621–630 of 646 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you cite specific examples of this "bias?"
How about using terms like "pregnant people"? Or the fact that on my local NPR station I can count down from 60 and something like 80% of the time, before I reach 0, they've talked about race or ethnicity at least once.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Babies are not babies until they are born. They’re fetuses. This is a factual statement with accurate medical terminology. We don’t call them meteorites until they hit the earth, either.
It's verbal sleight of hand in the cultural tug-of-war to emphasize or de-emphasize the future human. The point is that massaged language blunts or sharpens its impact, and an org's political choices therein reflect the bias. Meteorites don't have that baggage.
Who here is doing the verbal slight of hand? The people using factual terms, or the people lying? This should be an easy one to answer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"NPR Has Zero Republicans, 87 Democrats on Editorial Staff" How many "Republicans" applied?
Undoubtedly that's the reason for the under-representation of women as Fortune 500 CEO's. They're just not applying.
What I mean is, republicans choose to be ideologically opposed to journalism and ideologically opposed to education. Why would they become journalists? They hate journalism, by choice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is not what "public" means in ordinary language. Public is intended to mean "supported by taxes". Support by donations is always dependent on the largest donor.
>Public is intended to mean "supported by taxes". For you, probably, for me it means "from/for the people".
"From the people" = supported by taxes. If it's supported by some small pots of private money, then it's not from "the people", it's from a select few people.
For example, Bezos "donates" (owns) WAPO. Would you classify WAPO as "from the people"? Obviously not. Just doing private money exempts you from being "from the people".
"For the people" = equal access. The only services that have equal access are tax payer funded ones.
Is your private insurance equal access? No, it's tied to your employer.
Now what about roads, parks, sidewalks, the fucking DMV? Are those equal access?
I'm sure someone, somewhere, can find a counter example, but a counter example does not a rule make. 99.99% of the time, "private stuff" = only for some people, "tax payer funded stuff" = everyone at least has an equal opportunity to access it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are taxes for, then?
Things that are supported by a durable majority of the population. I wish that included public broadcasting, but it doesn't. Personally, I'm tired of hearing conservatives whine about public broadcasting. This will at least shut them up for good.
What you're referring to is a kind of "respectability politics". Basically, if we're nice and do what conservatives say, then things get better and they ease off.
We have literal hundreds of years of proof that this is not the case, and the opposite happens.
Think about Donald Trump. When we legitimize him and continue to do so, has he gotten less extreme, or more? In 2016 versus now, is he less extreme, or more? Much, much more. But he got what he wanted, right? Yes. And then he wants more, because he feels emboldened. It's an ideology built on Greed.
If you give conservatives an inch, they take a mile. If you ease up a bit on reconstruction, then suddenly you have Jim Crow. If you you give them a teensy little bit of morality legislation, then suddenly you have mass censorship proposals and the Ten Commandments in schools.
As a gay man, I see this time and time again in my own community. I have been told we are too vulgar, too sexual, too gross, and this is why conservatives target us. That if we just acted more normal, more respectable, they would leave us alone, and the world would be happy.
But there was a time when we were respectable, when we hid in the shadows. When we got wives just for show, just to please the conservative narrative. When we only acted like ourselves in our own hidden bars, our own hidden spaces. Out of sight, out of mind. And, well, how were we treated? Was it better? No. It was much, much worse.
This will not shut them up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Banning books and forcing bibles in schools. Right.
No, teaching what the local parents believe is best for their own kids. While there are certainly a few of those who will want bibles, most in my experience put much higher value in the extra STEM unhindered by ideology. My kids high school recently cancelled advanced math classes because the racial composition of students there was not what the school hoped to see. No, thank you, I want parents to have a much bigger…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conservative here. I wasn't very happy with the PBS defunding. One of their best shows was Frontline and the amount of just straight down the middle documentaries they did was great. For a lot of the issues that became very politicized, I would regularly turn to them for an unbiased view of what was going on. I agree on the educational stuff as well. How many generations of kids grew up watching PBS kids shows? My pa…
I’m socially liberal by American standards, but on the subject of government funding for media I feel like a small-c conservative. Government funded media faces constant pressure to become propaganda. I’m rather looking forward to public radio programming that would strike you as liberally biased, now that public radio productions no longer have to please Republicans in government.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend. We elect them to speak and choose on our behalf. It isn’t a “loophole” when this runs afoul of an individual’s values. It is simply that we have a representative government that makes decisions by majority votes. I don’t agree with most defense spending, but I a…
> While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend. Without limit? If Trump and the Congressional GOP force a bunch of tax-funded in-your-face right-wing propaganda that would be ok with you because "[y]ou pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend"?
But, the idea is, that we're not out here proposing that we stop paying taxes. We're not the ones committing a Jan 6th, are we?
The solution to Trump isn't assassinating him or whatever, it's legally impeaching him or not voting for him. That's how a democracy works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I've been bummed by how far NPR has swerved leftward, especially since 2016. Even ten years ago I liked tuning in because it was quality journalism that still made an honest effort to cover multiple sides of an issue, even if the topics they chose were primarily "liberal" topics. But yeah, now they seem just as tribal as Fox.
lol, I stopped caring about them because they weren’t willing to say anything about Gaza and bent over backwards to excuse what Trump was doing. If center-right NPR is too liberal I shudder to think of your politics
Equating a for-profit news corporation's politics with how they handle a singular topic like Gaza would be a bit reductive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The NYT is not right. WaPo is perhaps a touch more right than the NYT but both are left-leaning and liberal. NPR is centrist but its editorials lean liberal. You’ve cherry-picked a few stories where the NYT leaned more right, but on the whole the NYT, WaPo, and NPR certainly lean liberal or left of the general American public. The point of labels like right,left, liberal, conservative, etc. are relative valuations to…
Picking more: they pushed HARD the Claudine Gay story, putting it on the front page ten consecutive days. That story was a manufactured right wing operation to oust her. They also are still very anti-trans. I am operating on: if they are to the right of mainstream democratic voters, those that won Mamdani the primary and overwhelmingly support Palestine, then they do not get to claim to be left wing.
You’re operating on a fundamentally flawed premise. This is why if you’re using labels you have to compare against the general population. Just because you’re more left than Bob doesn’t make Bob right-leaning.