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Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

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Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#131

Post by vacri »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #9

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 fri…

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.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#132

Post by hueving »

stevenwoo wrote: post #63
freehunter wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NPR doesn't challenge anyone. You only notice it when it's conservative because of your politics.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#133

Post by fencepost »

SoulMan wrote: post #69

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 i…

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.

More info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear-channel_station

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.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#134

Post by jacobolus »

gozur88 wrote: post #26
nwatson wrote: post #7

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 alt…

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.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#135

Post by barsonme »

matt-attack wrote: post #112
barsonme wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it does have the general premise of very limited government, though.

I believe it's more about defending the rights of minorities. Don't forget that the individual is the ultimate minority group.

See, this is what I mean when even libertarians can't agree what libertarianism means ;)

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#136

Post by kristopolous »

colordrops wrote: post #99
lsdafjklsd wrote: post #92

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 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 afrai…

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.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#137

Post by jessaustin »

vacri wrote: post #113
astrodust wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't libertarian mean whatever the hell you want it to be because libertarian?

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 minoriti…

How's that Drug War working out for you? Are you glad that lots of black men are in prison, just like Nixon intended?

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#138

Post by jessaustin »

jms18 wrote: post #51
ekianjo wrote: post #15

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?

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.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#139

Post by colordrops »

kristopolous wrote: post #136
colordrops wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 afrai…

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…

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.

/s/liberal/neo-liberal/g

Does that make you feel better?

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#140

Post by BinaryIdiot »

ams6110 wrote: post #47
morganvachon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 comment…

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.

> nobody can claim to be libertarian and be liberal in the latter sense.

To be fair it's not a blanket black and white thing. You can be both, one in one area and one in another. I think we worry too much about labels.

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