And one thing I want to add to this: Bricker, it sounds like your betting spirit is showing, as though you’re daring me to bet that you can’t dig up these articles. I’m not interested in making any such bet, nor am I interested in setting firm goalposts when I feel like I might be tricked into conceding a case is bias when the details of the case contain no bias. If you have specific cases that you think demonstrate bias, I invite you to share them, with foreknowledge that I don’t expect to find any there–my experience with NPR is that they bend over backwards not to show bias, and so I’m likely to believe alternate plausible explanations in any given case.
If that’s something that you can deal with, excellent; if not, then I suppose you won’t offer the cases that you believe offer evidence of their bias.
Here is a link to the various beefs that FAIR, the liberal media watchdog group, has with NPR. Of course, I am not claiming that FAIR’s beefs prove a conservative bias to NPR, but you can see that from a liberal perspective, there are cases where NPR appears to be biased in a conservative direction just as conservative groups can find occasional cases where NPR appears to be biased in a liberal direction.
I am a liberal who listens to NPR to get the most basic straight reporting of the news and some good analysis. When I went to listen to the news or analysis from a left-wing perspective, I don’t listen to NPR…I switch to Air America or (more often) I read magazines like The Nation or The American Prospect.
I very rarely listen to NPR and for me, it’s hard enough to stay awake through a newscast let alone listen for any bias. I think the whole exercise of trying to find bias is quite futile, each of us has his/her own bias and we tend to judge others as unbiased if they happen to agree with us and biased if they don’t. From what little I’ve heard of NPR, they seem to be fair and professional although unexciting. Reading meaning into subtleties such as people being referred to as girls in one story and women in another and teens in another doesn’t seem productive. It might be as simple as different writers using different styles, or a single writer varying his style.
Well, then we’re not really in disagreement, are we? I’ve always acknowledged that bias at NPR is very slight. If you set a high bar for evidence of bias, then NPR’s bias, being slight, won’t ever qualify.
But I believe you should modify your statement from “NPR is not biased” to something that reflects your willingness only to accept a high standard of bias evidence. Perhaps, say, something along the lines of, “NPR’s bias, if it exists, is slight.”
To me, “professional journalists” who do not acknowledge their own biases or admit that those biases will inevitably color their reporting, are part of the problem. 90% of bias, IMO, is unconscious and unintentional, and the result of journalists putting too much faith in their own “professional” objectivity.
Hence, while you may put faith in their professionalism, I find that that very professionalism is a big part of the problem.
I could agree with this, I think, although I’m open to (albeit skeptical of) evidence that they have a significant, consistent, and systemic bias. If their bias is none of these things, then I’m not sure that it’s worthy of discussion, except either as a contrast to the bias in other news sources, or as part of a metaphysical discussion of the nature of truth.
I was listening to Hannity (involuntarily) several months back - specifically, the timeframe where a liberal group was trying to sue to have Hannity and his ilk tagged as adverising, and therefore a campaign contribution, for the GOP.
His exact response to a caller was that the particular market in question had NPR, and, therefore, NPR should count against funds for Libruls.
So, try all the misdirection and obfuscation you’d like, but when one of your oranges insists on comparing himself to an apple, well, your logic seems pretty flawed, doesn’t it?
It might be more constructive, for means of this discussion, to actually question the person when they make a blanket statement like this. What, in particular, have they heard on NPR that they found “so liberal its sickening”? Have they ever actually listened to NPR, or do they just think that’s what they’ll get? If they have, which shows, and which viewpoints made them gag?
Isn’t that an argument for the inexperienced being superior to the experienced, the deliberately disingenuous as superior to the honestly mistaken, the stalking horse as preferable to the guy who is just trying to be put out the story in as complete and honest way as he can? Would you apply a similar standard to, for instance, brain surgery or piloting a jet liner?
Journalism is, it seems to me, a craft much like baking or making furniture. I don’t see that lack of experience an advantage in producing a better cupcake or table. Professionalism involves more than being paid, it requires adherence to a standard of skill and a code of right behavior, study of the art and being judged by other members of the trade. Professionalism isn’t the problem. A failure to adhere to the standards of the profession is the problem.
Don’t confuse professional competence with arrogance. In my experience arrogance is a cover for a lack of professional skill. Arrogance is when a journalist shouts down contrary opinion or shuts off the microphone – things I have never known to happen on NPR but which has happened on other media outlets with alarming frequency.
I get the idea that what some people require is a level of impartiality in thought and deed that would try the patience of a saint and which would require a frontal lobotomy to achieve.
I think the general case is more subtle than that. The biggest difference between NPR and right-wing radio is the role of the interviewer. On NPR, the interviewer is more often than not extricated from the scenario; questions are asked in order to elucidate the interviewee’s ideas. On RWR, the interviewer is an actual participant in the debate.
NPR’s bias is not particularly left-leaning nor right-leaning – its major bias is towards intellectualism. Interviewers won’t let guests get away with emotional arguments or rationales not well-grounded in fact. It’s not surprising that NPR’s perceived bias is slight - since the right and the left have generally equal amounts of scholarship, they end up bashing the loony left as often as they bash the loony right. The small amount of bias that is detected is generally that which shows through on a secondary level – choice of topics, etc.
No, the sort of thing I’m thinking about would be the way the New York Times ignored months of complaints about Jayson Blair because they had faith in him as one of their own; the way Dan Rather clung to obviously fake documents and then angrily lashed out at bloggers who exposed the truth; the way the media increasingly relies on unnamed sources but expects to be trusted implictly; the way errors run on page A1, and corrections in small print on D23.
Lack of experience can be an advantage if “experience” means being locked into rigid thinking and unable to self-criticize or be open to new ideas.
I really have no great desire to debate this; YMV, and that’s fine.
I get the idea that the people who demand such a rarefied level of objectivity from the mainstream are often the same people whose preferred source of “news” are the agenda-journalists of Fox, etc.
And from the conservative mindset, that’s a “liberal” bias. Just look at how many targets of conservative outrage tend to be organizations that promote fighting ignorance (teachers, universities, researchers, investigative reporters, the SDMB… ).
What about the way it took the N.Y. Times nearly forever to acknowledge the lousy reporting of Judith Miller about the fantasy WMD and even then they couldn’t bring themselves to make a particularly strong statement?
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