Comment by bitshiftfaced

1 day ago

> Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.

https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...

Yeah yeah. If you want to find the Republicans in public broadcasting, look at the board members. Same thing happened with newspapers and local TV news after Bush 2 loosened media ownership rules.

Next you're going to tell me the New York Times has a liberal bias, right? Save it.

  • Yes, the NYT leans liberal. You can have your own political scale and that’s fine.

    But the value of pointing to things and saying they’re right or left or conservative or liberal is a relative valuation measured relative to the general American public. And relative to the general American public the NYT is liberal. Just because you are more liberal than the NYT doesn’t make the NYT conservative.

  • Is there some written work online that represents your viewpoint on the NYT? I'd genuinely like to read it. I'm a centrist person who can absolutely see that Fox is on the right. But, I can also see that NPR and NYT are on the left. It's hard for me to understand how someone could with any seriousness disagree. But I'm interested in reading more about your viewpoint on this.

    • “The Left” does not mean to the left of you personally. It’s like how there’s only two types of drivers, insane speeders and insane slowpokes and that’s true no matter how fast you drive :p

      The “left” in terms of voters is against the genocide in Gaza and for socialist policies and candidates like Mamdani. Plenty of polls and evidence supports this.

      NYT undid their endorsement policy to specifically Not endorse mamdani and is very biased against Palestine. Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.

      In terms of mainstream news sources, I consider the Guardian US to be a reasonable big tent news source for the center left.

      NPR is centrist. They take no sides even if (imo) one is obviously correct.

      NYT and WaPo is the ‘reasonable right’ (still report facts but with a right wing spin- see their billionaire owners).

      Fox etc. are not news they are ‘entertainment’ and do not report facts and are a vile propaganda engine that must be destroyed

      2 replies →

For the record, Uri story is not corroborated and doesn't seem to be in good faith.

https://steveinskeep.substack.com/p/how-my-npr-colleague-fai...

> When I asked Uri, he said he “couldn’t care less” that I am not a Democrat. He said the important thing was the “aggregate”—exactly what his 87-0 misrepresented by leaving out people like me. While it’s widely believed that most mainstream journalists are Democrats, I’ve had colleagues that I was pretty sure were conservative (I don’t ask), and I’ve learned just since Uri’s article that I am one of several NPR hosts of “no party” registration.

To a broader point, viewpoint diversity != unbias. If I staff half a newspaper with Stalinists that doesn't mean the reporting is going to become more factual or the coverage less biased. If it's become a Republican party position to attack mainstream media, we shouldn't expect them to even be applying for these jobs.

Just because conservatives hate kids and don't want to be teachers/educators/work at universities doesn't mean it's biased or bad.

It's like if you wanted a diversity of opinions designing a rocket so you decided to pull in flat earth's as well as new earth creationist. You're not getting a better rocket. Perhaps a better fireworks show, though.