Whenever I meet someone who informs me proudly, “I get all my news from NPR,” my heart sinks. Because I know if we get into a discussion, I’m going to have a lot of re-educating to do, and it’s exhausting. People simply do not understand that the once-proudly independent public radio system is a thing of the past. Oh yeah, great music and nice features, but the news content reflects the bias of the corporations from whom they now get the bulk of their funding. It’s subtle enough that intelligent people are fooled, and that’s what makes them so effective. Like this story — go read the rest, it’s illustrative of their approach:
NPR Morning Edition aired a report this week that reeked of anti-union bias, and inadvertently promoted the Koch brothers’ agenda to reduce collective bargaining rights, which means smaller wages and benefits.
The report was rife with errors, missing facts, bollixed concepts, and a meaningless comparison used to impeach a union source.
Below I’ll detail the serious problems with reports by Lisa Autry of WKU Public Radio in Bowling Green, Kentucky, but first you should know why this matters to you no matter where you live.
A serious, very well-funded, and thoroughly documented movement to pay workers less and reduce their rights, while increasing the rights of employers, is gaining traction as more states pass laws that harm workers. A host of proposals in Congress would compound this if passed and signed into law.
News organizations help this anti-worker movement, even if they do not mean to, when they get facts wrong, lackbalance, provide vagaries instead of telling details, and fail to apply time-tested reporting practices to separate fact from advocacy.The advocates are sophisticated. They pose as “nonprofit research organizations,” but are better described as ideological marketing agencies.
There’s nothing wrong with marketing ideology, only with not being honest about what you are doing.
These tax-exempt outfits operate on the model of Madison Avenue; reinforcing instincts, hopes, and desire to stir demand for what may not be good for you or be of dubious effectiveness.
Carefully read, their reports are mostly assertions with a sprinkling of cherry-picked facts and projections, which I have found, reviewing them years later, turned out to be wrong.
There was a lady at work who used to have NPR on the radio. She was one of those sort of liberal conservative-enablers. She only got mad at both sides for the bickering, like the wife of an abusive father. But the subtle conservatism imbuing all the underlying, unstated, uncontested assumptions to the perspectives on various issues was what drove me crazy.
I hate those kinds of Democrats the most. As the bible would call them, they are neither hot nor cold, but they are the worst and deserve to be vomited into the bowels of hell.
And they are also the patronizing Dems who think the problem with those of us who point out how many white working class men and women act against their own best interests is elitist and alienating and not “progressive” (hate that word for running from and thus accepting he pejorativeness of “liberal”). Which is much like when Rush and Bill and all the other chattering conservatives dominating the radio and TV accuse liberals of being hypocrites if we aren’t nice enough in our criticism. Nice way to accept conservative framing! (there is one of those guys at Digby’s place lately). Never occurs to these folks that if liberals were more combative and angry, it might alienate the NPR fence sitters, but it might actually attract some of those angry brothers in law and uncles who are more turned off by the loser wimpy mentality of Dems than they are by the so called socialist policies. But if it forced the Dems away from the center, those fence sitters might have to take that white picket out of their collective asses and chose a side, and in the end we probably would be better off.
I disagree – spewing hate is not a way to convince the other side. I’ve opened my (Fox News-watching) mother’s eyes a couple of times simply by stating facts. The tribalism doesn’t help.
A lot of comfortable suburbanites and urban dwellers (the creative class) are living in just as much of a bubble as the 1%ers. I remember a (supposedly liberal) co-worker saying something to the effect that abortions were not that expensive so why shouldn’t women have to shoulder the cost. Clueless. Even $25 is a lot of money to some people.
NPR lost me in 2008 (Mara “Liarson” and her CDS) – but I do have it on for the classical music. I play classical for my cats. lol