• Pronell@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    He was an antivax conspiracy theorist who was convinced there was no Trump/Russia connection.

      • locke
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        7 months ago

        Reality =

        • antivax conspiracy is correct
        • there’s no Trump/Russia connection

        ?

          • locke
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            7 months ago

            I probably seriously misunderstood what happened here. My bad, sorry.

            • Notyou
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              7 months ago

              If you were trying to be sarcastic, just know that it one of the hardest things to convey through text. Most people either add an “/s” or make it so over the top that the average person would recognize it as sarcasm. The second way is a lot more difficult as the Internet grows and more and more people believe things without proof.

      • Pronell@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I read the guys release before he quit. I don’t have the link at the moment.

    • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      NPR definitely has shifted left over the years. Reading his release, he had me with the first part. Then he goes and jumps the rails to Madeupville, Crazytown.

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        They haven’t shifted anywhere. Being “left” these days means not being an insurrectionist… it’s the conservatives who’ve moved further right; and in any case, NPR as a whole is very accurate on their reporting.

        • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          It’s that mentality that further perpetuates extremes.

          I’m not at all accusing them of compromised reporting. They’re well known for being factual, and one of my long-term favorite sources. Once they commit to a piece, they usually leave me with no questions. They just tend to spend more time focusing on the left than the right.

          • Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            In case you haven’t noticed, most of what the right spends their time talking about is made up bullshit. Sticking to the facts only will naturally exclude most right-wing topics because they’re not based in reality.

            • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              I’m sorry to say that isn’t true. You just have to sift through a lot more trash to find the truth. Read reports of the same event from multiple sources. There are bad actors in the Democratic Party as there are good actors in the Republican Party. Seeing the world as polarizing as media presents it will only further perpetuate our political divide.

              With that being said, I’d agree it’s quite rare that I read about a good act by a republican politician these days.

              • Lavitz@lemmings.world
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                7 months ago

                You do read about all the positive things Republicans are doing. Look at abortion, the lack of regulations, voters being purged, voting maps being unconstitutional, supreme Court justices taking bribes… It’s just most people don’t see this as positive. Whether these things are done by Republicans or Democrats a centered news outlet would not report this in a positive light. Freedoms are being taken away and progress is being halted. These are facts not opinions.

              • Crashumbc@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                What is right leaning that is factual that NPR isn’t reporting on?

                Vaccines? Trump in League with Russia? Claims of voter fraud being bullshit? Claiming immigrants are evil?

              • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                There are bad actors in the Democratic Party as there are good actors in the Republican Party.

                Can you name one good actor in the Republican party? “Good” as in “not obviously blatantly evil”, so they can’t (for example) be against abortion or supporting Trump.

          • Blackbeard@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            What the hell do you mean by “focusing on the left?” What would it mean to “focus on the right?”

      • stoly@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Reality has a leftist bias. You think they have gone left only because a lot of very stupid and insecure people have shifted harshly to the right.

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        7 months ago

        I listened to NPR the other day. They read off research by The Heritage Foundation with no analysis at all and then thanked them at the end.

        NPR aims to be middle of the road but doesn’t mind that it’s in the ditch.

          • ADonkeyBrainedFog@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            7 months ago

            They got right of center-left. This is the same as AP news which is a bulletin that includes moderate and conservative journalists. That site puts basically exclusively local news stations that primarily cover human interest and feel good stories in dead center. Getting just short of least bias in that site is as close to centrist as you can get while still hosting political thought. Not trashing the site, btw. It’s really the best way to quickly check the validity of an article from a source you’re unfamiliar with.

            If you make the argument that this is honestly true bias, you’re forfeiting the idea that right wing thought has any credibility. You’re accepting the idea that “reality has left wing bias”.

  • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    Interesting that he says:

    Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

    By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.

    And then blames this on NPR. The GOP has been labeling NPR and other legitimate news sources as “fake news” and corrupt for years now. They are constantly pushing their constituents to only get their news from the right-wing bubble where they can control the message.

    It’s no wonder that conservatives aren’t listening to NPR. But that is not NPR’s fault nor should NPR change their reporting as a result. Their job is to report fair and unbiased news. If a group of the population doesn’t want fair and unbaised news, they shouldn’t start spewing bullshit just to appease these people.

    • III@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      They guy refers to liberals as a “very small segment of the US population”. So at least he isn’t shy about exposing his extreme bias, and in turn invalidating pretty much all of his own words.

    • ZK686@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Bullshit. NPR put themselves in this situation and lost conservative listeners because they no longer cared to report news that the Right would care about. And that, starts at the top from people who want to push a certain narrative. I listen to a ton of radio news stations on my Sirius XM every day (I drive a lot for work) and they constantly attacked the Right, ONLY have liberal guests on, and ONLY reported news from a liberal position. And this has been going on for years. Every single political news that came out of NPR was how the Left was great, and the Right was killing America. It’s been the same liberal, leftist bullshit for years now. THAT’S why they started losing conservatives.

          • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
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            7 months ago

            When someone complains about a news organization having a left wing bias, it’s important to remind them that objective reporting will always look like a left wing bias

        • ZK686@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Reality also has a ton of issues that are a direct result of liberalism/left-wing policies too…issues that most news outlets don’t like to report on, which is why NPR is in this situation.

      • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I remember when GOP wasn’t anti-science.

        Hard to have a conversation with a guest when one side has PhDs and research papers and another side has a graph from a offbeat website and is “just asking questions”.

      • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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        7 months ago

        Spaceballs said evil will always triumph because good is dumb. But turns out if you need to play dumb to funnel money to the rich, eventually you’re gonna attract real dumb to your side. These days gop voters can’t stand the truth. Every single part of the party is based on a lie and the only people willing to support it are people without morals or complete idiots.

        News outlets shouldn’t platform liars. If that loses right wing listeners boo fucking hoo-- they already live in fantasy land.

        • ZK686@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Let me guess, news outlets that are Left Wing are al 100% honest? I mean, that’s bullshit and you know it. There’s crazy things going on, on both sides of the political spectrum. A news outlet’s job is to inform and report these things, no matter what side of the politics they are. Just because you hate Fox and it’s listeners, doesn’t mean that stuff isn’t actually happening. The problem is a lot of these news outlets don’t want to report anything that make Democrats/Liberals look bad…

          • WamGams@lemmy.ca
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            7 months ago

            What do you mean by left? Anticapitalist? I have never heard any bias in favor of socialism, communism or anarchism, but if you can point me to something you have that works as evidence in favor of your argument, I am happy to look at it.

            Otherwise, I think we have to consider the fact that you don’t know what you are talking about.

        • ZK686@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          If you listen to NPR, you’d know that they only lean one way.

          • WamGams@lemmy.ca
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            7 months ago

            I assume you mean they lean liberal and let’s say I grant you that.

            Do you think community radio might lean liberal because conservatives don’t believe in community and undermine the very concept at every turn?

            Do you think NPR could be more centrist if conservatives started believing in building our communities rather than undermine them?

            What specifically about community radio is antithetical to your beliefs and would your participation in it help to alleviate those issues?

            Because yeah, if the people you hate are involved in community radio while you choose not to, of course you won’t be represented, but that was your decision, not NPR’s. I think you should actively think about the fact that your consumption of right wing propaganda is silencing you within your community (on purpose). That is your fault, not NPR’s.

            A true criticism of public broadcasting would be the reliance on licensing British and Canadian content, but again, that’s your fault as well since you refuse to participate and help us fund original content.

      • MonkRome@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        “They constantly attack the right” if you view reporting what they have learned from investigation as an attack on the right, you should really asses what you think journalism’s role is. Should they report belief as truth, or truth as truth? “Only have liberal guests on” this is an obvious lie, and makes me question whether you ever actually listen to NPR or if you just have severe confirmation bias and view ANY liberal or Democrat on as proof of no conservatives even when they have both on at the same time… I hear conservatives on there pretty regularly.

        What is true is that slightly more of the guests are Democrats than Republicans, but NPR has been very honest about how difficult it has been to get Republicans on their channel. They might ask 12 Republican senators to come on before one agrees meanwhile the first Democrat they ask agrees. With the decades long effort by the right to delegitimize any news that isn’t their tightly controlled propaganda machine, is this a surprise?

        I don’t think it’s proof of bias to just attempt to report the investigative results of their work and have one party be anti-truth and then claim bias. Real news channels have an obligation to report reality irregardless of one parties unsubstantiated belief in anti-science, anti-fact, and anti-democracy demagoguery.

        With that said, their is no such thing as unbiased news as humans are all biased. At least channels like NPR attempt to be unbiased, unlike the hundreds of propaganda rags all over this country.

  • JaymesRS@literature.cafe
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    7 months ago

    What’s the over/under on the timeline for transition to right-wing “I used to be a liberal” grifter? Do we count when he invites people people to subscribe to his new “actual freedom of speech no cancel culture here” Substack even if there’s no posts?

  • stoly@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    The only complaint I have about NPR is that they went heavily with a pro-Israel posture after the October events. It took them months to catch up to reality and stop it.

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      7 months ago

      Some of their recent coverage about Reddit was pretty insulting. When the IPO was going live they tried to explain the people who Reddit burned over the years who weren’t buying into the IPO as “acting like children” needing to “grow up”. It was the most one-sided coverage I have ever heard from them - even with all this left-leaning talk.

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    7 months ago

    I mean, if by “liberal bias” they mean “they want NPR to continue” I guess it’s technically true, the same way that “Public Broadcasting should continue” also counts as “liberal bias”

    I’m like 90% sure I remember Mr. Rogers testifying before Congress to keep PBS a thing, which was met with vitriol by right-wingers

    • stoly@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      You’re mixing two events:

      1. Rogers went in front of the Senate and managed to convince an angry senator to support the creation of PBS. He was probably all of 25 years old when he did this and the senator went from hard and angry to soft and open-minded.
      2. Fox News at some point over Lockdown called him an evil man for suggesting that people deserve to be treated well.
      • VonCesaw@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        No, the first part and the second part were definitely separate, because regarding the 2nd one chumbos like ol Benny “my wife is a doctor” went on a crusade defending Mr Rogers because Rogers mentions that boys and girls are different

  • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    NPR: “This segment of ‘Corporations are Bad’ was brought to by a generous grant from our friends at Progressive Auto Insurance. Want to save money? Try Progressive! Millions of Americans are using our patented TrackYou driver tracking appliance that adjusts your rates based on your driving. So switch now! Give them money! Spend!”

    Seems pretty left wing to me.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR who penned an op-ed last week accusing the broadcaster of liberal bias, has resigned from the company.

    “But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.”

    In his essay, Berliner writes NPR had strayed too far left politically and was increasingly only presenting “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”

    The episode has provided fodder for Republicans and conservative critics of the network, who have long alleged bias against them at the public broadcaster.

    Some conservative activists have highlighted social media posts from Katherine Maher, NPR’s CEO, before she took over at the company this year espousing progressive ideas.

    In a statement to The Hill on Tuesday in regard to Berliner’s reported suspension, NPR said it “does not comment on individual personnel matters, including discipline.”


    The original article contains 272 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 42%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • OccamsRazer@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    It is inevitable for a state funded organization to become aligned with the party that is willing to give them more money.

  • ZK686@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    No news is neutral anymore. However, I will say that 80% of all news outlets and entertainment shows are Left leaning. There’s only a couple of Right leaning networks still alive… for every 1 Right Wing network, there’s a dozen Left Wing networks…this is why so many on the Right get their news from Fox, because there’s nothing else really out there that addresses issues that Conservatives/Republicans care about.

    • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      But the right doesn’t address issues, it never did, whichever country you may be in, that’s simply not what it exists for. The right is a pantomime, an intruder on the political chessboard that masquerades as a legit party, legit politicians, etc. while serving the interests of their masters - industrialists, CEOs. Right-wing partisans give away their money and souls to representatives that will keep fucking them in the ass and not solve a single thing, and that’s an observation you can make in a number of places on this planet