call themselves socialist, anarcho-syndacalist, Chomsky or Nader supporters, etc. They are mostly centrist Democrats.
Mainstream Republicans (not alt-right) are also neoliberals. They also believe structuring all of societies ills as free markets as the optimal solution (eg, CAFTA, NAFTA, Obamacare were started/proposed by Republicans and finished by Democrats and many of Reagan's championed policies were actually started by Carter). That's what's academically called "classical liberalism".
Honestly, the form of liberal that NPR is, is mostly just target demographics; what set of values an effective identical policy gets justified with. Hillary Clinton praises Kissinger, punted for Monsanto as Secretary of State...Obama used advisers from Milton Friedman's Chicago School...it's different wrapping paper on the same present.
For instance, job creators of the right become entrepreneurs and innovators on the left; it's the same people, different label. On the right, they shouldn't be taxed because they earned their wealth and on the left is because they invest in the innovation of tomorrow. Same policy, different backstory.
The American dynamics doesn't equate to substantive advocacy differences. They are effectively sports team playing the same game by the same rules with different fan bases.
>But if you expect to find prominent socialists or leftist political activists or their ideas on NPR, you'll be waiting a long time. Chomsky, nader, said, hedges, parenti ... none of them get mentioned or make an appearance.
Actually, an NPR station where I lived had all of those appear.
People have to realize that local affiliates have some room in picking the shows they broadcast. I was in a relatively activist town, and these folks were not rare. I know at least one of the names you mentioned because of NPR.
Funny I remember when Cokie Roberts was pimping Bush during the 2004 elections.
No, NPR's leadership since about the mid-nineties (at least) has been aligned with big business - they are part of the media elite, who collectively, despite the "liberal media" label are actually corporatists (because that's who owns them).
It's not a contradiction, it's a clarification. Corporatist means liberal or conservative as long as it pushes the interests of the military industrial complex.
They are only as liberal as their funders permit and kowtow to conservative viewpoints as well.
Your argument rests on the fault assumption that in a 'wide range of media', the median publication is unbiased and things that are more left-wing than it are biased and things more right-wing than it are biased in the other direction.
That's just not based in reality. In reality, almost all mainstream media is incredibly biased towards the status quo.
>because liberals tend to prefer news that has no bias
You have to be joking. Have you heard of the Huffington Post or MSNBC?
Even NPR is heavily biased at the editorial level. Most of the stories are intentionally selected to represent downtrodden folks, rust belt workers/farmers that realize they are closet Democrats, etc. The individual stories will be true but the representation of reality portrayed by the overarching theme of the stories will be a lie.
It's like a conservative station that constantly reports only crimes committed by Muslims. All of it can easily be 100% true, but the overarching theme will be complete BS.
It's clear that NPR has bias in its choice of reporting, but every other political radio station has a clearly stated allegiance more than they have a simple bias.
The difference is stark -"oh boy this story is here for the lefties" versus a guy screaming into the mic that we have to fight the bastard liberals before they throw us to the sharks.
I'm a centrist from Minnesota, which is where a lot of NPRs content is made through our local public stations MPR. We are pretty proud of our public radio here and pretty much both sides listen to the non political interest shoes like car talk, prairie home companion, etc.
NPR news and political opinion pieces used to be neutral with a libral flair: biased, but only a little bit.
The last year or so is when they really started going crazy left and it has become unbearable. I really think that whoever the editors are made a conscious decision right around the time of the primaries to stop trying to be neutral and just go full left propaganda. There was a noticable shift and I was no longer able to listen because of how overt and propaganda ish their reports became.
Im not sure what you'd call it when liberals listen to... Slightly biased news, and conservatives listen to people with clearly expressed political allegiances who refer to conservatives as "us", liberals as "them", and talk about how to politically defeat the other side.
Just because bias is hard to separate out, doesn't mean everyone's behavior and preferences are equivalent mirror images of each other.
You could find someone yelling about defeating conservatives on YouTube but that viewership is going to be lower than NPR... thus liberals prefer the less-biased sources...
Each side of the political spectrum has a spectrum of biased news. For example, Huffington Post and The Young Turks are liberal news sources which are very partisan. The Economist is a fiscally conservative magazine which is less partisan, Uncommon Knowledge is an interview show with a conservative viewpoint, but also an educated and intellectual viewpoint.
If you're a liberal minded person, your exposure to conservative sources of news is likely excerpts of their most grievous offenses. Hence, the liberal bias suggests that conservatives get all their news from Tucker Carlson making funny faces at people, or Alex Jones identifying gay amphibians. The result is the belief that liberals are reasonable intellectuals and conservatives stupid fools.
This is a PR piece. It has no correlative relationship to reality.
Source: knowing truckers, having them in my family, extended family, friends of family etc. for 40 years. They all have XM/Sirius at this point. None listen to NPR.
Why were no statistics about truckers and NPR quoted? Because they wouldn't have supported the thrust of the article.
I suspect this was true a decade ago, and I suspect it's still true in some of the wilder parts of the country. I'm surprised at how often I'll be out in the mountains somewhere and find no cell signal, no satellite radio, and one lonely NPR channel coming in clear as day.
But today, and in general? I don't really buy it. Truckers listen to Audible books, or XM, or a great many other things, and I'd want actual numbers to believe a majority of them listen to NPR.
PBS (and thus NPR) federal funding might be on the chopping block with the next federal budget, so it's not surprising to see pieces trying to get out ahead of that.
I grew up on NRP, and I LOVE This American Life, Garrison Keillor, and the reruns of Click and Clack, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that they have a pretty left leaning agenda.
The Brian Lehrer show used the anniversary of Pearl Harbor to discuss how Trump might create Muslim concentration camps in America.
> it’s the only station that will go on mile after mile and I can pick it up again.
I can vouch for that -- I just went on a road trip to visit all the state parks in Utah, and believe me, once you get out of Salt Lake, your choices are NPR, country music, or static. I listened to a lot of NPR.
I distinctly remember being on the long drive leaving my grandparents in Texas to go back north when Bob Hope died.
For very large chunks of that drive there was nothing we could pick up at all except for NPR.
And because it had just happened at the top and bottom and half of every hour they were talking about it and playing a little clips and the shows that were on may have been about him.
Nothing but hearing the same small amount of programming about his death for hours and hours and hours.
I normally love NPR but obviously it became too much. However I do get why truckers like satellite radio. To be able to listen to a station without it fading out, or to be able to CHOOSE another station no matter where you are…
Regarding satellite radio, it's not quite "no matter where". My car has Sirius XM and I like it, but when I'm driving through the forests of the Santa Cruz mountains, it cuts out so frequently that I just turn it off. But as long as the view to the sky is clear, it works great.
Both XM and Sirius before they merged had a big following among truckers. Even after the merger, they still have shows and channels tailored to them. The big reason was that could listen to the same channels across the country.
Next time you're on a road trip, stop at a good-sized truck stop
and spend some time looking at the technology and radio aisle.
These are folks who use a lot of technology, of many flavors.
It's difficult to have enough good content, it takes time and energy to discover the good podcasts and some percent of serendipity is required to keep it interesting.
When I got a phone that could play mp3s about 13 years ago I switched to podcasts and never listened to radio again.
Now I listen at 1.6x speed to fit even more in, BBC, NPR, tech, revisionist history, west wing weekly...
Makes you realise how terrible broadcast media is: and here's the news for the 10th time, 80% repeats, 10% things that haven't happened yet, 10% grown adults moving a sphere around a field
I know about a dozen truckers, more than half listen to podcasts. Not sure why you would say this. NPR is popular, but nowhere near a majority market imho.
It sounds very rude, there's no other way to read it when someone says "newsflash" or "how stupid do you think they are". No where did the parent imply truckers don't use 21st century technology, they just mentioned another option that hadn't been discussed in the article.
I see this here all the time, someone leaves a very rude comment and then they or someone else argues that it might not have been intended as being rude, but there are certain words and phrases that, any time you use them, you should be aware that they will always be interpreted as a rude remark. "newsflash" is one of them. "How stupid do you think... is" is another. Words have meanings and when you use them you should understand how someone else is going to read those words. That comment was intentionally rude, for absolutely no good reason.
A couple of years ago, I took my family on a road trip starting from Phoenix and ended up in SF. We drove north from Phoenix and hit a few of the amazing parks including Yellowstone and then west to Portland and then south to SF. And public radio was part of the fun for us. Aside from our beloved NPR, I loved how the only stations we could get gave us an insight on who probably lived in the areas we were driving through. I never really liked country music, but on that trip, I grew to actually appreciate it. Not to mention the number of new songs and artists we were able to discover. Some of those songs we now associate with the various places along the way.
Used to listen to NPR all the time, but now they just shit on Trump 24x7. It was fun in the beginning, but got old after a few weeks. I switched to audible, where I remain to this day, and will remain for the foreseeable future.
Today I learned: If you start a sentence with "Love it or hate it," it instills a temporary feeling in the reader that he cares about the thing you were saying.
Compare that to State radio and television in late USSR. It wasn't strictly obligatory. But there wasn't anything else, so you end up watching and listening to it anyway.
Imagine NPR as a giant propaganda machine, powerful and tuned up, but currently working in idle mode (or not?)
Not strictly related to public radio specifically but still interesting on the topic of broadcast radio (and rather disappointing to say the least) - here in Australia we have a big problem with the (lack of) advancement of broadcast quality, while we have DAB+ broadcasts - the stream audio quality is so bad due to the low bit rate - you’re actually better off switching back to FM.
The average Australian DAB+ radio stream is... 24-48Kbps! Yes it’s generally AAC+ which is about 30% more efficient than MP3 but it’s not even close to FM sound quality.
When I looked at moving to Australia, the one consistent thread among the "how to move" media was "Australia's homegrown media sucks and everything else is expensive".
I listen to a number of NPR podcasts and perhaps I'm misremembering but it seems there's an uptick in the past few years of interviewing and discussing the lives of just "regular folks", people who work blue-collar jobs, people with conservative religious backgrounds, etc., ... and not in a disparaging way.
But ... Fresh Air with Terry Gross still largely wanders the fields of the cultural left with nary a nod to alternative viewpoints.
Ugh. I can't stand Terry Gross. They should call it "Terry Gross Talks About Her Feelings While Interesting Guests Listen And Wonder What They're Doing There."
Terry Gross is the best interviewer in English with a regular show in any medium, and has been for decades. I’d even even be willing to proclaim her best of all time, if you only count people with long-running interview shows. (There are some documentary filmmakers who are great interviewers, etc., but only publish occasional niche work.)
She is invariably respectful, even of complete asshats. She prepares well for every interview, listens to her guests, asks good starting questions and insightful follow-up questions, and gets people to open up about topics they don’t usually discuss. She knows she has a wide audience and makes sure guests explain things in an accessible way. She doesn’t throw softballs at people, but she also isn’t aggressively confrontational. It’s clear that her goal is always to understand where someone is coming from give them space to explain their point of view in their own words, rather than trying to win an argument, score cheap points, or kiss ass.
As a result, she usually has very good guests, from a wide variety of backgrounds, talking about a wide variety of topics.
Pick anyone going on a book (or whatever) interview circuit and listen to / watch 4 or 5 of their interviews back to back. The Fresh Air interview turns out best almost every time. Usually it’s not even close. Other interviewers try to tell the guest’s story for them, or are trying to push the guest into one identity bucket or another, or have a point they want to make and won’t listen, or haven’t prepared and have no idea about the guest’s field or background.
I'd put Bob Edwards (former Morning Edition anchor, now on SirriusXM) in there as well.
Paul Kennedy, CBC, Ideas isn't strictly an interview programme, but it's exceedingly good long-form, and intelligent.
I'm surprised I'm not coming up with any British / BBC interviewers, though there can be good programming there as well, at times.
Brooke Gladstone and Bob Edwards of On the Media also make my list. Their subject range from friendly to collegial (other people in the media industry), to hostile. It's possible to tell the dynamic, but the demeanor is always professional.
I am quite the fan of Gross, and she's grown on me over the years.
As a 20+ year listener of NPR (and Terry Gross), I always thought Gross was the best interviewer without a doubt. About 2 years ago, I stumbled upon a Howard Stern interview and was blown away. Never thought much of the shock-jock before, but you should check out his interview with Letterman from last week.
People have different tastes, and that's okay. Not all shows are for everyone. There's no need for gratuitous negativity. It adds nothing to the conversation and can easily derail it.
Yeah, Fresh Air/Terry Gross is pretty caught up in her own bubble, if you ask me. She gets pretty feisty when guests challenge her from time to time, which I enjoy. (Good listening when that happens!)
Contrast her to any of the Right-Wing talk programmes, where an "opposition" guest can't get a word in edgewise.
Gross does not berate her guests. She can and does ask tough questions, but she's not emotionally aggressive.
Classic instance is her interview of O'Reilly, where he cut the mic and left the interview. There are lots of online mentions of this, though I'm not sure the episode itself is. See:
(Her interviews are almost never in-studio, so guests are typically remote, as in this case.)
At the same time, it's quite obvious that Gross is a massive fan of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, to the point of schoolgirl crush. I find it endearingly charming.
The difference is the right wing talk radio shows are on commercial radio. Any show on NPR has an enormous advantage, because they're not packed with advertisements that tempt people to flip to another station. So the host can't really have a relaxed, in depth conversation with anybody.
The few left wing commercial radio shows out there are no different from their ideological counterparts.
I suspect the reason is that there is a lack of appealing alternatives to NPR on the "conservative" side.
If anyone has ever listened to conservative radio like Rush Limbaugh, you'll know that his slow-wit attempts at humor/satire are cringe-worthy failures unless the listener happens to be a septuagenarian with dementia. The other conservative options are preachers and conspiracy wack-jobs... is there anything else?
My family has listened to NPR and WNYC for years. I don't recommend anyone rely on it as an exclusive source for information as it does serve special political interests. Two examples that come to mind are the presidential primaries coverage (it was pro-HRC) and more recently coverage on the Saudi Arabia vs Qatar debacle (conveniently omitting Saudi involvement in global terrorism).
I think truckers are one of the groups of people that really love Sirius/XM satellite radio, too -- uniform programming and coverage across the US, and if you are in your truck all the time, the monthly cost is trivial. Sirius even has special stations dedicated to truckers, as well as most of the ads added by the network being trucker-focused.
"it’s the only station that will go on mile after mile and I can pick it up again"
Captive audience. In my experience, when I've lived in very rural areas (and a lot of large metro areas), the only TV stations I could ever get over antenna were PBS, but more often than that I could only get FOX.
Yes. I don't know if it's on a vaslty bigger scale, according to this they spent $220m in operating expenses: http://www.npr.org/about/statements/fy2015/NPR_Consolidated_..., compared to about £90m for R4. Before brexit they would be pretty comparable ;).
"BBC Radio 4 is a radio station owned and operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes including news, drama, comedy, science and history."
I have several truckers in my family. A couple of them do subscribe to SiriusXM but the rest don't because it's expensive relative to what they get out of it.
One cousin bought a lifetime XM subscription back in...2009? I think...and paid the $99 to upgrade it to "Lifetime Premium" or some such. He's had the same radio, a SiriusXM Edge, for the past 7 years and, according to him, "it's the best payback I've gotten except for that divorce lawyer." (He had a messy divorce...)
I suspect many do. Just that this isn't a story about them.
As to the coverage: North American only. There is coverage in Canada and Puerto Rico.
The XM satellite are geostationary, the Sirius satellites are in a highly elliptical "tundra orbit" where they use apogee dwell over North America. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tundra_orbit )
SiriusXM is now only using the geostationary satellites.
If you spend any time listening to satellite radio, it's pretty clear that they do - I'd say 70%+ of the callers to talk shows on SiriusXM are truckers. (Though they could be over-represented amongst those likely to call in, it's clear they make up a significant portion of the subscriber base.)
Wonder if AM is covered everywhere throughout the country . Here in India radio in trucks was there for a very short period of time till side loaded cassettes I, CDnd side loaded MP3 took over. I think we never had great "talk" content.Even in 2017 I tune to BBC1 , world service and VOA in my car via internet but I get mocked a lot. Guess no one else does it. People here are used to side loaded MP3 music and not so intellectual Bollywood FM radio.
There are some "clear channel" (now "Class A") AM stations that have huge listening areas particularly at night. These are distinct from Clear Channel the company. These stations mostly broadcast at 50kw in the USA and have a bunch of added protections such as distant AM stations on the same frequency having to reduce their broadcast power at night.
There's really not much about it in the article, but my impression growing up in Chicago (which has at least 5, currently 2 sports, 2 talk and 1 news) was that part of their role was also to be emergency information destinations.
As much as I like NPR, my politics have slowly drifted left over the years, and it's amazing how differently the same shows and hosts now sound to me through a more critical filter. To see what I mean, I recommend browsing through https://twitter.com/npr_watch (not my account, and I'm not affiliated in any way).
I would consider myself a progressive, and yet I find NPR to be a propaganda mouthpiece for the left. It seems that every other story is pushing some identity politics agenda with a puff piece for some liberal politician or a slam against some conservative politician, or a heart to heart interview with a transgender immigrant homeless playwright. I agree with the sentiment and the politics, but I disagree with the method, claiming lack of bias while clearly not being neutral. In fact during the last presidential campaign they went so far as to take up a Fox News style slogan, "No Slant, No Rant". They also decided to remove the comments section permanently when even the majority of liberal commenters were slamming Hillary, NPR's darling candidate.
Whenever there's a big event that requires public support, they definitely do their part to push a particular choice. I also remember clearly NPR beating the war drum for war with Iraq. BBC too.
I've listened to NPR for some 30+ years now, and there's been a shift, either in the network or myself.
I'd trace it to the late 1990s and the Elian Gonzales story -- a non-story, ultimately, though a political shibboleth, which NPR, as the commercial media, pounded the drum on continuously. Bob Edwards' firing was another watershed.
The network has been under political attack, and I'd argue those attacks have been successful to a large extent in changing and weakening the network -- it doesn't have the spine it once did.
Some of the change is technological: NPR used to pre-tape much of its material, and in particular there was very little (if any) live content on its weekend programmes. This has shifted to the point that much or most of the programming is now live.
The flagship programmes are now bi-coastal, with two anchors in two separate locations. There are exceptionally strong arguments for doing this, and the experiences of 9/11 directly influenced the decision. The day-to-day-result for the programmes themselves is negative, though. There's more inter-host banter, and an annoying focus on having the hosts read alternate lines of copy within the same story. Again: technically impressive, but ultimately for product delivery, a gimmick.
The other change is that I've found additional sources of information, and broadened my own knowledge of history, technology, institutions, and more recently, media. The result is to clearly point out the holes and limits to NPR's coverage. The network has a different Overton window, but it most certainly has an Overton window.
In particular what's somewhat shocked me has been the lack of intellectual depth or presence on NPR. Again: a "stable" of voices, but a quite limited one, with highly notable exceptions (Noam Chomsky comes to mind particularly, he is only one of numerous instances).
Since Jarl Mohn's taken the helm (and after a period in which the CEO position had come to remember Al Qaeda's 2nd in Command or Hogwart's Instructor in Defence Against the Dark Arts), what I've noted has been a fragmentation of programming. Whilst the total "sponsorship spot" time may not have changed, the distribution of same seems to have, and the result is that the flagship programming (ATC & Morning Edition) have a rather shattered-and-crazed sense to them. I don't sense the rhythm which permeated those programmes in the early 1990s. And it destroys continuity.
The focus on everyman -- and uniformed -- voices in programming also has a profound effect. I can understand the drive to expose such viewpoints, but ... well, they're simply so wrong.
(Mind: the suppsed NPR stable of experts seems also to have become detached from either reality or any interest in taking a critical or incisive perspective on it.)
Neal Conan's sign-off message at Talk of the Nation (where those voices should be given air, or a format similar to it) has stuck with me. And I'm afraid NPR has been wasting my time with stupid stuff.
Long and short: NPR doesn't deliver.
And the problem strikes me as structural. Charlie Pierce, regular on "Wait, Wait", is presented as a funny guy. If you read him at Esquire, though, he's got stuff to say. Maybe a comedy panel isn't the place to go for that, but as has been noted in criticism of that show, it goes more for fart jokes than real commentary, where it's got an opportunity to do so. Colbert, Oliver, Bee, and other commercial commedy programmes are beating NPR handily at its own game here.
Which is to say: the jockeys (management) are restraining the horses (guests and commentators). That's really bad.
For all that: yes, NPR is better than mainstream commercial news programming, and by degrees which frankly shock me. Having traveled by ground through "flyover" country, I can attest that there's a lot to be said for plotting a route by NPR translator stations. (Or by having a good supply of podcasts loaded in your mobile.) And so far as truckers-as-listeners go, that's a Good Thing.
It's always entertaining when stories of NPR or Foxnews or anything political comes up.
You always see comments like "my conservative father/mother/brother/friend/etc listened to NPR to find liberal bias and found none".
Or "my liberal father/mother/brother/friend/etc listened to foxnews and couldn't find conservative bias".
If your conservative family member or friend couldn't find anything liberal on NPR or your liberal friend couldn't find anything conservative on foxnews, then they must be hard of hearing and they should have their ears check by a doctor.
People are overcompensating too much or they are embarrassed by what they listen to. It's okay to admit that NPR is liberal. It's okay to admit that foxnews is conservative. It's why they exist. If NPR isn't liberal then it isn't doing its job and not serving their fanbase. If foxnews isn't conservative, then it isn't doing its job and not serving their fanbase.
It is just so obvious what people are trying to do and it is annoying.
Edit: Just a PSA... current was founded by the people who founded NPR or PBS. So I'd take what they have to say, especially about NPR or PBS, with a grain of salt.
"whose members were leaders in founding the PBS and National Public Radio."
It'd make sense that non-interactive mass media such as a radio broadcast would be less prone to the filter-bubble effect. For one, it's not personalized (other than you picking the station). For two, the fact that most listeners can't respond means that there's no tight feedback loop reinforcing and amplifying the demographic's positions.
Is NPR really liberal, or do conservatives just say that because it doesn't have an explicitly conservative spin? It seems like whenever I hear people talking about "the liberal media", the list of names seems to cover basically any journalism outfit that isn't explicitly and overtly conservative. It feels like anything left of Fox News is commonly labeled as liberal media which seems a little off to me.
I must be ridiculously liberal because when I listen to NPR and they have a conservative on and that conservative says stuff that is fairly objectively untrue ( see recent Obamacare repeal attempt and public justifications for it) they never challenge them.
I tend to think that NPR is liberal, though they try to be balanced.
My problem with them is I find they try to bend over backwards to present the alternate viewpoint even in situations where it clearly makes almost no sense. It's always frustrated me about the election coverage even in much more normal years.
I distinctly remember once hearing them have a piece about how old milk is good for you (or something like that) and then shortly after presenting the "alternate viewpoint" that milk causes cancer. Maybe I have the order flipped. I just found it so laughably stupid that they thought they needed to justify it with the other side.
That may not have been one of their normal news breaks, it could've been some other kind of program of theirs. But that idea has stuck with me.
Cokie Roberts might have been the worst example of that, I had to tune it out when she started speaking on her bits in the 90's! It felt like she was a concession to the constant attacks on NPR's budget from conservatives.
About once a day I hear some piece that is overtly liberal, by media standards. For example, today there was a piece about protests and counter protests where there was a far left protester and a center-left talking head in the studio, and the Trump supporter only got a quick pre recorded sound bite. It's not propaganda to be sure, but it is a definate bias that is imho inappropriate for a supposedly public service.
Forgive me if this is a bit unfocused; I'm in late-night banter mode.
>Is NPR really liberal, or do conservatives just say that because it doesn't have an explicitly conservative spin?
I don't listen to NPR a ton since I haven't been in my car as much lately, though I almost always enjoy it when I do turn it on. I tend to tune in during nationally syndicated stuff so I can't speak towards the local broadcasts as much.
I think that NPR is particularly great at pulling stories out of the smallest little nooks and crannies of society, without feeling like they have to always fit it into a broader narrative or talk about the news items that everyone else is talking about. They generally have high journalistic rigor for the subjects that they cover, but they probably suffer from selection bias in terms of the mix of stories they pick. By this I mean that you get the sense that everyone on the network (including the donor base!) leans left and coastal, so they will gravitate towards people, events, and culture that fit in that worldview.
Never feels great to make assertions like that - arguing bias is hard to do and tends to reflect on how you see the world. A good example of this is [this NPR memo from 2010][0] about abortion language. What do you make of it? Did a desire for neutrality shift away from loaded terms into more descriptive and accurate ones? Did they make a conscious decision to move away from common and useful terms that fairly described the aims of each side? How would you interpret "It is acceptable to use the phrase 'anti-abortion', but do not use the term 'pro-abortion rights'."? Feel free to search the Web for plenty of people who will answer that for you in their own ways.
Anyways, have you ever heard the NPR folk talk about music? You certainly don't hear critiques like this[1] in the redder areas of the country. (I say this light-heartedly, please take it as such.)
>It feels like anything left of Fox News is commonly labeled as liberal media which seems a little off to me.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I think it's one of those self-reinforcing stereotypes too, so the more you look for it the more you'll see it.
Scott Alexander had a piece[2] that's somewhat relevant to this topic, as he examines how "...Republicans unilaterally seceded from...shared gatekeeper institutions, so that now we’re in the weird position of having two sets of institutions: one labeling itself 'neutral' and the other labeling itself 'conservative'."
I like the New York Times, but even one of their own public editors noted that "[a]cross the paper’s many departments...so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times."[3] I think that everyone, and thus every publication has biases. It was helpful for the Gray Lady to say so clearly.
All of that to say: You're right, there is a problem, but it didn't happen in a vacuum. A lot of the more popular news sites out there lean to the left, which isn't meant to be a slight against their quality otherwise. Would you argue that point?
I would say that if you stuck close to Reuters and the Christian Science Monitor, you'd get a pretty good cross-section of the news without getting beat over the head with opinionated commentary. (I might try this for a few days to test the theory.) And I'd put sites like the Wall Street Journal and Axios as closer to the center than the NYT and the Washington Post, so center-right and center-left journalism is out there. Something like Deseret News is probably a good example of my NPR critique in the opposite direction, as they have pretty solid journalistic chops but do it in the middle of Utah.
Are you just referring to tone? Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson is right-wing and has a very mellow tone. Also check out the Federalist Radio Hour and Conversations with Bill Kristol.
I love NPR. My wife makes fun of me because sometimes I sit in the car with the battery / radio on after I park just to hear a story finish.
New Hampshire Public radio has a lot of local news and features too, which I can't hear anywhere else. I'm sure other markets are the same.
You can get it on Alexa too because most of the shows are also podcasts which is also great.
I've also heard a lot from my conservative friends that NPR is too liberal but to be honest, I haven't seen that at all. The more entertainment like programs like "Wait Wait" do sometimes have liberal jokes but I think anyone who can take a joke would laugh at them even if they are conservative.[1]
[1] I'm a Libertarian and thus social liberal and economically conservative which puts me in the great position of being able to laugh at jokes at the expense of either of the two major parties.
> I'm a Libertarian and thus social conservative and economically liberally
That's fascinating; I've been called Libertarian because I'm the opposite. I'm socially progressive yet fiscally conservative, and from what I've read, there are branches of Libertarianism that can embrace either extreme or a mixture.
I've listened to NPR since I was a teenager in the early 90s, and while I don't always agree with the commentators, I usually find the subjects fascinating and the content entertaining. Here in Atlanta the "Second Cup Concert" classical music show kept me motivated at work, and Lois Reitzes' voice was as soothing as listening to Bob Ross talk about his paintings.
I'm not super familiar with American politics. What do you mean by 'fiscally conservative'? You want the Government to lower taxes and lower benefits and such, is that right? Because that sort of 'the market is right, we don't need no government spending in our economy' view.. well.. that just is the same as being economically liberal.
But then again Americans seem to use 'liberal' to mean 'left-wing', is that right? Because that's pretty insane IMO, that's not really what it means anywhere else..
>What do you mean by 'fiscally conservative'? You want the Government to lower taxes and lower benefits and such, is that right?
To me it means balancing the budget and actually working off debt. Right now, that means higher taxes. Being responsible with the treasury rather than borrowing with no intent to pay it back. Spending responsibly and ensuring the spending is not wasteful or kickbacks to political cronies, etc.
Why is paying off debt so important when long-term interest rates are so low? For example, the yield on 30-year Treasury Inflation Protected Securities is currently 0.92%. If the government sold these bonds to invest in long-term infrastructure projects, wouldn't that boost the economy enough to outweigh the increase in debt?
Is it necessarily a burden to have debt if it is coupled with infrastructure assets? Don't you need to quantify the debt relative to the assets in order to say whether it's a burden or benefit?
It's because the US is slightly messed up in the sense that there's a group of people people who say that they care about "free market" and "less government spending and regulations". At the same time, these people also support protectionism, closed borders and government regulation on things they don't agree with.
On the other side, there's a group that is often called liberal, who support open borders and (often) free international trade, but don't tend to agree with capitalism because they think it increases inequality.
There don't seem to be any true liberals (if you look at the two groups that the US is always talking about) in the full sense of 'economic liberalism'.
There's a major political party which has been saying "free market", "less spending and regulations", and only turned protectionist as of the last election (Republicans) with the election of a populist president. This change hasn't pleased everyone associated with the party. You can read many editorials inveighing against Trump's economic policies in the Wall Street Journal, for instance - whilst also finding plenty of disdain for his erstwhile political opponent Hillary Clinton.
(Concerns about their desire to regulate other things are not addressed by this comment.)
There's also the Libertarians, certainly a minor party, but one which has been consistently against protectionism for longer than I've been alive, and is likely to remain that way until I'm dead.
I don't think so, these groups exist, you're just assuming I'm talking about the parties. But the weird thing in the US is that Democrat and Republican are becoming more and more an identity instead of a political representation of its followers. Trump, who was despised within the party in the primaries, won because the voters wanted a person like him. At the same time, many democrats despised Clinton, but the party wanted her as the candidate and worked against Sanders.
Much of this is caused by a two party system fuelled by hate for the other party. Now I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as an outsider, this is what it looks like.
Here in the Netherlands, one of the two biggest parties of the elections 4 years ago, practically disappeared because its voters disagreed with what they did during the last 4 years. So they all moved to parties that seemed to better represent their viewpoints. Something like this is just impossible in the US and moving between the two parties is often as difficult as dropping a religion, since many people are tied to their parties through friends and family. I've experienced all of this while living in the US and am still seeing this on Facebook.
> There's a major political party which has been saying "free market", "less spending and regulations", and only turned protectionist as of the last election (Republicans
I've noticed republicans and (so-called) libertarians being protectionist long before last election, so I think that's a bit of a non-point.
All parties are hypocritical in practise, so I'll take your point. For the Trump election, they really sold the protectionism in a way they hadn't before, though. Full-on "Down with NAFTA!" etc.
The simple fact is, people really aren't that principled, at least not in the binary Dem vs Rep "two party" system we have. People are interested in one thing. That is, them selves. And they really don't care (read: aren't willing to take action) unless the issue directly effect their back yard.
The idea that America and Americans are principled is a myth. Note: That's not a judgement. Simply an analysis of the historial facts.
Fiscally conservative means holding back on public spending and not seeing the government as the best user of societies money. So they favor lower taxes i.e. less state involvement.
Liberal means a lot of different things based on the context.
Liberal can mean a lot of different things depending on the context. The classical usage though is more individual freedom less state (from the enlightenment) the US version is more like Social Liberalism (vs. Social Conservatism).
> What do you mean by 'fiscally conservative'? You want the Government to lower taxes and lower benefits and such, is that right?
Not quite. I do want lower taxes and less government in people's lives, as long as that benefits the people. I have less of a problem with welfare than people might think, though I believe we'd benefit more overall from a universal basic income as long as it's funded wholly from dismantling existing welfare programs rather than as an addition to them. That eliminates tons of bureaucracy, overspending, and politicians mooching off loopholes in the existing system. I concede though, that at this stage it's nothing more than a pipe dream.
There's liberal as in "tolerate how other people choose to live" and there's liberal as in "spend a lot of money on big government solutions to social problems" and nobody can claim to be libertarian and be liberal in the latter sense.
not in the American sense, but "libertarianism" has long usage in Europe as well, where it's usually associated with 'left libertarian' thinkers such as Orwell, Kropotkin and so forth. Chomsky would be a contemporary example.
Many European anarchists describe themselves as libertarian, in the US the terminology is just not common, so people might be talking past each other here.
Bookchin has spoken about this, but I can't find the lecture at the moment. When I use "libertarian" to describe myself, it's in the Socialist/anarchist sense, rather than what I view as antithetical to libertarian (i.e concerned with the freedom of people) philosophy; I think I would rather call "libertarians" as "propertytarians", as they are so much more concerned with the ownership of property rather than individual freedom, but the name won't catch on.
I consider myself to be a "bleeding heart libertarian". I'm against the drug war, believe in a strong separation of church an state, live and let live, etc. But I don't mind paying taxes for the government to help people help themselves and to help people who can't help themselves.
Small, localized governance. True representative government (no career politicians like the sleaze John McCain and Nancy Pelosi). Strong adherence to property rights. Government not picking winners and losers. Government not accepting bribes (campaign contributions via big-money lobbyists). No corporate welfare--if a bank fucks up, they go out of business and shitbirds like Jamie Dimon get to live under a bridge the rest of their lives and (hopefully) die drunk while OD'ing on heroin.
ETA: End to the drug war, non-interventionist foreign policy.
I haven't heard liberals talk too much about legalizing all drugs. Clinton in the 90s started the whole tough on crime, 3 strikes you're out, crusade. I am against the minimum wage - I think it skews supply and demand and contorts the free market -- but I do believe in the basic income for people who work in the form of an expansion of the earned income tax credit.
I still mind paying taxes and always will--anyone who doesn't is a doormat. It's just that I also no that a certain amount of expropriation is going to happen no matter what. I still don't support in collectivism or collectivist solutions, though. I think those things are the big lie told to people--that no other system can do what government does. The US government is mainly involved in theft from the middle class via taxation and inflation.
It's not that no other system can do what government does, it's that there is no other system. Government is a local monopoly on violence. Getting rid of violent (coercive) government does not remove the ability of men to be violent. Because violence is the birthright of man, we develop these agreements about when it's okay to be violent. These are called 'governments'.
Libertarianism is an idealist philosophy which elevates individual rights over that of the collective. This is not a logically inconsistent position, but the real world is not required to conform to what you think is logical. In the real world, rights don't exist if they're not enforced, and you'll note how that word is also inseparable from violence. It would be nice if we lived in a world where libertarianism were possible, or communism too for that matter. Unfortunately such is not the case.
> the libertarian platform is basically defined by its anti government stance
See, this is why I think arguing about labels is a complete waste of time. The majority of libertarians that I personally know are for smaller government in some areas. That doesn't always meant anti government. Sure you'll find plenty of libertarians that are anti government but you're going to find a lot of people with a lot of views calling themselves all sorts of different things that, ultimately, do not fit very well.
For example after reading multiple websites regarding my own political views it would seem some places labeled me as a Libertarian Socialist, others a Liberal and one other a Fiscal Conservative Liberal. I'm not even convinced these labels make complete sense and really only capture some of my viewpoints in a pretty inarticulate way.
Ultimately I just think all of these labels are a complete waste of time. People are imperfect and you'll never bucket them well. Even when you have finally come up with the perfect buckets for people you'll be lucky if half of the people put themselves in the correct bucket either due to a misunderstanding or some other reason.
Not anti-government. Some are as anti all government as anarchist. A lot are for governments to be limited.
What to limit it to is what differentiate different liberal (the original definition, not what your parties have done to it) movements. Some will want nothing, others include only the police, army and diplomacy. Some will include basic infrastructure. Most think contracts enforcement is the responsibility of the government. You even have libertarians who are for a universal basic income.
But using a huge brush of "hurr durr libertarians, tea party, Ayn Rand" to paint libertarians is an error. Which a lot of so-called libertarians do too, like far left people who will parrot concepts while they never read -and certainly not studied- Marx books.
As a side note if the only knowledge you have from the libertarians points come from media (old and new) you should reflect on how they report on tech things you know about and how maybe they report all subjects as badly.
One could argue that the goal of a libertarian is to maximize individual liberty, and plausibly argue that the loss of liberty via taxation is both a faux loss (eg, actually a charge for externalities, not an "extra" cost imposed by others) and liberty maximizing (eg, freedom from concern of unemployment ruining your life is more freeing than the loss of freedom to not pay taxes).
Why? For he simple reason that the more money funnels through the government, the less choice an individual has in how to use it. It’s about power, and in our world, money is power.
>For he simple reason that the more money funnels through the government, the less choice an individual has in how to use it.
Well, if the money funnels in billionaires and overseas corporate accounts, an individual has even less choice in how to use it (unless he is the owner of said company or the billionaire).
Whereas with the government at least the individual gets a vote on how those money should be used.
>It’s about power, and in our world, money is power.
So better than the government, where we have some say, have that money, than billionaires and mega-corps, which we don't control.
> Well, if the money funnels in billionaires and overseas corporate accounts, an individual has even less choice in how to use it
Billionaires buy things, travel, and hire people to work for them. They don't hold onto their money forever. And if they do hold on to, it lowers the supply of money in circulation, thus increasing the value of the dollars YOU hold. A rising tide lifts all ships. So I fail to see the problems. Besides, it's their money, what right does anyone else have to it? If you want their money, find something to sell to them. Maybe start a billionaire vacation resort on the moon. That will create tons of jobs.
> Whereas with the government at least the individual gets a vote on how those money should be used.
Voting is just a small piece, the bigger part is the full-time lobby groups and interest. They have a much more control than the individual gets 1 vote out of 200+ million. And just because 51+% of voters think it's ok to steal someones income, doesn't make it right.
>Billionaires buy things, travel, and hire people to work for them. They don't hold onto their money forever.
Their living and partying costs are so tiny compared to their wealth, we can just as well say that they are "holding onto their money forever".
>Besides, it's their money, what right does anyone else have to it?
I don't believe in the concept of "their money" above a certain degree. After a point such gains are so much part of systemic faults and imbalances that it should be "everybody's money" but its just hoarded.
>And just because 51+% of voters think it's ok to steal someones income, doesn't make it right.
Absent a god, it's only what people think that makes something right or wrong.
It's not a zero-sum game. Money is just a symbolic representation of value. Value is created by people working and innovating. It's not about sharing a finite size pie. It's a planet full of people innovating and making pies.
There can be billionaires and average people all prospering at the same time. It doesn't bother me when billionaires have hordes of money and private jets. I have an average income, but my life is very comfortable especially compared to human history. I don't have to work on a farm, I have air conditioning, time for entertainment, cheap plane tickets to travel thousands of miles in a single day. I think ancient kings would be jealous of what the average person has access to now.
I am super grateful for all the "selfish ba$#@rds" like Henry Ford who brought cars to the masses and made them selves massively wealthy in the process. Communists, Italian Fascists and Nazis all tried to provide the "peoples car" and every time they failed. Capitalism benefits the common man the most! Even when capitalism doesn't work right, it's still far better then centralized systems.
Another "selfish ba$#@rd" is Steve Jobs. Thank him for helping bring the computing power to the common mans home!
> it's only what people think that makes something right or wrong
To be logically consistent, you must admit there is no moral basis to say what the Nazis did was wrong. Or the nice friendly communists who believe in sharing "everybody's money" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_... I'll take my chances with the Rockefellers :)
It does apply to healthcare because healthcare costs are only inflated due to artificial influences. Health insurance, removal of choice of health insurance from the marketplace, government influence on that arrangement due to tax deductibility of employer sponsored insurance but not personally purchased insurance, and finally the expansion of "insurance" to mean a payment system in all transactions and not just the serious items (home owners insurance doesn't pay for minor things).
Government influence is what inflated healthcare costs in the first place by removing all aspects from true consumer choice (aka - the market).
Healthcare costs a hundred times more. That makes it almost incomparable. And has knock-on effects like different people wanting different styles of coverage with very different price schedules.
Courts/police are relatively straightforward and cheap, and act as an enabler for contracts and personal choice.
It's about 10x more if you count just police and fire; about 2x more if you count defense spending along with policing, using UK numbers. (Nowhere near 100x!)
Of course, many more people spread colds, cause accidents, etc than commit crimes, so it makes sense that the cost of controlling their externalities is more than those of criminals.
But your choice seems arbitrary: you couch it in pragmatic terms, because you're not categorically against government programs, but then avoid actual cost-benefit analysis, rendering your opinion nothing more than whim.
That's what it always seems to come down to with "libertarians": unprincipled bullshit that aligns with their whims (such as yes police, no NHS).
I would definitely not categorize defense spending as police.
Healthcare doesn't stop people from spreading colds. You're not actually reducing externalities with most categories of care. And if there were no police you would see a lot more theft.
Anyway, you can put it in cost-benefit terms, but you have to include a strong freedom factor. A government that takes 2% of GDP to keep public order is far better than not doing that. But taking a very large fraction of income to provide health care? That is an enormous cost to both spending and freedom, and reasonable people can see those costs as higher or lower than the benefits.
They don't have cold vaccines. And vaccines are part of the reason I said "most categories". Note also that vaccines are pretty cheap. They're far removed from expensive surgery and drugs.
I believe you're describing classical liberalism, freedom with governmental safety nets. Libertarianism would have no safety nets and very minimum police and military. If you can't afford food or health care, that's on you.
I'm a libertarian who believes that in a modern industrialized world, you can't not have SOME sort of safety net - the days of the yeoman farmer are long gone (subsistence farming isn't possible in the city) - I'd rather it be in the form of a GMI which would enhance personal freedom of choice, over the existing patchwork of expensive, discriminatory programs and wage controls.
Give people money, give them mandatory financial literacy training before they get said money, let them figure out how best to live their lives, remove the minimum wage in the process. I'm also strongly opposed to malum prohibitum laws as well - the government does a poor job of respecting peoples civil liberties out of the misguided concept that any and all evils are preventable - the truth is, sometimes bad things happen, and not every potential bad thing is worth the collateral costs to prevent it.
I guess those seeking your brand of liberty should just get thrown in prison. There you're "free" to not worry about having to feed yourself, "free" from having to pay for healthcare, and rent. Way to completely invert the definition of freedom.
In general it's about story selection. 80% of the "stories of the day" are related to minority rights, empathy stories and a bunch of others. Rural white people are rarely mentioned except in the context of an environmental disaster. I like the stories myself but I definitely feel like the average conservative doesn't feel like they're included in any of the coverage.
Maybe it's my bias, but I feel like I actually hear a lot of stories about rural white people. Especially since the election, every outlet keeps wanting to do think pieces on their plight.
I think a lot of sources generally treated as liberal have swerved in their coverage over the last ~year, since Trump began to look credible. I'd argue that stretch is non-representative compared to, say, 2014, but I'd also argue you can still see a distinctive outlook when they do cover those topics.
A source like Vox covers urban/coastal issues from the 'inside', treating first-hand sources as credible and writing like the reader is included in the topic. There's also a significant assumption that readers inherently care.
It writes rural white plight stories as 'explainers', approaching them the way you would approach some international crisis your readers are unlikely to know about. One big human-interest frame example to make your readers care, lots of background and statistics, first-hand interviews that add flavor, but are aggressively contextualized by talking to professors and experts who aren't part of the community. And, of course, a necessity to say "which maybe caused Trump" or otherwise justify why such stories are relevant to their readers.
Basically, I think NPR/Vox/etc have started covering rural plight stuff far more, but they're still explaining those people to their readers.
You hit the nail on the head - and nothing really turns off a viewership than being "taught" about yourself. 90% of conservative talk radio is "teaching" about how liberals think.
Yes, that's a much more succinct way of putting it! A source feels biased to me any time it's talking to one side, but 'teaching' about another side - no matter how the mechanisms of that bias vary.
I'd agree with taurath that if bias is there it's in the story framing or selection. And also sometimes interviewee: the various shows seem to like "Here's an archetype (e.g. soldier) who you would expect to be conservative, but actually has liberal views."
If you summarize every story, you end up with a lot more "affirming a liberal view of the world" ones than "affirming a conservative view."
That said, I still believe the content of the stories presented hews far closer to objective fact and truth than what I've seen from conservative media. So I wouldn't say it's nearly that biased.
Is it possible that you would consider any story that isn't about a white heterosexual man one of those? I'm really wondering, because I could see myself keeping a running tally like this once I thought I noticed a trend–kinda like noticing how they put pumpkin into everything in the fall.
But of course, 80% is actually pretty close to the number of Americans that are not white heterosexual men. We may just have gotten used to an overrepresentation in movies, politics, and our social life.
I don't think there's much of an overrepresentation - I haven't heard a human interest piece on a rural/conservative person on there that didn't deal with the opioid crisis in the last 6 months - and I listen every day. I look back to where I grew up which was a much more conservative rural area and frequently think about how I'd never feel like any of the stories on NPR would apply to me.
NPR before the 2016 election cycle, I'd absolutely agree with you - they've at least started to cover the depravities of the opioid crisis in rural areas now, its a nice change - but I'd agree with you, outside of ATC (All Things Considered) the programming has a huge urban liberal bias.
>In general it's about story selection. 80% of the "stories of the day" are related to minority rights, empathy stories and a bunch of others. Rural white people are rarely mentioned except in the context of an environmental disaster.
I think the problem is you're lumping all minorities into one, and treating rural whites as a separate category.
Pick any particular minority group, and you could make the same statement:
"80% of the stories of the day are related to non-X group. Group X is rarely mentioned"
It took me a long time listening to NPR to realize this, though I'm sure a rural conservative would pick it up in a day.
It's common to watch for bias on a per-story level, looking for either bad facts or heavy spin. That's the level where liberals insist conservative media is biased and other media isn't. NPR is generally great on that level - if they run a piece, it'll be factually accurate and told from some basically reasonable viewpoint.
But it's also worth talking about multi-story bias - what will you come away believing if you hear 100 (factually accurate) stories from this source? That's the usual level where conservatives complain about liberal media bias. (They're not wrong, though conservative sources do plenty of the same.) NPR looks way less good on that level; the scheduled programs (e.g. Fresh Air) lean very liberal/cosmopolitan, while the news reports are prone to a focus on political, coastal, and international issues without so much awareness of the 'interior'.
It's still a vastly better source than most news for learning about any single event, I generally prefer it to NYT coverage even, but it's not exactly comprehensive.
If I ever had to move a lot of Make America Great Again merchandise, I would license clips from "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me."
I have two main difficulties with NPR. First, as a baby boomer, I wonder whether my generation will let go. WAMU still plays old Car Talk shows on Saturday morning, a couple of years after one of the brothers died. Garrison Keillor did, finally, let go, but it took him a while.
Second, so much of it seems to me the self-esteem of the college-bred classes. After a while, I wonder whether it isn't as restrictive to the listeners' viewpoint as the private school. (I suppose that this doesn't apply to truckers so much.)
"being able to laugh at jokes at the expense of either of the two major parties". Shouldn't one be able to laugh at jokes that are funny in general?
Ask Me Another is a newish humorous public radio quiz show hosted by Gen. Xer Ophira Eisenberg with Jonathan Colton (also Gen. X).
My impression is public radio quiz shows don't depend on a college education but reward the accumulation of knowledge and attention paid to current events. The college-educated are more likely to to appreciate those rewards. I'm sure there's also the occasional joke or comment that assumes a shared experience found in college but I expect that's rare enough to not completely put off someone who can't relate to that experience (sometimes they'll say it knowingly, making a joke out of assuming everyone has the same background, especially whiteness).
>WAMU still plays old Car Talk shows on Saturday morning, a couple of years after one of the brothers died.
I occasionally listen to the syndicated podcast. I know next to nothing about cars. Minus the 'forwards from grandma' style jokes that occasionally pop up in the beginning it's a quality program.
> I've also heard a lot from my conservative friends that NPR is too liberal but to be honest, I haven't seen that at all.
As with the media more general, the “NPR is liberal” line is a decades old part of the effort to pressure coverage to move further to the right that generations of conservatives have been indoctrinated into as an article of faith; its been quite successful, and if it was ever true in any sense other than maybe the coverage not being as far right as the (rightward moving) center of mass of the Republican Party, it hasn't been for a long time.
> You can get it on Alexa too because most of the shows are also podcasts which is also great.
"Alexa, play NPR" also works. It will use the ZIP code from your Amazon account and play the local NPR affiliate from either TuneIn or iHeartRadio.
This is how I listen to it at home - one Echo Dot (connected to a Tivoli Audio Model One) in the "office", and another using its built-in speaker, in the bedroom.
I'm Australian, I understand how the affiliate stations work but can you explain what you mean when you say you don't like your local station?
I'm assuming it's the same as wanting to listen to ABC Melbourne when you live in Sydney - but that means missing out on the local news or particular presenters.
In addition to the other comment, there's simply a huge amount of format variation between local affiliates. Some are mostly music, often classical or jazz, with nothing else except daily news. Others are almost all in-depth news and programming like quiz shows and interview channels.
So there are places where the local station carries almost no NPR content.
Public radio stations across the US carry different programs.
After asking the question I thought about it more and I think I just need to fully commit to podcasts. I've pretty much stopped watching live TV (except for sports) and the same should probably be true for radio.
By going to https://alexa.amazon.com, "music, video and books", tunein, picking the Dot I wanted to play through, and then I searched for KGOU (Oklahoma City NPR), I was able to play that station.
You might be able to say "Alexa, play KGOU" (or whatever station you want).
We've only had our Echos since Prime Day and it is simultaneously great and awful.
We connected it to our light dimmer and ceiling fan and it was harder than it should be to make it work. We would say "Alexa, turn the lights on" and it would reply with something like "I don't know about a device named lights". So, the natural next question is "Alexa, what devices do you know about?" That should work, but it doesn't.
In a quiet room, the microphones are amazing. But as soon as I turn on the fan over our stove, the white noise makes the Echo practically deaf.
Other things like turning on drop-in was an exercise in frustration. Why can't I just say "Alexa, turn on drop-in for the household?" Instead I had to go to the app, give it access to my contacts, turn on drop in on our contact card, then turn on drop in on both devices.
Frankly, I don't think there should even be a phone app. Go all in on the voice interface.
For quite a while recently, Libertarian meant "Embarrassed Republican Who Doesn't Want To Admit He Votes Republican Every Election Even Though He Swears He Doesn't Like Either Candidate"
Libertarianism is, at its core, an ethos where skilled people with in-demand skills get to keep all their stuff and pretend that their wealth has nothing to do with other people's inputs. If you want to keep all your stuff, libertarianism is for you. If you want to make it sound like you're being noble when you're actually being selfish, libertarianism is for you.
How many libertarians are poor? How many are minorities? How many are women? The libertarian deck is pretty obviously stacked - it's all about maintaining property rights with zero responsibility; for example, somehow 'taxes' are 'violence', but 'enforcing property rights through the courts and the exact same sheriff that would recover taxes' is 'not violence'. Pick on any libertarian thread and the cloth unravels pretty fast.
The biggest trick the libertarians have pulled, in my opinion, is convincing people that they're the only ones interested in civil rights.
Oh sure if I re-read it about 829 more times while CNN plays in the background, I might care about that. Hypnotizing!
Libertarians aren't angels (except perhaps in a relative sense, when considering any POTUS other than Carter elected in my lifetime), but they never get 3% of the vote, for one office. Yet they're some sort of crazy powerful bogeyman that every progressive of correct thought must constantly fear and agitate against on threads that originally had nothing to do with that. Besides didn't you get the memo? Instead of caring about Libertarians, now you're supposed to care about a much smaller and stupider group of statue enthusiasts! They're going to destroy the nation with their passion for old statues! In the meantime please ignore the wars and brutality that the two wings of the mainstream party keep doing...
I don't fear libertarians, I just find them juvenile and annoying. Stop projecting. My point about re-reading my comment was that you were accusing me of the very thing that I said people other than libertarians care about.
This is why I find libertarians fucking annoying, because they just wholesale declare the world to be other than it is. No, they're not a bogeyman, but they do spend a lot of time derailing politics, like when Rand Paul describes government provided universal healthcare as literal slavery of doctors. Yes, the two major parties in the US are fucked, but libertarianism is not the only alternative.
Also, you're a child for revenge-downmodding. When all my comments in time range go down by a point except the ones that specifically you can't downmod, it's stupidly obvious it's you.
Sorry about your internet points. Now that I've regained composure, I'll be sure to upvote you occasionally. You'll make it to the top in no time! I don't think I downvoted all your comments, however? I'm pretty sure I upvoted this one?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15069956 Bygones!
I'm happy to support any alternative. I feel that any actual change (as opposed to Trump's new-boss-same-as-the-old shtick), in no matter what direction, would have to be an improvement. For instance, I voted for Bernie in the primaries, and he had my vote in the general before DNC wiped their asses with that vote. I haven't voted D or R for President in decades. I guess I can understand being annoyed by libertarians, although I myself am not. What drives me around the bend is CNN reptiles like Jake Tapper or Alisyn Camerota defending the two-faces-one-party status quo and all the wars and brutality that entails. That often takes the form of pointless derailing bitching about libertarians or greens or random online skeptics or whomever, of which yours upthread is a prime example. Sorry... I don't think we'll see the changes we want by starting the effort with a purity test.
Limited government, except for the massive expansion of the court system, so that everything can be decided post-facto in the courts rather than beforehand with regulations.
You're absolutely right. It is late at night here but regardless I have no excuse. I have no clue why I typed it that way (fixed the original post since it was within the edit window)
He's using conservative and liberal in their classical senses, whereby conservative connotes restraint in legislating social issues and liberal connotes freedom of the marketplace.
I know you got down-voted and you are wrong about my intentions (it was just a typo) but I up-voted you because I do appreciate that the definitions of liberal and conservative have not always been the same.
Hello from Amherst/Nashua. Email me if you want to get a beer sometime.
I used to listen to NHPR a lot when I had a long commute one summer and would occasionally tune in. My biggest complaint isn't that NPR is too liberal, only that it is very surface-thought in its discussion of topics. Too often a story will raise what seem to be obvious and interesting (but maybe difficult) questions and the journalist or interviewer will just move on.
I dimly have one example in mind, a government agency (port authority?) in Oregon had millions in carbon credits (tax offsets) that it couldn't use, so it sold them to some other Oregon company for cheap to some corporation. Imagine its $5m tax credits that it sold for $1m. The company could then offset $5m of taxes. This was billed as a good deal for the port authority.
Of course as described it's really the state of Oregon losing $4m by selling the credit on the cheap, which seems totally insane. This was never discussed. I gave up after that story.
> My biggest complaint isn't that NPR is too liberal, only that it is very surface-thought in its discussion of topics. Too often a story will raise what seem to be obvious and interesting (but maybe difficult) questions and the journalist or interviewer will just move on.
Tom Ashbrook (On Point) does this especially egregiously. Some of his simplistic (or biased) "So what you're saying is..." moments make me cringe.
I realize it's a call in show, but jesus, there isn't anyone out there with a less obvious liberal bias / more technical background who's interested in the job?
Let callers or interviewees make their points fairly, then debate them. Rhetorically dancing around the topics with the advantage of being the host just makes me feel like I'm listening to Bill O'Reilly. (Ugh)
You should both check out WNYC'S "On The Media." It's NPR style, but every interview you hear is a 40-60-120 minute interview that's been boiled down to 8-10 min for the show. It's truly bespoke radio in that way, so they get to cover the issues at the core of something. It's my favorite show week to week.
In GA, we've got Political Rewind, which is similar and also fantastic.
It's also a simple formula: find an expert in the field who's also a halfway decent host, then invite guests who work in the professional and balance their biases against each other.
On The Media is fantastic. It's really hard to find succinct sources that don't totally misrepresent their subject, and they do an impressive job of it.
Yeah, this gets exhausting with some of their shows. The ones where the interviews are interviewee-focused like Fresh Air are good, but some shows just get infuriating.
Diane Rehm, for all her awards, has an awful tendency to cut people off in ways that destroy clarity. Things like letting someone give "on one hand..." and cutting them off as they say "but on the other hand...", so that only half their opinion gets aired.
On the "more technical" side, Science Friday really needs a host who understands something about science. Flatow's digested 'restatements' tend to be flatly wrong, and he's often two or three laps behind what an interested layman would pick up. I can understand going slowly in the name of accessibility, but he sort of forfeits that right by arriving at completely inaccurate final summaries.
It's not bad overall, but there's an aggravating tendency for the interviewers to 'participate' when they're not really qualified to have a dialogue instead of simply offering prompts.
OMG Kai Ryssdal is insufferable. I can't decide which I loathe more: his nails-on-chalkboard exaggeratedly-saccharine voice or his habit of filling in between stories with stupid rhetorical questions the "answers" to which are based entirely on his own banal idiosyncratic bourgeois politics.
Kai Ryssdal is horrible. Fluff piece after fluff piece and he prefaces all stories containing data with an extremely patronizing "dumb this down for you" speech.
It also helps that, depending on where you live, NHPR is the most entertaining programming available. The Exchange is a very high quality current events show, and the host is incredibly good at her job. I would listen to that when traveling up to PSU for school during my senior year.
If you find yourself north of Tilton, NH, you're not going to have much choice in radio programming. Unless, that is, you enjoy country or Christian radio.
Or, you know, the three NHPR signals, the multiple VPR state border blasters, Maine Public Radio, most of the tilton stations, or the Canadian border blasters we get.
>I've also heard a lot from my conservative friends that NPR is too liberal but to be honest, I haven't seen that at all.
The reason conservatives think NPR is wildly liberal is they don't listen to it. They only listen to conservative media, and it tells them NPR is 100% pro-communism and also is pro-Sharia law. Which anyone who actually listens to it knows is utter nonsense.
The lesson here is you should listen directly to both sides, and not just listen to one side and take for granted it is telling you the truth about the other side.
NPR is itself is pretty good here. It regularly has conservatives presenting their views. But I also subscribe to a conservative magazine, just to make sure I am getting the whole story.
In my own experience driving for a little while around the Four Corners area in the desert, there were more than a few spots where the only option was NPR, because all other stations on the dial were glassy-eyed christian proselytising, especially driving Utah -> Colorado. I mean, the kind of radio that even normal christians would be uncomfortable listening to. I like NPR's content anyway, but if you lived in some of those areas, it's the only option that isn't cult-ish.
Unfortunately many of these Christian stations have poorly maintained transmitters that broadcast not only on their assigned frequencies but also all over the adjacent NPR stations. Only Christian stations seem to get away with this.
> I've also heard a lot from my conservative friends that NPR is too liberal but to be honest, I haven't seen that at all.
Are you being facetious? NPR is extremely liberal.
> [1] I'm a Libertarian and thus social liberal and economically conservative which puts me in the great position of being able to laugh at jokes at the expense of either of the two major parties.
I'm moderate independent so I too laugh at both sides.
I also don't listen to NPR or watch foxnews as they are a terrible waste of time.
> You seem to have a lot to say about something you never listen to because it's a "terrible waste of time".
Did I say I never listened to them? I used to as a teen and young adult. I was a big fan of NPR. Even was a supporting member and have their tote bag somewhere( WNYC is my station )...
I also used to watched a bit of foxnews, but that was only at work when they had it on.
But the past few years, I grew up. I will still listen to radio lab once in a while if they have an interesting topic and maybe catch wait wait don't tell me ( especially if they have an interesting guest ).
But for the most part, it's gotten old and boring. But that's my opinion. I'm sure yours is different.
It's gotten so dumbed down it's painful to listen to. There are highlights such as Michael Krazny for us locals. But mostly too stupid to bother with. And though I don't watch tv, from what I gather of the Jim Lehrer Newshour on YouTube, PBS seems to be headed in the same direction. I guess it's a reflection of American culture and intellect in general. Sad.
Yeah, NPR is great. I'm a daily listener. But you have to wonder. What if there were no NPR, might it be that we'd have high quality commercial talk radio instead? And would it cost as much to produce as NPR does?
> What if there were no NPR, might it be that we'd have high quality commercial talk radio instead?
Why would that be? If not for the competition with NPR's programming, you mean?
BTW talk radio is no competition for news radio. I don't care for talk radio at all. Facts about global events and sprinkle in a few human interest stories, that's just fine. NPR produces some talk radio shows but most public radio stations air them when no one's listening. But if you meant commercial news radio, then yeah, maybe we would have more CNN, FOX, etc produced news radio if we had less NPR or more spectrum.
I apologize. Just so happens that while reading the article, it reminded so many times I experienced the opposite, and had to listen to some, not very friendly radio hosts.
Just drove from IA to MI and it's true. Between 90.3 and 92.7 FM there's always an NPR station waiting.
Or I could just download their app and listen anywhere / anytime.
http://www.npr.org/about/products/npr-one/