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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

#231

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> 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.

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

#232

Post by perpetualcrayon » 

  "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.

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

#233

Post by justadeveloper2 »

scarface74 wrote: post #174
ams6110 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#234

Post by pault »

kristopolous wrote: post #214
Moru wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)…

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 impoverish…

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. :)

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

#235

Post by justadeveloper2 »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #176
scarface74 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That just sounds like a standard progressive liberal (and there's nothing wrong with that). What viewpoints do you consider specifically libertarian?

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.

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

#236

Post by justadeveloper2 »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #187
scarface74 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't believe Clinton is a progressive liberal, but most progressives support these policies, as far as I know.

The Clintons, as far as I can tell, are some kind of crime family masquerading as career public servants.

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

#237

Post by ajmarsh »

danmaz74 wrote: post #178
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…

Shouldn't a libertarian be against NPR because it's funded by the Federal government? I get confused sometimes.

Yes but we also have to live in the real world. It's on the air so you might as well take advantage of that.

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

#238

Post by azernik »

eighthnate wrote: post #218
patrickg_zill wrote: post #197

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.

Not only that. The publication was founded by the same people who founded PBS and NPR. "whose members were leaders in founding the PBS and National Public Radio." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_(newspaper) This article is like an "article" by foxnews saying everyone is listening to foxnews talk radio. It's pretty much advertisement. And all the comments here is rather praising NPR is rather suspicious as well.

The comments here praising NPR are not suspicious; they just reflect the echo chamber of rich educated coastal liberals.

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

#239

Post by Bartweiss »

taurath wrote: post #54
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 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.

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.

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

#240

Post by ryanx435 »

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…

> a few years back

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.

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