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

Much the same.

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.

But it could be so, so much better.

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.

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.

[0]: http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2010/03/npr_changes_ab...

[1]: http://www.npr.org/2013/03/18/174643299/justin-timberlakes-m...

[2]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative...

[3]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/success-and...

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.

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?)