Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'm a Libertarian As a libertarian, don't you find the economic news reports from NPS cringeworthy though?
Marketplace with Kai Ryssdal? Cringeworthy? Edit: Or Planet Money?
I dont remember the program name.
Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
91–100 of 288 posts
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#92my 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.
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#93Yeah, 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?
Switch to AM radio and you'll have your answer.
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Does that argument extend to courts and police? If not, why not? Do the same reasons not apply to healthcare?
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).
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#96“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. http://www.npr.org/about/products/npr-one/
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.
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that argument extend to courts and police? If not, why not? Do the same reasons not apply to healthcare?
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).
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#98I 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 fri…
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 intervi…
> 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)
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#99my 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 no…
> 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.
Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your politics clearly lean left. I emphatically disagree with your assessment. Not surprisingly, I am center right/libertarian.
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'm a Bernie supporting far left liberal, and NPR has a clear neo-liberal (i.e. central-conservative globalist) agenda.