- Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.
UPDATE: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/16/1244962042/npr-editor-uri-berliner-suspended-essay I used to listen to NPR quite a bit. Now I don't. Too little news, too much messaging.
I think that Berliner actually was way off in his timeline. NPR almost fully lost me back when Obama did the DACA executive order. Every story NPR did about it was some version of "listen to this sob story about a kid who isn't going to go to Harvard if DACA is struck down by the courts." Certainly those stories were real and heartbreaking in a way, but you never heard them run a story about the wife beaters and tax evaders who came here illegally with their parents as children (and of course I'm not saying those types of people are representative of the population either...just that they never even tried to be balanced). I thought their coverage was a great disservice to the country by not focusing on the legal merits but rather on the human interest. It was so blatantly biased that I see that as the point in my life where the liberal media bubble was popped for me. It (DACA) is probably one of the major starting points for Trump's political career, so it's ironic that Berliner sees their Trump coverage as the beginning of the end. NPR-level liberal bullshit is why he exists as a political player, IMO.
there's a quote i like from a ceo i read: "all the GenZ employees at my company are bisexual and they all have long covid. I'll believe long covid is real when somebody who isn't bisexual has it." in the same vein, i will believe that woke media has gone too far when somebody that doesn't post on bari weiss's website says it there is no such thing as a news outlet without bias. there are no objective perspectives - even down to the AP newsline stories that are just "a train crashed in india today". you have to choose what to report on even before you worry about how to present it. there is no way to avoid it. so how do you appear unbiased? you bias yourself to the status quo and the opinions of powerful people. you appear rational by appealing to whatever is common sense - which is the same thing as whatever is the status quo. there's this weird self-flagellating antiliberalism going around that sees reluctant liberals disavowing their own political positions over and over. some people have internalized the idea that rightwingedness is of the people and leftwingedness is of the elite. it gives the senior financial editors and the oped columnists etc of the world so much airtime beyond their natural habitats. people aren't turning off NPR, they were never turned on to it. there are better echo chambers out there for people whose common sense, idols, and overton windows are different.
But people are turning it off. I used to listen every day I quit them they even lost my wife who is a hardcore liberal. I hate it so much I would donate to kill it now. They produce the type of content that we used to laugh at Russia, Iran or North Korea for.
I used to listen daily. I used to donate. I used to volunteer to answer phones. I turned it off, stopped being a, “sustainer,” and would never volunteer to help fundraise anymore. I’m not alone. It’s become hard to listen. Lots of noise, very little signal. Wasn’t always so.
to put it another way, when i hear people like mr. berliner talk about media trust and activism ruling over facts, the dogwhistles are too shrill to hear the surface message of "npr isn't very good", which i think we can all agree with. i view it as one of the best options available, but honestly that puts it at "fine" for me because most are just dreck i am too used to this kind of thing being used as a shuttle for bigotry and polemics about people like me, and the response to the article has cemented that perception for me
well, looking at the statistics, there has been a dip in NPR's radio figures at least based on this back down to pre-trump levels -I've seen other stats on total platforms combined, so including podcasts, online video, etc, that pushes it up to 50 to 60 million weekly consumers. if you cut it to donating members ,i don't know how the statistics have changed because i can't find that data, but you could make an argument either way on whether subscribers would be more or less likely to abandon the station anecdotally, I'm not sure how to respond other than that my experience has not been the same as yours. i think given our past conversations on the subject that you probably have some insight as to why that is. i will say that my mother used to be an NPR donator but stopped because she felt they weren't left wing enough. i think the political and cultural war in america demands more partisanship than NPR can provide.
Did you read the article? Pretty sure he mentions the decline in listeners. It’s a very well written article from someone that genuinely loves NPR. It’s remarkable for that reason.
yes, of course - why else would I be here? he cites the same statistics (hosted on a different website) that i used.