Regarding the national NPR newsroom, I think this story will provoke positive change, as indicated in the article. There is no media which every person would consider unbiased, and very few media organizations take action to even attempt to reign in biases. The fact that editors will start reviewing coverage more closely to remove tilt sets a higher bar than all but a few news organizations.
I chuckle thinking about a reporter stepping out of another random news room in the country and spreading outrage that the coverage has a bias. The response would generally be: “Yes, duh.”
For instance, Boston has two NPR stations, WGBH and WBUR, and both are in trouble. This article talks about declining numbers of live listeners and resistance to digital transformation, but never mentions the issues brought up by Berliner.
https://www.boston.com/news/the-boston-globe/2024/04/11/two-...
I do think we've turned a corner for the better. I haven't listened to NPR in years but the Times has improved over the past few years.
One of the themes of Civil War, the new Alex Garland movie, concerns this dynamic. See his interview in the Times: https://archive.is/pzs1a. His theory is that the press is supposed to check polarization by disseminating objective facts (which never fit one faction's worldview perfectly) and this process' failure has led to increasing polarization.
Almost every piece of reporting is now some kind of soft-outrage human-interest pseudo news. I want to listen but every other story is a tale of victim hood and oppression. It's just too much.
In all honesty, I never understood the appeal of NPR, and I've been consuming news all the time since I was in elementary school (I even got my elementary school library to get a weekly subscription for The Economist).
I love PBS, but NPR always felt like cultural commentary with no actual in depth reporting. NYT occasionally feels like that as well, but their track record has more than redeemed themselves.
Like most of the rest of the media, NPR is no longer liberal (in respect to protecting personal human rights, economic freedom, observable truth and government institutions) but rather Liberal causes (restricting speech against protected classes, skeptical of free markets, relative truths, tearing down government institutions).
It makes me wonder if NPR news leadership thinks they are doing a good job? Is there an audience out there that think NPR is doing a good job in absolute terms? It's easy to say they are better than Newsmax or some other outlet, but that's not the same as saying NPR is good all by itself.
It seems like Berliner breaking the rules (or norms) and throwing bombs by way of another media outlet was his last-ditch effort to break through and be heard. In that, at least, he's getting attention, and now let's hope it leads to change.
The examples he gave in the FP piece all seemed very political, focusing on not covering "the other side". Honestly I don't want any of that crap coming at me in the morning, I don't want "other side" coverage just like I don't want "my side" coverage. I can get that anywhere. I listen to NPR because I want good journalism, not both-sidesism. I hope this event can lead coverage back there. With the new CEO, perhaps there's an opportunity.
[It has since been marked flagged. My comment was seemingly changed by someone to "and marked flagged", I've changed it back for posterity]
I went back through five pages of posts.
I understand the desire to keep politics out of HN but this seems like a big story to cover up.
That's a bold strategy Cotton, let's see if it pays off.
And I have no idea where people who are saying NPR has made some kind of hard partisan shift are coming from. If anything, as far as I can tell, most programming is still trying to walk a middle-of-the-road multiple-perspectives this-side-says-this but that-side-says-that, sometimes annoying so.
Of course, there is one group of people that has been casting NPR as particularly partisan for at least 25 years, and a lot of these comments sound like a cross between their rhetoric and NYT Pitchbot.
The bit about political 'ammunition' is interesting to me though, given that the inciting article is briefly but thoroughly damning of the political camp evidently using this as 'ammunition'.
Juan Williams may be laughing now. Don't know about the person who fired him, then lost her job in the fallout.
Coverage seems to have gotten stuck around that time.
I still have hope for the future. Not much to be found in these comments tho.
In all fairness, I think generations of folks aren't really able to set viewpoints aside and have come to believe that attempting to is bad. Which is complicated. But it no doubt meant that they needed to meet that audience to keep donations up.
And at least it's better than Fox News or talk radio and their ilk.
Sounds like some of the HN audience wants content that is some of entertaining, interesting, informative and, instead, is getting some quite different content, superficial, and based on some topics common in current journalism and/or partisan politics.
Why??
For "partisan politics" content, one candidate explanation is simply money.
But for journalism, that's more difficult. A guess is that journalism is an old profession with some accepted assumptions and techniques.
One such assumption is:
"Keep it short, simple, superficial. Avoid credible information as too difficult, demanding of the audience."
One technique is:
"Keep it emotional about problems of people."
With the Web, for a focused audience journalism may be changing.
Maybe I'll pay attention to journalism again when, for a start. they report numerical data with graphs, done like STEM field students do.
Generally speaking NPR rarely shows up on my radar. Punishing him for this article though sure has the opposite effect of what they hope to achieve. In fact, with this they just sent a message to all their journalists that they are not allowed to express viewpoints making their problem worse.
Objective outsider view, NPR is guilty as charged. How can NPR ever repair trust in their reporting with this over their head?
How many times do you recall seeing coverage of it on Fox News itself, whether on TV or their web site? How many times have you seen a similar piece of self-reflection on OANN? Or Newsmax? Or CNN?
Most of the time, news outlets clam up and you read the articles about them on other outlets.
That's why they're in my top three rotation.
>”Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.”
What’s the point of free speech if you have no meaningful way to exercise it?
Anything beyond the boundaries of this ticker of raw measurements depends on some level of narrative, and therefore bias. Even the driest, most unbiased reporting of "what happened" is not immune to selection bias in choosing which events to report.
Ironically, the more that a news organization pretends this purist ideal of unbiased news exists, the more biased it becomes in its effort to hide its natural biases.
In terms of raw signal/noise, a pair of oppositely polarized news organizations are more informative than a single "unbiased" one. I learn more about the "truth" (which is mostly a matter of perception) by reading both Fox and CNN, and comparing the overlaps and differences between them, than I ever could by reading a single "unbiased" source of news in the middle.
@dang please ban this account.
> "We're looking for a leader right now who's going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about," Berliner said. "And this seems to be the opposite of that.
Berliner could have stopped at criticism of the coverage, but now seems to be looking for ways to attack the institution in destructive ways. Berliner knows these attacks could bury and destroy NPR. NPR holding onto Berliner this long might be a mistake - it invites the tidal wave of attacks from the right, and the 'centrist' Dems will join in (like cowards joining the bully) - but at this point, it may be time to fire them.
The real test of the CEO will be handling this crisis. It should not be unexpected in the modern world, and there are playbooks for being effective. It's now part of the job.
https://steveinskeep.substack.com/p/how-my-npr-colleague-fai...
I still recall listening to an especially wretched NPR news story ~2003 - where (in effect) Senator Slime(D) insisted that 2 + 2 was 3, Senator Sleaze(R) insisted that 2 + 2 was 5, and NPR was far too fair, balanced, and brain-dead to even hint at the possibility of 4. I stopped tuning in, and never donated another dime.
I find the person leading the coverage “solution” has the same emblematic word choice issues as the organization as a whole. I love NPR and the local public affiliates but they cannot see their own failings.
Are there any two people, anywhere in this world that truly “share little in common”?
I am in no way a Trump supporter but the way the tone shifted into vitriolic acid spitting after his election, I just can’t abide or frankly listen anymore. I just want the news.
The right are huge hypocrites. Seems like only the progressives need to apologise for holding their views but the right never does.
NPR should tell everyone to fuck off and go watch fox news if they don't want a progressive and fact based view point.
Now, I don't listen to NPR anymore, and it is for exactly the reasons described, but my media consumption at this point is limited to 3blue1brown videos (veritasium can sometimes get a bit sensationalistic). Outrage politics and in group/out group signalling is a perfectly valid competitive strategy in the modern media monomarket, and the Old Media graveyard is littered with previously esteemed names in journalism who were too principled to let trending Twitter narratives drive their reporting.
Why do these "activists" always seem like they're operating in bad faith?
I used to love NPR growing up.
I miss the good old NPR, the narrative machine that's replaced it needs to go away.
They interviewed Adam Schiff 25 times in the RussiaGate "scandal." They dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a "non-story" and somehow they still want to claim they're non-partisan?
It might be more straightforward and honest for all you NPR-defenders to just come out and say, "It's OK when we do it, because we're right. And we're SO tired of hearing about that laptop."
To cover Jan 6 do we have to say that maybe it was Trump supporters who peacefully went to the Capitol or maybe it was Antifa who stormed it - we have to treat all possible scenarios as equally likely?
Summing it up as a lack of transparency (would he rather say “fairness?”) and viewpoint diversity (“balance?”) seems somewhat disingenuous. At a higher level view, different organizations are going to take different positions. Arguably, obligated to do so.
Surely he doesn’t believe every org has to pretend there are “both sides” to every story. But if he’s no longer aligned with NPR, then perhaps the suspension is in everyone’s best interest.
But based on all this whinging, today's NPR sounds awesome. I may have to start listening.
Speaking as a lifelong NPR listener who recently had to cut them off because of ideological exhaustion: yep!