People think NPR is Good?
Help a brother to understand, because I’m not seeing it.
First let me get this out of the way: I am not partisan in any way, shape, or form. I have no love for the Democratic party and less than no love for Republicans. If a person evaluates things honestly and with some historical perspective, it’s not possible to view the modern two party system as anything other than an abject failure. Why? Because most rational, educated voters are not far-right-wing or far-left-wing people who abstract everything into black and white terms, and believe the most important issues every election are abortion, taxes, and guns. Because they’re not the most important issues. They’re not even close for a country this size. Those are hot-button issues designed to rile people’s emotions.
Get people away from their rabid partisan neighbors and their dinner parties, and you’ll find the truth — their real beliefs don’t match the narrative we see on television news 24 hours a day. Most people tend to have some moderate leanings and their views tend to be mixed. What I know for damn sure about the Democratic and Republican parties, is that they constantly fail to represent people with centrist leanings. People whose views are mixed and full of grey area and a willingness to compromise on many issues to solve problems in a pragmatic way. If this is you, you have zero voice in Washington, and what’s more zero voice on the television news.
With that in mind, and with this also in mind — I’ve been a professional writer of one kind or another for over a decade and got my start at one of the best J schools in America (Iowa) — explain to me how NPR news is “good journalism.” I’ve been listening to NPR for about 90 minutes a day on the way to and from work, for the past year. Just as an experiment because I know these guys don’t fit the usual mold. Most days, I catch parts of at least three different shows.
People in blue states love to talk up NPR and how they do great reporting. While I agree that they provide more context per news story than worthless outlets like ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and Fox… they’re still not very good when measured against an objective benchmark. Why? They clearly have a bias towards not just the Democratic but the Progressive side of the political spectrum. Call it ‘Camp Bernie.’ (Hey! Whoa! Don‘t get mad… I like Bernie. I like him because he’s honest and even if a bit naive, a man of principle. I have watched him many times on C-Span. You can count people in Congress, with his level of integrity, on one hand.)
But any story on NPR which is about politics or which has a socio-political bent / angle to it, they slant it left. Sometimes subtly sometimes not. I’d say roughly [40–50%]* of NPR political and business stories have a predictable liberal bent. It’s partly these snide-sounding, pseudo tag-lines that some of their reporters use, that really bug me — as if they’re telling us what to conclude instead of letting us make up our own minds.
Remember when news reporting was not just about gathering a few salient facts but telling a broader story in context and letting US make up our minds? Well, no. Most of you probably don’t remember that. But I promise, there was a time when that was way more common than it is now. Man does this country need a few more Walter Kronkites.
I’m not saying there are no good journalists or news writers in this country (although we’re VERY close to having zero good TV journalists). There are still some real professionals out there — most write for big papers or mags like the Washington Post or the Economist (more the latter than the former), and a couple of the people on 60 Minutes are decent. But most news people on television and radio? Almost universally, egregiously bad at what they do.
Sure, NPR is better than Fox News (who isn’t), but they’re far from good. The only good news show out there (if also politically biased at times) is the PBS News Hour. Why? Because most of the time they still see the value in taking a 15 minute story… and giving it… 15 minutes. More facts, more viewpoints, more tough questions, then you decide.
Crazy, right?
* after re-evaluating this number and giving it one more week, I think my original estimate as a little harsh / too high, so revising down.
