What do you think of NPR?

[GIR]

From second grade until well after high school, I listened to NPR all the time. I woke up to morning edition, and came home to listen to all things considered in the afternoon while I did my homework. My family also listened to car talk and a prairie home companion on Saturdays. I was literally soaking in it. In high school I started to vaguely notice something was off, but it wasn’t until the middle of college that I really saw NPR for what it was. One program, for example, was talking about a latina woman having sex with a black woman, and the most pressing thing they could see was that the woman was black Garrison Keiler may like gospel music but he sure as thunder doesn’t like gospel values. Their joke show is terrible, and I used to listen to it every year without fail.

And since someone INEVITABLY brought up fox news, I watched glen beck for a month or so, but lost interest fairly quickly. I never watched the oriley factor except for a few minutes here and there (because it comes on the same time as Mother Angelica ) but he seems more level headed then beck does, and I don’t think he’s as clueless as people make him out to be. Nevertheless, I make a point not to read or watch or listen to the news. Most of it is none of my business, and if there’s something really earth-shattering I’ll hear about it eventually.

It’s important to know that people will watch/listen to whatever they agree with and call it unbiased. I used to say NPR doesn’t sensationalize the news like other people do, but they actually do, just in different ways.

 

[estesbob]

My 2 cents!

I have to say I love NPR and I take any opinions mentioned about gay rights and abortion in stride – since I know it is a secular show. I actually feel they are just reporting the news – not endorsing any particular way of life. Like someone said – it is not a Catholic or Christian channel, therefore what can we expect? I think NPR reports the news without much of a slant either way. They are not into lighting any fires and they are more into supporting human rights than most other news shows.

.

So in your opinion other than the fact they are anti-Catholic ,pro-homosexual
marriage and po-abortion it’s a great newscast, correct?

“Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln”

 

[GIR]

Also, it should be noted that the idea of a neutral point of view is at the very best an unachievable ideal, if not a complete fiction. Nobody, and especially not people who know they effect millions through mass media, is going to leave their convictions behind when they sit down to write an article or give a newscast.

Linguistically speaking, there’s a thing called marked vs unmarked language. The thing that is more usual/normal/correct according to the speaker is left unmarked, and anything that deviates from that norm is usually marked. For instance, if you live in iceland, where there are probably next to no black people, you would probably make a note that someone is black when talking about him, “there was a black man behind the counter” but “there was a white man behind the counter” sounds odd if it’s two icelanders talking about another icelander. but if you live in Kenya, you probably would do the reverse since white people are pretty rare there, so “there was a white man behind the counter” sounds reasonable if it’s two kenyans talking, but “there was a black man behind the counter” sounds odd because it’s two black people in a place where black people are the norm, so “black” is probably assumed. NPR will consistantly and without fail label a group or person as “conservative”, but will never give a similar “liberal” label to groups or people like Obama or Pelosi. Fox news does just the opposite. They will mark liberal groups and people and leave conservative groups and people unmarked.

 

[LCMS_No_More]

You say that NPR is"just reporting the news–not endorsing any way of life" but right before that you said “I take any OPINIONS mentioned about gay rights and abortion in stride”. So, which does NPR provide, opinions or news reporting?

Considering they do both news and documentaries, they give both. An educated adult is expected to be able to discern between opinion and reporting.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I sometimes listen to NPR when I’m traveling and it’s very early in the morning. Nothing much on besides that. The conservative talk show folks come on a little later.

To me, the difference (and I will include Fox News commentators in this, but not the “straight news” people) is that the conservative talk show people are overt about what they’re selling. They make no secret of it whatsoever. So, in listening to them, you know in advance that you are going to get a point of view. Nothing insidious about it.

With NPR it’s different. It’s a bit like having tinnitus. It isn’t overt, but the liberal bias is there almost all the time. I find it enormously irritating to be aware that the folks on NPR don’t admit to their bias and evidently think we’re too stupid to realize what they’re doing.

But I will also say that a conservative is always going to know he’s listening to a conservative point of view in listening to conservative talk radio. I don’t know that a liberal would always know he’s listening to a liberal point of view with NPR. Again, its liberal bias is like tinnitus. Those who have tinnitus will tell you it’s there all the time, but they aren’t aware of it most of the time because it’s usually fairly low-key and constant in volume and tone.

 

[GIR]

I will say this, though, fox does make some effort to occasionally feature liberal guests, but the result is usually a rather combative and hard to listen to conversation. The same can be said when a liberal reporter interviews a conservative guest, though.

The comparison to tinitus is a good one. Everyone knows fox is conservative, even if they don’t come right out and say it, it’s pretty much both assumed and obvious. NPR is probably as much to the left as fox is to the right, and everyone who is familiar with the american right-left dichotomy can point that out if they’re honest with themselves.

Both fox and npr advertise themselves as “fair and balanced” or words to that effect, but neither is, really.

But even fox won’t really dive into the hardcore issues like abortion, they really just stick to fiscal issues.

 

[livnlern]

Considering they do both news and documentaries, they give both. An educated adult is expected to be able to discern between opinion and reporting.

Documentaries? Doesn’t NPR stand for National Public RADIO?

 

[estesbob]

Considering they do both news and documentaries, they give both. An educated adult is expected to be able to discern between opinion and reporting.

And everybody knows Bill Moyers documentaries were marvels of unbiased reporting. And who can ever forget the reasoned commentaries of Daniel Schorr.

 

[JChapel]

Still somewhat on topic, I know that the BBC world service (which I may have at least partially confused with NPR’s news service) comes on the same station where I listen to NPR’s non-news programs. My first inclination suspects that this means they are on the same end of the left-right spectrum. What do you think?

 

[GIR]

You’d probably have to ask an english person about that, but having watched a lot of brittish tv growing up, and knowing the general state of english society, it may actually be more liberal.

It’s important to keep in mind what “liberal” and “conservative” mean, besides the obvious social and moral issues that we see in this forum, and what the Church has to say about it.

For instance, the Church roundly condemns socialism, but also nationalism (remember that nationalism is what helped the protestant reformation get going in the first place)

 

[estesbob]

You’d probably have to ask an english person about that, but having watched a lot of brittish tv growing up, and knowing the general state of english society, it may actually be more liberal.

It’s important to keep in mind what “liberal” and “conservative” mean, besides the obvious social and moral issues that we see in this forum, and what the Church has to say about it.

For instance, the Church roundly condemns socialism, but also nationalism (remember that nationalism is what helped the protestant reformation get going in the first place)

In order to combat criticism that it was a liberally biased the BBC commissioned a report to investigate it. The report concluded they were deeply biased towards liberal views, were anti-Israel had biased in favor of the Labour Party. Sounds a lot like NPR, doesn’t it?

BBC report damns its ‘culture of bias’

---

Richard Brooks and Dipesh Gadher

DIV#related-article-links P A { COLOR: #06c}DIV#related-article-links P A:visited { COLOR: #06c}THE BBC is institutionally biased, an official report will conclude this week. The year-long investigation, commissioned by the BBC, has found the corporation particularly partial in its treatment of single-issue politics such as climate change, poverty, race and religion.

timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1942948.ece

 

[AnotherChance]

Sigh …some of you might even think Fox News too liberal.

Yes, Fox News is definitely too liberal. No question about that. I’ve thought that since November 2008. We now have no satellite/cable TV at all, so I get most of my news from the Internet.

When in college I beleived the hype that NPR was the intellectual choice. I still listened to NPR occasionally up until about 2002 when I heard a report that “objectively” claimed that laws meant to enforce our borders were “racist”, with no counter-balance or other point of view presented. NPR is far from unbiased.

 

[tomarin]

But I will also say that a conservative is always going to know he’s listening to a conservative point of view in listening to conservative talk radio. I don’t know that a liberal would always know he’s listening to a liberal point of view with NPR. Again, its liberal bias is like tinnitus. Those who have tinnitus will tell you it’s there all the time, but they aren’t aware of it most of the time because it’s usually fairly low-key and constant in volume and tone.

Good observations, and I agree wholeheartedly. NPR suffers from an echo-chamber effect.

When you say “a conservative is always going to know he’s listening to a conservative point of view …” it struck a chord with me because I’m always trying, it seems, to inject a conservative point of view into actual conversations I have with my friends and family, who are all pretty much uniformly liberal. But I have to be subtle to not alienate them right off the bat and provoke a hysteria, so I feel almost like I’m speaking in code most of the time in the sense that if a fellow conservative were there, he or she might say “Aha!”

 

[JChapel]

In order to combat criticism that it was a liberally biased the BBC commissioned a report to investigate it. The report concluded they were deeply biased towards liberal views, were anti-Israel had biased in favor of the Labour Party. Sounds a lot like NPR, doesn’t it?

BBC report damns its ‘culture of bias’

---

Richard Brooks and Dipesh Gadher

DIV#related-article-links P A { COLOR: #06c}DIV#related-article-links P A:visited { COLOR: #06c}THE BBC is institutionally biased, an official report will conclude this week. The year-long investigation, commissioned by the BBC, has found the corporation particularly partial in its treatment of single-issue politics such as climate change, poverty, race and religion.

timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1942948.ece

Well, that isn’t exactly surprising. It doesn’t bother me much, though, because, of course, all news/media is bias. In any case, it’s always good to keep a source’s biases in mind when following it (and even the people’s biases who claim bias), so that you can follow it with a cautiously open mind.

 

[Cracker_Mom]

I refuse to listen to NPR. Too annoying.

 

[estesbob]

I refuse to listen to NPR. Too annoying.

But you are forced to pay to keep them on the air, which I find even more annoying. This, in my mind, is the crux of the debate. I consider NPR to be nothing more than a left-wing mouthpiece for the Democrat party. Others may consider that Fox is nothing more than a right-wing mouthpiece for the Republican Party. I suspect they would be upset if they were forced to help fund Fox news yet try to hide behind the myth that NPR is balanced to justify their taxpayer funding.

 

[JChapel]

But you are forced to pay to keep them on the air, which I find even more annoying. This, in my mind, is the crux of the debate. I consider NPR to be nothing more than a left-wing mouthpiece for the Democrat party. Others may consider that Fox is nothing more than a right-wing mouthpiece for the Republican Party. I suspect they would be upset if they were forced to help fund Fox news yet try to hide behind the myth that NPR is balanced to justify their taxpayer funding.

I’ll give you this much: it’s wrong that a taxpayer-funded, publicly-aired news problem have any biases at all, but frankly, it’s unavoidable, in this day and age. I’ll also agree with the fact that NPR has some liberal tilt, but not necessarily as much as you make it out to be (part of it may be just that you only listen to conservative news programs and anything else comes as a culture shock). Interestingly enough, there seems to be a lot of controversy regarding NPR’s bias in both directions (believe it or not, some people find it too conservative): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Allegations_of_ideological_bias

 

[lil_flower_luv]

Anyway, because you refuse to answer my question, I’ll go right to my point. If Catholics “aren’t allowed” to go any further left than the rightmost extremities of the Republican party, our discussions become very… one sided. It inaccurately portrays the church as a platform for the Republican party, and we “liberals” are basically left to either throw away all of our non-Republican-party-approved views or risk being branded a heretic. I seriously doubt God wants to divide his church in that way.

It depends. Are you a progressive liberal? Or are we just talking the democratic beliefs of your grandfather? Let’s be specific.

I say this because the Catholic Church’s teachings tend to point more conservative. That’s not to say we don’t believe in what the traditional democratic party once was…a shadow of what’s left of it.

What do I think of NPR?
I think we shouldn’t be paying for them to spread their liberal agenda.

I think they fired Juan Williams because he was too conservative.

Now, that I pointed out the obvious, where’s that dial…
…Yay, Relevant Radio’s on!

 

[JChapel]

It depends. Are you a progressive liberal? Or are we just talking the democratic beliefs of your grandfather? Let’s be specific.

I’m talking progressive liberal. How far left can I go from the rightmost end of the political spectrum without being criticized as anti-catholic?

 

[AnotherChance]

I’m talking progressive liberal. How far left can I go from the rightmost end of the political spectrum without being criticized as anti-catholic?

The Democrat Party is the Pro-Death Pro-Abortion party. So-called pro-life Democrats are marginalized or threatened into compromise. I don’t so much care if a Catholic is Republican, but I can’t see being a loyal Catholic and voting Democrat. The Democrat Party has been taking over by anti-family, anti-life extremists.