We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
Or did NPR listeners shift politically? Not sure we have evidence to support the author’s claim
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.
The facts, coming from all around, have continually led more people to realize the GOP is full of shit, making people sympathize more with the “liberal” party, and that’s somehow NPR’s fault?
It’s not just NPR. Partisanship in media has been a colossal turnoff for me, and it’s on both sides of the aisle, for that matter.
I used to subscribe to The Atlantic and cancelled my subscription after it kept running articles arguing for Obama. I don’t even particularly have a problem with Obama, but I’m not going to pay someone to feed me political advocacy garbage.
I cancelled The Economist more because it was a firehose – I needed maybe one article a month on hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, not several articles per issue – but it was grating whenever it decided to put something political in relating to the US; British political positions didn’t always align with my American ones.
I used to read the New York Times and Washington Post – albeit not subscribe – but their coverage of Trump was horrific, and really discouraged me from wanting to read them. I don’t like Trump at all, but they disliked him so much that they were willing to drop their journalistic standards to try to get more-exciting stories about him. And they didn’t need to do so. They had plenty of legitimate fodder to complain about. And frankly, I don’t really want to read about Trump on a daily basis. Trump isn’t the entire world.
And NPR is probably one of the less politicized sources out there.
It’s never going to be absolutely possible to have a perfectly detached position, but I really feel that the media was better prior to the social media era. I thought that maybe it might just be that I was suffering from the gilding of history, but I went back and looked at The Guardian’s headlines when Cameron was elected in 2010, and it was pretty sedate and reasonable, no “death of democracy” type stuff of the sort that it was running about Johnson.
Like, if I want political advocacy, I can get all I want for free and in enormous volume online. I don’t need to pay anyone to get that for me. What I’d like a journalist to do, if I’m going to pay them, is to filter out overwrought hand-wringing, nonsense claims, and all that, preferably talk about new and interesting things that I didn’t know about. I don’t especially want even more political advocacy. I don’t want a 24/7 factcheck of Alex Jones, because I ignore Alex Jones, and don’t really want the subscriptions that I pay for injecting Alex Jones into my life.
What the actual fuck? If anything NPR had become more corporate and more conservative. They’ve been complicit in helping move the overton window to the right alongside outlets like the NYT and CNN.
This arricle is so incredibly detatched from reality. These idiots genuinely think they need to be more “moderate”. The idea that they’ve been pushing too hard for the left is simply a falsehood.
They constantly fixate on the right-wing perspective on nearly every issue and consistently adopted the language and framing laid out for them by the far right.
They’ve lost people’s trust because they refuse to stick to the facts and instead try to court the far right by using euphemism.
They “lost” ole farmer Bill because farmer Bill has been brainwashed and doesn’t give a shit about factual reporting or even the reality in front of his eyes. The answer is not for NPR to grovel on bended knee and apologize and promise to be more “fair and balanced” to Bill’s deluded fantasies.
We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
This is everyone. Im not sure I believe the center has dropped out, so much as the loudest people aren’t really interested in talking to anyone about things. It seems like it’s more important to let people know where you stand than to have an exchange of views. This is built on fear of extremism, fight fire with fire. I don’t agree that just posting more diverse viewpoints would help without also stressing the important institutional and social guardrails that ensure people have fundamental rights and a real voice. The fear is that these guardrails are coming off, and then safety is in picking a side (which of course the removal of guardrails). If this guy is so sure that’s not the case, he needs to be making that argument publicly.
I’m not a super marginalized person and probably have a lot in common with the author, but I am a woman and maybe that’s why I feel it’s reality that’s radicalizing people, not some top down policy at NPR.
