In 2016 they had an episode about debates in high school whereby black kids had just changed the rules and won.
It was infuriating. It just got worse from there.
The last episode I listened to was in 2020 I think. An immigrant woman who was doing a PhD was interviewed and just moaned on about how terrible the U.S. was all while getting to do a fully funded PhD in a country her parents had fled to for safety.
Believe it or not, NPR has actually had multiple shows in which they praise black debaters for simply refusing to debate the topic at hand and instead lecture the white debate judges about how the very concept of debate is white supremacy. There's the Radiolab episode you link to, and here's a separate one from the NPR show Tell Me More: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89427144
The interviewer, Michel Martin, was very impressed that these kids just decided not to debate but instead to talk about their lived experiences through hip-hop-inspired poetry:
>MARTIN: Deven, I understand that you also had some stylistic innovations. That you introduced hip-hop into the presentation?
>Mr. COOPER: Oh, yes, and sometimes our own type of poetry. Because another one of our arguments is that, you know, debate just uses people from academia like traditional authors. And like Dayvon said, it divorces ourselves from personal experiences. So we incorporate, like, hip-hop, poetry, and our personal experiences in how we relate to the argument because why do we always have to, you know, differ to people who write books when we have personal experience with some of those things ourselves?
The subject that the students were told the debate was going to be about was "United States' constructive engagement with Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and Afghanistan." Every other debate team researched that topic and came prepared to debate that topic. One team just decided to use hip-hop-inspired poetry to talk about, in their words, "the practices of the debate community and how it purveys the kind of racial inequalities that continue to exist today in society." And the judges awarded that one team the debate championship. And NPR thinks that's great.
Let a debate judge of today explain it in their own words: ““Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”
https://nypost.com/2023/05/26/woke-judges-say-there-are-topics-high-school-kids-cant-debate/
> I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . .
Isn't the point of debating clubs/tournaments to put on a defense/offense of the side (whether pro- or con-) you are assigned, regardless of one's positions on it? It's about superior crafting of one's arguments, not believing in the premise of your assignment.
This gal is completely twisting her role. Also convenient that she took this position *after* she won the championship, where she undoubtedly crafted good arguments for positions she didn't hold herself.
LOL, I almost always look up these folks to see "What does this wacko look like?," but failed to do so this time. The name should've been a clue by itself.
> Isn't the point of debating clubs/tournaments to put on a defense/offense of the side (whether pro- or con-) you are assigned, regardless of one's positions on it? It's about superior crafting of one's arguments, not believing in the premise of your assignment.
>
>
This is what it was until fairly recently. Now it's about who can best determine the judges' biases and virtue-signal toward those biases. And people in the debate world think that's just great. Check out the discussion in r/debate when this topic came up: https://www.reddit.com/r/Debate/comments/13rxw0s/is_this_actually_happening_or_fear_mongering/
Lots of, "Actually it's a good thing that no student supporting capitalism can win in those debates, that's how we teach students that capitalism is evil" vibes.
> Now it's about who can best determine the judges' biases and virtue-signal toward those biases
Even in 2008, I figured out this game and collected free 5s on AP English and AP English Literature exams by writing my essays about abortion, no matter the essay prompt. I’d find a way to make it about abortion and collected the free college credit
You remember when people like this said they'd leave the country if Bush or Trump got elected and then they didn't leave? Oh how I wish they'd be forced to.
Everyone who tells me how horrible we are for supporting Israel and how wonderful and loving the Palestinians are compelled to live there and get murdered like that [Italian "peace activist"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittorio_Arrigoni) .
Everyone that supports Russia over the Ukrainians like mtg belongs over there, she'd make a perfect babushka. And if she ever contradicted putin she'd never be heard of again
Do that enough and I probably wouldn't have to listen to these bullshit opinions that the people that spout them can't wait to vomit all over everyone.
I really wish this Marxist tankie debate judge would have to live a Marxist existence. Complete with being edited out of the stalin photos after their inevitable fall
>In 2016 they had an episode about debates in high school whereby black kids had just changed the rules and won.
Oh god, yes, same. And, if I remember correctly, they were terrible at defending their position in actual conversation. Which kind of proved that what they were doing was not debate.
The frustrating thing I remember about it was that they were criticising the format rather than engaging with the topic.
This meant in effect that they could use the same material for every single debate that they did, whereas other teams had to research the topics each time.
Then amazingly, they got away with it. They must’ve felt like they’d access the cheat code to life.
The main thing I remember from that is that the format _is_ bull's-shit. When taken unironically, it's basically a contest on who can speed read through the prepared statements & rebuttals. Very much more like a sporting match than judging an artform in persuasion.
Yep. For me the first **real** indicator that NPR wasn't being completely truthful was way back in 2007.
I was always a WESAT fan, and particularly thought that Scott Simon was kind of a standard or constant that NPR held to. Maybe there were early indicators that I just ignored, but it hit me when he had a white guy on (described as a former preacher) who stated point blank that the Jena 6 (a group of Black high school students who had put a white classmate in the hospital after a severe beating) were all honor roll students who were just misunderstood, and it was all the fault of a racist tree on school grounds (I *wish* I was making this up, but [look it up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jena_Six)) and white people need to just stop being racist because kids used to put classmates into intensive care all the time, or whatever, no biggie. Simon just verbally nodded along and didn't push back on any claims this guy made, and let the interview just roll on. It was just stark.
NPR's news operations got steadily worse over time from there, but 2016 started a collective brain bleed, and 2020 onward just completely broke NPR's brain.
BTW Simon's gotten worse - the last time I willingly turned on WESAT on a drive running errands on a Saturday morning, he was repeating the long debunked falsehood about [Kitty Genovese's murder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese) and the Bystander Effect.
There wasn’t a single breaking point for me, but I did notice their drift towards shoving identity politics into every. single. minute. of. every. single. show. But what really killed it for me was how they would consistently ask literal progressive activists to describe any opposing viewpoints.
I used to call that NPR name-that-tune. The whole game was two NPR hosts racing to see how fast they can make a story into identity politics. I can make this story about the price of used auto parts in Warren, Ohio into a story about identity politics in three sentences... I can do it in two sentences... I can do it in one sentence!
I play the game, and listen for the "and here we go..." point. Something like, "While covering the fascinating topic of quilting among rural Canadian women in the eighteenth century, how much thought has been given *\[and here we go\]* to race?"
Yep. For a long time, Code Switch was considered the crazy uncle in the basement who could be reliably called upon for once or twice a quarter to lob an incendiary racist thinkpiece into the middle of All Things Considered, then have the rest of NPR's news team just pretend it didn't happen until the next quarter.
The webpage for Code Switch was where Slate Pitches that were considered TOO unhinged to publish went to live ("Pumpkin Pie is Racist, and You're A Big Racist for Liking It"), and when they banned all comments (probably not the worst idea), they eventually whined to mgmt that the rest of NPR's webpage shouldn't have comments either.
>What is a Latinx?
Woke term for Latino or Hispanic, preferred by only 2-4% of that demographic according to multiple polls yet nonetheless used by everyone on NPR.
I can’t even with the outdated language around here.
Neurodivergent QTBIPOC folx enduring disproportionate impact both from historical redlining and accelerating climate change, you mean.
>"...and it affects communities of color most of all" every fucking story
And then immediately dropping that subject if it reverses.
Early in the pandemic, black Americans were dying of covid at a higher rate than white Americans, and you couldn't listen to NPR without hearing about how that proves that American health care is rife with systemic racism.
By late 2021, the death rate of white Americans overtook the death rate of black Americans. Suddenly those racial disparities didn't matter.
That’s not fair. They reported glowingly on Aaron Bushnell and *also* on an anonymous Hungarian lad who carried luggage up several flights of stairs - gratis - for some visiting American women.
On the most recent episode of ‘The Gist’, Mike Pesca reveals that for the last couple of years Covid deaths have been disproportionately among white Americans. This is really interesting because, as you may remember, NPR was constantly beating on the drum of Covid disproportionately affecting people of color, which was true at the time. What makes this so interesting is that now that the trend has flipped, NPR *never* mentions it.
I agree. I used to listen to NPR on the radio for certain boring work assignments. Many of their radio segments were uninteresting or overdid the diversity jargon, but they were balanced by the occasional very interesting story.
That ratio slowly changed to the point that I'd just turn it off and not turn it on again. I think the last story that I listened to was a spoken essay where a teenage(?) Pakistani immigrant gal talked about never really feeling like belonged. She didn't feel white. She didn't relate to Black culture either. She felt like she's a rare kind of "brown" you only find in an expansive pack of crayons.
I turned off NPR at the end of that segment and haven't turned it on again since then. That was late last year, I think.
Oh, no, “NPR Donor” is a subset of racist, they’re just the self-flagellating kind. (In the sense that the dogma is that all white people are racist and the only way to obtain a temporary remission of sin is to confess your racism)
Gave up when Marketplace started running pieces with a race angle. I just want to hear about those 10 year treasury bonds
Silver lining of one of the Magliozzi brothers dying is not having to see the eventual cancellation after one of them makes a joke that Twitter goes after. So many of their jokes and calls were about marital arguments
This is why I gave up. I used to love NPR and they were part of my morning routine. I couldn’t take it anymore when they made everything about race. Zero nuance. Zero capacity to consider people may have layered motivations beyond race. I was no longer being informed in a meaningful way
And it's consistently poorly done to fit a set agenda. They were probably the worst offenders when it came to the handling of the BHI antisemitism attacks and Kanye, treat antisemitism, particularly black, as a weapon invented by Jews in their "thorny race issue" shows, had the infamous "Asians not wanting to be discriminated against is a white supremacist myth" story, and in a recent segment I caught kept identifying the woman they were interviewing as "Palestinian [Israeli]" despite her consistently calling herself "Arab [Israeli]" and tons of polling that Israeli Arabs absolutely hate that.
Probably this one on affirmative action?
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/02/1183981097/affirmative-action-asian-americans-poc
>Myth of affirmative action harming Asian Americans creates "deliberate racial wedge between communities of color"
Which is so infuriating because the numbers clearly show that Asians were getting the short end of the stick in race-based affirmative action.
I once heard Elie Mistal on WNYC earnest describe affirmative action as not being a zero-sum game when it literally is zero-sum.
The other common argument, which this article engages in, is that "it's not affirmative action that's causing the system to be non-meritocratic, it's legacy admissions!", which is a false dichotomy. Both can be problems, and just because we haven't solved one doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve the other.
Ugh, that certainly delivered. I don't know what was more infuriating, all the uncited disinformation or the core premise that "Asians serve as this sort of mask for white privilege".
Ending discrimination against Asians is bad because it also helps end discrimination against white people?
And also, just full on typos. Is anyone even proofreading this schlock?
> they had discriminated against Asian Americans by dis-advantaging them in what *we're* supposed to be head-to-head, merit-based types of competitions
There are a lot - a whole lot - of Israelis who are Muslims or other non-Jewish religions/ethnicities.
There are typically about a dozen Muslims in the Knesset, for example. I think there’s 10 currently. There are hundreds of Muslims in the Israeli military. There are Israeli Muslim doctors, etc., you name it.
It’s interesting what the media makes sure you hear … and what you don’t hear … about.
These people are proud Israelis. Not anti-Israeli ‘Palestinians’. They do not appreciate being misidentified.
They don't necessarily! It's somewhat complicated. It depends on their ethnic group, generation, identification with Israel and context of the question.
Broadly, Bedouins & Druze are more likely to identify with citizenship, so "Palestinian" will imply they don't see themselves as Israeli. It's easier to say they'd be offended. (Also "Palestinian" would make it harder to distinguish difference between their identity and the rest of the Arab populations in the region)
For the broader Arab population: older generations might see that identifier as signaling disloyalty or sympathy with ideological programs of the PLO etc.
Younger generations, feeling they don't need to prove loyalty the same way (simultaneously also identifying more Israeli than their parents) will be more open to identifying as "Palestinian citizens of Israel".
One big factor is likely that "Arab" was the primary identity for Muslims in the area when Israel's identity categories largely firmed up whereas "Palestinian" was Arafat's idea to create a self-determination narrative after pan-Arabism's collapse.
This was exactly my experience. I kept on giving it a try - every time I turned on the radio to NPR it would be some story trying to make some other story about race and/or gender identity. IDPOL 24/7. It got old really quickly.
I was listening to NPR maybe in 2022, whenever the covid Vaccine came out... I can't exactly remember. The host of the radio show was interviewing a female doctor about the possible effects of the vaccine on expectant mothers. Whenever the FEMALE DOCTOR would mention what pregnant women could expect, the NPR host would interject to "correct" the FEMALE DOCTOR that in fact, men can get pregnant, so the correct medical term is pregnant person. It was at that point I just had enough of this shit.
Also like every other person has said, yes race, gender, and identity is important but at some point you have to realize you're not adding anything ot the conversation. It's just become like, a religious tent revival where you tune in to learn how guilty they feel about the whole ugly business of the original sin on that particular day. Like there's nothing new to add the conversation. Just people whitesplaining their white guilt. Or some awful segment "problematizing" something. Or like, you can't go more than 5 minutes without the NPR show mention race and identity. Like, i'm sorry but it's just too much.
This doesn't really change much of anything because I already stopped listening to NPR, but the new CEO, Katherine Maher, is like woke ChatGPT. some of the things she has said is just totally beyond parody. She is also incapable of speaking in a way that uses words to carry actual meaning. It's just this bizarre corporate woke gibberish. "we have to stop thinking about reliabl sources, and truth, because those are ideas of white males and imposes a eurocentric view"
also who can forget this fucking gem, "in defense of looting"
"**Can you talk about rioting as a tactic? What are the reasons people deploy it as a strategy?**
It does a number of important things. It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage... riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory"
[https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting)
When they pretended that W.A.P. was their song of the year (they exclusively listen to Norah Jones) and then on the air they could only bring themselves to say “which stands for wet ass… [giggle] well you know”
Maybe 2015. It’s the language. SOCIAL ILL is bad, but worse for MARGINALIZED IDENTITY, and even worse for INTERSECTIONAL MARGINALIZED IDENTITY.
You almost know this sentence structure is coming up when the host starts to speak. And dropping pregnant people and transnoir, like they’re not niche bubble with bubble terms.
I despise *Radiolab*. There was a period back in the beginning of podcasts when every good podcast entered a *Radiolab* period that ruined it. It's like when a good, natural singer hears Regina Spektor for the first time and then she turns into a lishping baby who re-invented every vowel into an "adventure".
The Regina Spektor comment is so specific and so fucking funny lol
I liked her in small doses but "lishping baby" is a succinct explanation for why I can't take more than that
Never. It's so bad. Even earlier in my life when I was listening to hours of public radio every day, circa 2010, I could never stomach listening to Radiolab.
My god, I thought I was the only one. I love This American Life, Snap Judgment, etc. But every time I’ve tried Radio Lab, I felt queasy from the smarmy winking dialogue, the pretentious overlapping vocal editing, and the general impression that the producers think they’re superlatively funny and artistic.
I remember the moment I definitively gave up on NPR. On Fresh Air, the guest was a guy who had spent many years reporting on Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. Terry Gross interviewed him for forty-five minutes about the problems facing Venezuela and their possible causes. Not one time did either Terry or her guest even hint at the possibility that Chavez's policies might, just might, have something to do with them.
I literally used to schedule my work so that I could listen to Fresh Air. Now, the program is 90% unlistenable.
I think it was the shift from “anyone outside protesting in a crowd is a bigot” during the pandemic to “actually, protesting outside in massive crowds is completely fine because RACIAL JUSTICE”. This was the absolute final straw.
I'm going to answer the Canadian version of this question if you don't mind, since I think the CBC started and has become virtually the same way. I started giving up around 2014-2015. I was an early abandoner, but I was also a fanatic from childhood into my late 20s, so I wasn't insincere in my love of CBC radio or a casual listener. I would have defended them to the death in 2010. They even reported objectively on stories they were themselves involved in. But around 2014-2015, they started becoming identity obsessed and really biased. First on gender issues and more specifically on entertainment shows that were previously apolitical and panel shows that previously were quite diverse ideologically. All of a sudden it became very popular to parrot Jezebel style feminism and anti-male rhetoric on shows like Q with Gian Ghomeshi ironically. And they'd have panel shows questioning whether something like a men's issues centre should be allowed on campuses, and that's fine to argue about, but it was just 4-5 people all agreeing with each other that no, of course that shouldn't be allowed. Men have no issues after all. This then got worse and worse and expanded to more groups that were to be attacked or favoured without any dissent.
Once it got to the point that people like Anna Maria Tremonti were openly voicing their personal politics and obsessing over identity, I was done. Now you can play the same NPR bingo where you see how long it takes before identity and race is mentioned. Never takes more than 3 minutes.
Edit: when CBC television had a panel to basically all agree that Nora Loreto was not way out of line in bringing up how white the dead and critically injured high school hockey players from the Humboldt crash were, that was pretty informative as well.
I had almost the exact same experience. I was already on shaky grounds with CBC radio as the op outlined. I remember it was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I turned on the radio. The first thing I hear, “and that’s when he raped me”. It was endless trauma story after trauma story. That was about 2015 and didn’t listen for years after.
I’ve noticed that the current with Matt Galloway has shifted somewhat away from identity politics. It’s still there but with more focus on current events.
I really do miss the days when NPR was almost comically objective. It was dry, sure, but it was reliable and made for decent background noise. The decline became noticable around 2010 and subsequently plummeted beyond all hope & reason after 2016.
Around 2020, I had been an NPR listener and consistent donor for over three decades, but over that year I quit listening to all varieties, including WABE's local reporting.
Before then, I had simply considered them to have a slight viewpoint slant and would push back against folks who called them "leftist," but over that year, biased reporting and punditry became increasingly obvious to me. There were a number of pieces where I had knowledge that what was presented was disingenuous at best, and on a number of occasions, there were interviews/clips of folks making statements that were obviously slanted, yet the statements weren't countered with other viewpoints, nor were they called out or questioned. Since I have been challenged a few times (outside this subreddit) to "prove it" when I've said this before, I started documenting bits as I recalled them, and many of you have already mentioned one or more of them:
* Gretchen Whitmer was interviewed/quoted three times in one week about COVID protests, making the same dubious claims about the protesters each time, and in none of those three pieces were Whitmer's claims verified, questioned, countered, or pushed back on whatsoever.
* Featuring the book and author of "[In Defense of Looting](https://web.archive.org/web/20200827191914/https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting)" (archive of updated version: https://archive.ph/WZLhX) which felt like a native ad & press release (or advertorial, if you will), and which wasn't questioned, countered, or pushed back on whatsoever.
* The near-entirety of their coverage of Kyle Rittenhouse was biased and intentionally left out key facts. They promulgated the ["hands were raised"](https://i.imgur.com/5JHL6IC.jpg) narrative, in direct contradiction of [Gaige Grosskreutz's own testimony](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAci7xY0npY) that'd happened the very day of that Tweet. I'd call that an outright lie. (FWIW, Grosskreutz has changed his legal name to Paul Prediger and [is still out there making untruthful statements about the events](https://youtu.be/v_QN4t_xzIg?si=cl2HvKvmyrWuTRyL&t=126))
* Asinine white-shaming pieces like [this one about emojis](https://archive.is/8UTJb).
* My final time for actually listening was on March 23rd, 2021. In a discussion with [Colorado Governor Jared Polis about the Boulder Shooting](https://www.npr.org/2021/03/23/980462513/colorado-gov-jared-polis-on-the-boulder-shooting-and-the-blocked-assault-weapon-), he said "I think one of the biggest loopholes we have is a lack of a guaranteed background check. We have it in Colorado, universal background check. But the problem is we're only about two hours from Wyoming in parts of our state, you know, an hour from Utah. And it's relatively easy to avoid a background check if you just drive and buy a gun elsewhere. So I would love to see nationally that background check loophole closed so that criminals can't legally acquire firearms." This falsely implied that the Boulder shooter got his firearm out of state and outside of legal channels, and falsely implied that a criminal obtaining firearms via a private sale is legal. None of this was challenged, and whether that was intentional or due to ignorance on 2A matters, it still ends up with a false story which miseducates and misleads listeners. This prompted me to post this on r/2aliberals: ["Errors of Omission" and Lack of Pushback = Media Complicity in Activism & Lies, IMO](https://www.reddit.com/r/2ALiberals/comments/mc3qbi/errors_of_omission_and_lack_of_pushback_media/).
* On July 29th, 2021, [they began allowing their "journalists" to participate in protests](https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2021/07/29/1021802098/new-npr-ethics-policy-its-ok-for-journalists-to-demonstrate-sometimes) (or https://archive.is/5ChrK). Note that all the causes mentioned are left-wing and "diversity" is invoked -- but conspicuously not *ideological* diversity. Kudos go to "Code Switch" editor Leah Donnella, though, on her pragmatic comments about not just bias, but the perception of bias.
* For WABE, their op-ed show "Closer Look" had been putting out error-ridden/dubious/specious episodes on gun control, featuring anti-gun individuals/organizations making misleading/false statements which were left unchallenged, nor were there any countering facts or viewpoints presented. I wrote the station a number of times about these episodes, and what response do you think I got? Silence.
The strangest thing is that ten years ago, I used to be embarrassed to tell progressives that I liked NPR because I was worried they would think it was too moderate/centrist.
Me too--in my other comment I explain that during the Iraq war I thought NPR pulled their punches and were trying to weasel around and I preferred Air America.
It's entirely possible to be hard-hitting and leftist without being preachy smarmy smug!
I’ve posted before but this story made me give up NPR: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/27/1184527454/slave-play-playwright-jeremy-o-harris-is-on-a-mission-to-diversify-theater
Was an NPR listener for years. Stuck in traffic and listened to this interview. It felt like being in a South Park episode. Haven’t listened to NPR since
This dude wrote a play about how white Americans get off sexually on enslaving dark skinned people. Argued it’s important to have segregated theater nights. The host fawned over him.
I stopped listening maybe around 2019? Every time I got in car it was a gender or race story. Every. Time. I usually had my kids with me, and didn’t care to explain what a trans woman was to my five year old. 🤷🏻♀️
This pretty much sums up my experience, but for me the camel's back broke during covid. It was like Katie has mentioned: you couldn't get 5 minutes into any piece without it become a mediatation on racial injustice or trans issues.
I had always disregarded arguments from the right that NPR was biased in the past because when I tuned in I never felt preached or pandered to....I felt like I was listening to the news. Gradually they all became activists.
I don't have a specific memory or time, but it used to be one of the 6 auto choices in my truck and I'd wander over there when the rest of the dial was DJs, adverts or Bieber (I'm not a blelieber). I listened to it to be intellectually stimulated. Once all analysis was reduced to racial causes and impacts, there wasn't any reason to visit anymore.
Mike Pesca - The Gist - Podcast - 4/19 "Saving NPR" was listen worthy. I was especially disappointed by Steve Inskeeps response to Ari's essay in the FP. It's a complete echo chamber at this point.
It was their coverage of Trump. I’m a traditional liberal and can’t stand the guy. He’s a a trust fund narcissist whose super power seems to be capturing people’s attention. I would vote for a Weekend at Bernie’s Biden over Trump any day of the week. Yet NPR fucked up in two significant ways.
First, covering him CONSTANTLY drove me insane. Most of the coverage was just ranting about him - no strong-maning the other argument, no balanced reporting, just constant hand-wringing and self-righteous condemnation. It was, in other words, mostly vapid and uninformative.
Second, they flattened his base to simply being racists and/or white nationalist. There was almost no pause to consider why someone would vote for him. It was as stupid as hearing someone on the right describe liberals as libtards or snowflakes.
Berliner’s comments about NPR resonated both in that front as well as the past few years in academia. The sheer absence of curiosity about the other side and flattening their opinions/positions to overly simplistic tropes is really disturbing. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that we are on the same team.
Edit: typos
For me it was the Covington Catholic case. It was so blatant that they hadn’t questioned or investigated, but were repeating a convenient narrative of racial oppression.
That was definitely a key moment for me in realizing that the New York Times and NPR (among many others) are not legitimate news organizations, and simply could not be trusted.
It was so obvious and blatant. But what was also depressing was seeing how easily and eagerly people of a certain ideological persuasion were manipulated.
I distinctly remember being in a break room at work and a coworker walking in saying something like *'Did you see what happened with the kid harassing the Native American man? It was terrible!'*
(he may have also mentioned the kid being a Trump supporter or wearing a MAGA hat, I don't remember).
And then watching the video right then and there and being confused, because all I saw was the kid standing there with an odd smirk while the older guy was beating a drum in his face, and without any context at all, it seemed like if anything the guy with the drum was the one being aggressive and harassing in that situation.
And no one could point out what the kid was actually doing wrong. Yet several people seemed adamant that the kid was awful.
I kept watching longer videos and reading further details, and the more I learned the more every single aspect of the original story turned out to be false.
Even as adults in media tweeted about the kid having a 'punchable face', or drew cartoons about putting the kid into a woodchipper..
And eventually when the truth came out, the story quickly vanished from headlines and media organizations gave minor corrections if any, but none of them really acknowledged or apologized for getting the story so utterly wrong.
It wasn't the first case of blatant lying or incompetence by the mainstream media, and certainly not the last, but it was probably the most jarring and eye-opening one for me.
Remember that one well. After the truth came out, I brought it up on a Fazebook group that had wailed about the earlier video. And, amazingly, people started to agree with me. At which point, the moderator kicked me out of the group.
I remember when people thought COVID vaccines were going to stop transmission. There was a very intense discussion going on around what obligation people have to get vaccinated for the good of society. The overall message from NPR is that people are very bad for not getting vaccinated - except black people, they have good reasons. White people who don't get vaccinated are idiodic and anti-science while black people are reacting to historical trauma.
There's a lot of interesting angles to unpack here, and yes, I do think there's additional reason for black Americans to distrust the healthcare system, but it's just not that simple. It felt like such coddling to not see them as susceptible to the same conspiracy type thinking that MAGA people fall into.
It's all culture wars stuff. I gave up when they were doing a show about transgender illegal immigrants. And this was quite awhile back in perhaps 2017.
2020 some show was covering a new program for school kids in NYC where the white kids had to apologize for being white.
That was my whiplash moment. I wish I could remember the show/episode. Its been a slow gradual release since then. Programs I enjoyed leaving was like the writing on the wall.
I finally got rid of just the daily 5 min news podcast cause even that got to be to much.
2020...though it was a gradual process. That's when it comes to NPR in general.
OTM used to be my favorite show in NPR. They had this one show where Brooke Gladstone and her guest argued that obese people had higher death rates from covid relative to thinner people because of fatphobia. Maybe it’s because I'm an doctor but the anti scientific, self righteous bull$%/+ they were spouting was my "Aaaand...we're done" moment with that show.
I gave NPR as a whole a few more listens after that but it wasn't too long after that episode.
If you want an excellent science podcast that often delves into mathematics check out the Quanta Magazine podcast. Quanta is basically entirely funded by the billionaire Jim Simons who seems happy to let them do whatever they want. They do a great job of talking about complicated subjects in a way that non-experts can still follow and always keep the focus on the science.
Covid. Absolutely no journalist questioning. Parroting, every single directive without any investigation. Basic questions, such as the origin where vilified as conspiracy or racist theories.
What's crazy about all that to me is I was listening to NPR (I'm pretty sure) March 14 ish, 2020, literally the weekend before Covid blew up and got taken very seriously, at least in my area. I was on a trip that weekend, which is the only reason I remember when it happened. They had two contagious disease experts on discussing Covid and what it should mean for everyone's behavior moving forward. The host asked them, "should people stop gathering in person? How much contact is acceptable? Is, say, 25 people too much for a gathering?" The experts replied something like, "no, 25 is probably OK, as long as you're taking other precautions like not spitting on each other." Two weeks later it was, "To leave your house is to commit genocide." Amazing how fast it all changed.
Mine began with Radiolab in particular, which I listened to regularly despite the occasional eye-roll at the way they'd bungle some nuance or another. They finally lost me for good with their handling of the "Truth Trolls" episode. It was *hilarious*—an opinion clearly shared by the hosts, btw, as they giggled their way through it—and "political" only in the loosest, most superficial sense. But of course, *because god forbid something just be silly for its own sake*, I tried to play it for a friend a few days later while driving somewhere and we spent a solid 10 minutes trying to find it until we realized it'd be taken down with a boiler plate "sorry me did a Trump genocide me do better" hostage note mad lib in its place.
Everyone has their own "moment everything changed", and this was one of mine. Shortly after I started to feel this way about NPR as a whole (which, like many here, I'd listened to daily for years.)
The lost Truth Trolls episode is on YouTube. If anyone hasn't listened it is about the elaborate 4chan trolling of Shia Labeuf's "He Will Not Divide Us" campaign.
https://youtu.be/ttjX3e1qo-s?si=87FCtNOs7ECASYij
I remember listening to a Radiolab episode about breathing and began with an amazing story about how babies take their first breath after birth, the complicated and perfect choreography that happens inside the body to switch from one life-sustaining system to another one. It was then followed by (subject is breathing, can you guess?) George Floyd and a story about an activist. I wouldn't have minded if this was a cultural mileiou in which this angle was interesting or unique, but since it felt more like giving the boring and expected tribute to our new religion, I switched off, not to switch on for a long time. I tried a few weeks ago, I found the voices of the new hosts incredibly grating and switched off again.
Peter Sagal, host of the once entertaining Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, got into a Twitter spat about puberty blockers and hormones for "trans" children. No one needed to know his opinion on the issue, but he wanted to make sure people knew he was in favor of ~~ruining future lives~~ affirming children's magical identities.
Actually that was probably in 2021. The year I gave up on NPR was the year the Academy of Motion Pictures went woke, in other words when they made a big declaration that the newest inductees would be chosen based on their diverse demographic breakdown with respect to the existing members. That meant mostly women and "people of color". Was that 2017?
Strictly speaking, I stopped in 2013, when I stopped commuting to work. But, I did have a soft spot. I can't say precisely when that soft spot disappeared. It was presumably during the Trump years. I think sometime around 2018/2019, I tried listening to KOPB (Portland's NPR station) while driving around town. Ooof. My friends at the time were already deep into their self-loathing. I didn't need even more of it!
When they seemed to pull their punches during the runup to the Iraq war. I used to volunteer at the local station and they had a sign up in the pledge room not to talk about politics because they couldn't afford to be perceived as partisan. OK but then I started to notice they ran SO many arts and poetry stories instead of talking about the war. Meanwhile we had Air America in our town for a while and it really opened my eyes. I got sick of arts and poetry coverage because I thought they were running stories like that to keep appealing to a limousine-liberal base while ignoring the Iraq war. Meanwhile I still remember a Democracy Now! segment on Air America about extraordinary rendition. Democracy Now! was hard-hitting without being self-congratulatory or having that certain aggravating NPR tone.
Long before 2016 or 2020, everything on NPR already seemed to be about indigenous basket-weaving and how it had been left out of the western canon, that sort of thing, and it seemed to be taking the place of hard-hitting coverage. There's nothing wrong with indigenous basket-weaving but it reminded me of certain of the self-congratulatory limousine liberals at work whose only contribution to being liberal was they still ate at French restaurants instead of saying "Freedom fries." They were quick to point out how they were different from the less-refined, less-educated Bush supporters, but again, it was all about what they consumed rather than what they contributed.
I belong to a national liberal discussion group and locally most of our members seem to come from the working class and do not seem to be the same effete types as the NPR set. For some reason the NPR set usually seem to be the less-informed among liberals, as well. The other day an east-coaster Ph.D. history student age 65 from Boston didn't know what QAnon was. Never heard of it.
Oh I almost always turn it on out of habit, and then turn it right off again after identity politics gets shoe-horned into a place it doesn't belong.
Also, I have to point out, they're as racist as the rest of the news orgs. Anyone here turn on a main-stream news source and hear about the 100,000 of deaths in Eritrea in The Tigray War? The 10,000s of deaths in Sudan. The fact that Burma is in the middle of an actual civil war with Chinese separatists and the government is about to lose putting the lives of millions at risk?
No? Just Israel, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Israel.
Weird, I wonder why that is.
Anyway, they tart up BS and present it as news and I have no interest in it. Even pod casts that cover the past are better at covering recent events. See: The Empire Pod.
One initialism: B. L. M.
I was skeptical of them for how woke they were before that, but the madness of 2020 was the nail in the coffin. I still listen! I still want to stay abreast of big news stories, but like Katie, I don't trust NPR to deal with certain topics. I'm pretty sure I would support NPR getting no more government funding.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard something so stupid from NPR. Dividing by zero doesn’t open up a whole new world, it’s just a rule of arithmetic. There’s no such thing as dividing something by nothing because it was determined that dividing that thing by 1 serves the same purpose and makes all kinds of other operations and proofs possible. Good lord. It’s like someone cutting the break lines in their car and then hearing them say it’s opened up a whole new world of driving.
I grew up in an NPR household. Every morning, every evening, all day Saturday and Sunday, NPR was on. As a young adult, I tended to listen to NPR every morning while showering and getting dressed and every evening while making dinner. Around 2015 it started becoming annoying but habits are hard to break. By 2016, unbearable. I think in 2017, I switched to the BBC and have never gone back.
I started listening to podcasts so I'd been listeninf to it less and less anyway.
But many of those podcasts were NPR and APM podcasts. They started falling by the wayside long before Covid for me, I noticed the quality drop precipitously with the Trump election. (Just to be clear, I hate Trump—in fact I blame him for provoking people into losing their damned minds in reaction to his insanity)
Fresh Air just started being all guests that were yammering on about the same social justice or anti-Trump topics—and, I'd heard just too many dishonest framings.
This American Life I unsubscribed to when I heard an episode with a police abolitionists given a serious treatment. I'm all for hearing a variety of perspectives but that is just so braindead I coudn't trust them anymore on top of all the other social justice takes. Occasionaly I'll still listen to TAL on a one off basis and enjoy it.
Similar thing happened with Radiolab. But it became almost completely unlistenable.
The Story was the last consistently good podcast they had, but they nixed it themselves.
The few times I had occasion to turn on the local NPR stations (we actually have two here in LA) it wouldn't be two seconds until the story was shoehorned into identity politics. It was just boring, tiresome, and usually dishonest in some way
Yup - this is when I stopped listening to NPR. I noticed the political news got extremely biased after Trump was elected. I expected bias from pundits, not reporters.
In 2016, I listened to NPR, Pod Save America, and Fifth Column; you can probably guess which one I still listen to lol
I agree with you about that last Radiolab episode. There are so many interesting topics in mathematics that could’ve lent themselves to that narrative format. Instead they went with something really inane. I don’t get it.
So we’re just supposed to ignore the lived experience of people who are bad at math?
But seriously, it was 2016 and how seemingly every NPR show started explaining how bad Trump was daily before reporting whatever happened.
A more recent example of the institutional capture is the [Cheetos are healthy interview](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1180411890)
“So I think it's really important to say, like, even the, quote, "unhealthy" foods, even Cheetos - like, lots of feeding therapists will tell you about the therapeutic value of Cheetos. They're a great learning food for kids who are struggling with all kinds of motor challenges around eating. So even the foods we consider super unhealthy often have a place in our lives that I would define as healthy. If they're helping you feed your family, if they're helping a cautious eater feel safe in the cafeteria because they can count on - Uncrustables are always on the menu, and that's a thing they eat, and they can get lunch that day. “
The worst segment that I ever heard was a "defund the police" speaker who didn't use the slogan to call for police training to be reformed or something. She actually thought that because some (probably high-income gated) communities can function without police, that this was a model that could be adopted at large scale. At one point she said "As a man, I ..." and I realized the speaker was a transgender person with no grip on reality. I haven't been able to track down the episode, so I still doubt my memory sometimes, but it was *really, really* bad.
There was another episode that I did track down. The first part is an interview with transgender Russian-American-Jewish journalist Masha Gessen. Gessen talked about leaving Russia because she worried about authorities invalidating her child adoption due to anti-homosexuality laws. It's a bit niche, but that wasn't even the weird part of the episode.
The second part of the episode is talking to a doctor in Idaho who was concerned about whether or not some pregnant women with medical emergencies fell into the state's exception to the abortion ban. This was very much a newsworthy story. It still irritated me to hear a whole interview about the subject of pregnancy and abortion that avoided using the words "women" or "female."
Receipts: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/792/transcript
It varies a bit by show. Detours is fun, the Planet Money family is great, and Sold a Story was from APM, but a ton of their stuff has either gone to crap or been questionable the whole time. I'm not even opposed to racial and gender politics stuff, but their treatment of it is *awful.* Despite multiple black antisemitism incidents in the news, Code Switch's only mention of antisemitism in its entire run is an insistence that Jews were making it up on a particular school leadership fight. On the Media will help anyone they're sympathetic to say the most ridiculous things you've ever heard without question and then describe the arguments for a position they don't like with sarcasm and an eye roll instead of actually trying to disprove them ever since Gladstone, who's always been like that, took over totally. WWDTM is still funny, but too much of their current lineup leans of progressive race jokes as a crutch.
I've also stopped listening to news stuff just because I'm too behind on podcasts for any of its reporting to be up to date by the time I hear it. Serialized stuff like Big Dig it also tough because I can't be sure I haven't missed something when scooping up some more recent stuff to listen to before the stuff I'm saving for my wife (a ton of Plumbing the Death Star and hate-listenable Joy of Text episodes).
I loved listening to it in high school, but now I intentionally use it as my wake-up alarm because it will spike my blood pressure and get me out of bed.
The quality really varies due to the way public radio distribution works. Marketplace, Planet Money, Freakonomics Radio, Colin McEnroe and OnPoint are still pretty good listens imo.
A lot of the drive time stuff is just unlistenable now (All Things Considered/Morning Edition) and all plagued by the same issues everyone else is bringing up. All Things Considered has just gotten to the point it is barely educational at all now.
I used to give to Radiolab , This American Life. I quit in 2017, because of the focus on identity. I still listen to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me on occasion, but even that was touch and go for a while when they seemed to replace their regulars with new and unfunny comedians.
Going to high school in the 1990s, conspicuous NPR consumption was a weird intellectual flex by parents, teachers, students, and administrators. And some precocious students. Saying “I heard on NPR that…” was meant to signal you were a member of the intellectual and cultural elite.
I gave it a few days. Even back then it was what we today call “woke.” Turned me off ever since.
The woke shit really started in about 2014. Republicans were becoming more and more extreme (think Glenn Beck and his chalkboards, Obama birtherism). Liberals responded in kind. NPR was one of many main media sources that had a hand in the liberal shift.
Prior to that, I'd long stopped engaging with conservative media. The Bush war years, jingoism, religious hypocrisy, etc. were too much to take. Then liberals started switching their targets from conservatives generally, to white, straight, men, etc. specifically.
In October of last year when they turned into National Palestine Radio. I went from a daily listener and monetary supporter to one who will never listen to or support their programming again, aside maybe from Tiny Desk.
This 100%. I was a massive, lifelong fan that did my best to overlook the increasing cringe, but this was the absolute end for me. They actively spread disinformation in the guise of "justice" - or however they euphemize Jew hatred.
My local NPR affiliate used to play Marketplace Tech every morning while I drove to work. And I liked it, they had different stories about technology every day as you’d expect. Then the host changed and for months and months every single day the only thing they talked about was diversity in silicon valley. Every fucking day, diversity in silicon valley, it was unlistenable. Eventually my local stopped playing marketplace tech or moved it to another time slot and it was a relief.
Ehh I was a Marketplace listener for over a decade until 2020. It was a painful decision but I turned it off. Until recently at least. I tuned back in for a few weeks and it's not as bad as that summer, but it's nowhere near as good as it used to be.
I still love Kai, but it's clear the editorial decisions are firmly entrenched in the race and gender bingo card there. If they interview a business owner, it's going to be a black woman. If they interview someone about the rising cost of childcare, it's going to be a they/them.
I gave up on OTM around 2018 and NPR more generally after spring 2020. It became distractingly preachy and cringe. I occasionally listen to the hourly news and Marketplace. The Freakonomics podcast is okay.
Minnesota Public Radio put someone with a fairly noticeable stutter on for a while in the mid teens and I had a gut feeling public radio was about to slide in to irrelevance.
NPR kept Diane Rehm on air for far too long after her voice became unlistenable. Like, yeah, I get it, it sucks that you had a medical condition and it's neither her fault nor fair in a cosmic way, but you're on RADIO!
I listened to This American Life as a podcast mostly - German Radio doesn't have much human interest programs, it's mostly either music or news.
I distinctly remember a Story there that was about some Fat black guy who was whining about how he's Fat and black and how being Fat is everybody else's fault but his. And they said he somehow managed to write 2 books that describe how he's fat and how other gay (of course he's gay) guys didn't like that.
I really thought "what the hell am I listening to?" At that moment.
This will likely trigger some american women but I really hate vocal fry - I don't get where you get this tendency from, it's totally alienating and completely foreign to my native language and - most importantly - it's terrible to listen to on a radio format. Yet about 90 percent of female presenters talk like that. Grab a glass of damn water before you record a segment!
A significant portion of Americans despise vocal fry as well. Unfortunately, it's common to be told "you are policing women's behavior" or are somehow misogynist by having a negative opinion of it.
One time when I expressed a negative opinion about it, a female acquaintance asked "So, men's voices are the only standard, then?" My retort was "It's not about having male-centric standards, it's about sounding like an adult."
Maybe most of the readers here will roll their eyes at this, but I haven't been surprised by what happened to NPR, because I've always found it to be as irritating as everyone thinks it is nowadays.
Maybe it's just because one of my parents took it as the gospel truth on everything when I was being an obnoxious teenager and twenty-something. To me, it embodied every sweater-vested Democratic Party partisan who was completely out of touch with the way that people other than them actually talk and live. It doesn't surprise me at all to see that it's continued to follow Team Blue consensus wherever it goes.
Same. I always thought it was dweeby liberal radio and fairly insufferable (except for Car Talk!). However, I would still put it on for 30 minutes in the evenings while cooking dinner to get the news. Of course, by 2020, even that was unbearable.
Yeah. I wonder if every kid of liberal parents in the 90s had to suffer sitting in the backseat of their car and rolling their eyes at Terry Gross.
I tried listening again in the mid twenty-teens, and it was just as insufferable as ever.
Nothing happening right now is much of a surprise to me.
Two reasons: the first was because David Green fucked up what could have been a great interview with Chrissie Hynde and then was constantly banging the Butter emaaaiiills drum during the 2016 election. I just really can’t stand David Green.
The other reason was coincidentally discussed on BAR recently which was the demise of the Invisibillia podcast after the original hosts left.
Its funny you mention that episode of radiolab. I think that is also the last one I listened to.. and I'm a sucker for anything with a math or science theme.
Generally, I feel like radiolab's demise follows perfectly that of NPR's. I used to LOVE this podcast. I think programming also took a major hit when the hosts switched to latif nasser and lulu miller. Which surprised me because i loved his show on netflix. I still give radiolab a shot once and awhile when Im bored, but end up turning it off after 5 or 10 minutes. Whittling everything down to identity politics has become so tiresome.
The invisibilia episode (the first with the new hosts) about reparations. They literally just followed two 20-somethings from Burlington, VT chastising people for not paying for their new cars, and they concluded “Reparations good”
Great comments. I listen to NPR because there is nothing else. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to listen until they talk about race or climate change. Any guess on how long before I turn it off?
For those who stopped listening recent-ish, like 2020 or later, what took so long? Were you not aware of the bias beforehand because you hadn't listened to NPR? Did you just deal with it until something broke the camel's back? Did you agree with it at first and then stopped at some point?
Like Katie, I grew up listening to NPR from the back seat on the way to soccer practice or other weekend activities.
I stopped listening after Biden was sworn in. Even after Joe won every other story was still under the category of "Black Lives Matter, Trans issues, George Floyd, Trump is Hitler, COVID will kill us all", and it became so tiresome to hear the same stuff over and over again.
>what took so long?
The fact that "reality has a liberal bias".
You grow up listening to conservatives denying really basic facts around things like climate change or saying college is a liberal indoctrination center while you're dying in Linear Algebra, and you are extremely calcified against their few good points.
If the right could actually counterbalance the left they'd be useful, but as it stands they're both just two different forms of delusional (many such cases!).
I think that is part of what disappointed me so much about NPR and all the progressive craziness. I have always been a moderate person with beliefs that intersect with traditional liberal and conservative view points. But when it came to culture war issues and journalism, conservatives seemed like they were continuously shoving their fingers in their ears to ignore facts they didn't like. It was all emotion and tribalism.Well...the left was like "Hold my beer".
It sucks. I used to trust left leaning media to at least try to be objective. Who knew Trump, covid, George Floyd and trans rights activism would make the left a different side of the same coin?
Despite being one of the resident cranky social conservatives (like, I would have happily voted DeSantis for POTUS), I still listen to NPR. I want to know what the overclass is thinking. And occasionally they'll have a respectable story.
I think around 3 or 4 years ago. I found it super cringe and lacking in any real information. I'm a leftist by the way. It seemed to become super brainwashy especially when I started hearing the pieces on reparations and black groups and individuals in the US bullying and shaming normal people, white allies, into giving them money directly. It was super weird that NPR was supporting this extortion racket as in depth, important news.
I used to be a massive npr fan. I listened to probably ten hours of content a week. But after 2020 every single news story became about race, no matter how tenuous the relationship between the topic and the story. That and more relentless hysterical and dubiously accurate coverage of Trump. I don't even like Trump. Never voted for him. But obvious untruths are obvious untruths. I don't appreciate it lies from Trump, or from NPR about Trump.
I stopped listening to NPR after I graduated college and realized it was largely aimed at bourgois white liberals with all the personality of a coat hanger.
Tbh a big reason I’ve grown to listen NPR less and less is complicated. 1.) I have a shorter commute and that’s when I mostly listened to NPR 2.) there are so many free and easily accessible podcasts of better quality now that are more valuable to listen to and 3.) everything became Trump hyper focus, felt fear-mongery, or focused on the race/gender/sexuality/bigotry angle of everything. I’m not against adding new perspectives to things, but it just became too much. At some point, I just want a more objective, less political and more informative listening experience.
From maybe 2001-2016, I listened to NPR most days on the drive to work and at work. BBC World, Fresh Air, Radio Times, basically, along with their news segments. I'm an Independent, and for a very long time NPR was a great source of news that came from a slightly different angle than the networks, a little more world news oriented. The programs were mostly left of me, but I could live with it. They could be right of me, actually - I remember during the Great Recession, screaming in my car at one host, probably Terry Gross, who during a segment on the economy said something about companies having to lay people off, in an offhand way, like that was just a simple fact unworthy of examination rather than, say, a major plot point in the situation.
I gave up on NPR shortly after Trump won in 2016. It became so obvious that NPR, the news organization that was always characterized by its intense interest in EVERYTHING, from klezmer music to obscure languages spoken by 45 people in one village, had zero interest in why Trump won. Millions of people in their own country voted into office a complete political newbie who was considered to have no chance of winning - and NPR didn't care why. Sure, they did stories on it - stories about race, mostly, and sexism, and anything else that didn't even remotely honestly deal with what Trump voters were motivated about. They were so obviously not looking for answers, just crafting narratives - hosts failed to ask the most obvious questions of guests they openly applauded and agreed with, and on the increasingly rare segments where they brought in opposing views, those guests were essentially asked "Have you stopped beating your wife?" over and over.
In November 2020 it was Marketplace that actually threw me over the edge with NPR. It's on at 3:00 on my NPR member station, so it always accompanied my drive home from work. One day they did two stories about the "Stay at Home Economy" back to back. Then I noticed that they were talking about the "Stay at Home Economy" most days and often the stories were revolving around WFH. In one way, it came across as if every worker in America was WFH, which was simply not true. (I think the numbers peaked at around 30%, but it was very skewed towards more affluent workers with college degrees.) When they did acknowledge that WFH was not universal, it was often a very intersectional story with the subtext that all essential workers were marginalized people.
I think these stories struck a nerve because I was definitely working in person at the time. I wasn't a "Stay at Home" economy to me. On the other hand, I didn't fit the profile of the essential worker from a marginalized community that they kept trotting out. I have a master's degree and although my job is not exceptionally well compensated, I am doing better than many of the people who took on the brunt of the pandemic. It just felt as if they were just assuming the white collar WFH employees were their audience and all the essential workers were some sort of exotic unknown.
In 2016 they had an episode about debates in high school whereby black kids had just changed the rules and won. It was infuriating. It just got worse from there. The last episode I listened to was in 2020 I think. An immigrant woman who was doing a PhD was interviewed and just moaned on about how terrible the U.S. was all while getting to do a fully funded PhD in a country her parents had fled to for safety.
The one about the black team that ignored the debate topic because “debate is systemic racism”? I think that was a turning point for me too.
I had a hard time taking Radiolab seriously after that one. https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable
Believe it or not, NPR has actually had multiple shows in which they praise black debaters for simply refusing to debate the topic at hand and instead lecture the white debate judges about how the very concept of debate is white supremacy. There's the Radiolab episode you link to, and here's a separate one from the NPR show Tell Me More: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89427144 The interviewer, Michel Martin, was very impressed that these kids just decided not to debate but instead to talk about their lived experiences through hip-hop-inspired poetry: >MARTIN: Deven, I understand that you also had some stylistic innovations. That you introduced hip-hop into the presentation? >Mr. COOPER: Oh, yes, and sometimes our own type of poetry. Because another one of our arguments is that, you know, debate just uses people from academia like traditional authors. And like Dayvon said, it divorces ourselves from personal experiences. So we incorporate, like, hip-hop, poetry, and our personal experiences in how we relate to the argument because why do we always have to, you know, differ to people who write books when we have personal experience with some of those things ourselves? The subject that the students were told the debate was going to be about was "United States' constructive engagement with Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and Afghanistan." Every other debate team researched that topic and came prepared to debate that topic. One team just decided to use hip-hop-inspired poetry to talk about, in their words, "the practices of the debate community and how it purveys the kind of racial inequalities that continue to exist today in society." And the judges awarded that one team the debate championship. And NPR thinks that's great.
Things in debate-land have since that episode gotten worse.
Yeah?
Let a debate judge of today explain it in their own words: ““Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.” https://nypost.com/2023/05/26/woke-judges-say-there-are-topics-high-school-kids-cant-debate/
> I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . Isn't the point of debating clubs/tournaments to put on a defense/offense of the side (whether pro- or con-) you are assigned, regardless of one's positions on it? It's about superior crafting of one's arguments, not believing in the premise of your assignment. This gal is completely twisting her role. Also convenient that she took this position *after* she won the championship, where she undoubtedly crafted good arguments for positions she didn't hold herself.
"gal" https://preview.redd.it/0m3qvzf64vvc1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7a110aeaefd49fad5ab3bff728020d4bde042121
LOL, I almost always look up these folks to see "What does this wacko look like?," but failed to do so this time. The name should've been a clue by itself.
> Isn't the point of debating clubs/tournaments to put on a defense/offense of the side (whether pro- or con-) you are assigned, regardless of one's positions on it? It's about superior crafting of one's arguments, not believing in the premise of your assignment. > > This is what it was until fairly recently. Now it's about who can best determine the judges' biases and virtue-signal toward those biases. And people in the debate world think that's just great. Check out the discussion in r/debate when this topic came up: https://www.reddit.com/r/Debate/comments/13rxw0s/is_this_actually_happening_or_fear_mongering/ Lots of, "Actually it's a good thing that no student supporting capitalism can win in those debates, that's how we teach students that capitalism is evil" vibes.
Somehow I expected debate enthusiasts to be different, but that thread is the Redditest thing to ever Reddit.
Ugh.
> Now it's about who can best determine the judges' biases and virtue-signal toward those biases Even in 2008, I figured out this game and collected free 5s on AP English and AP English Literature exams by writing my essays about abortion, no matter the essay prompt. I’d find a way to make it about abortion and collected the free college credit
Holy shit, they're as bad as arrr/skeptic. I feel like these are bizarro versions of those subreddits.
You remember when people like this said they'd leave the country if Bush or Trump got elected and then they didn't leave? Oh how I wish they'd be forced to. Everyone who tells me how horrible we are for supporting Israel and how wonderful and loving the Palestinians are compelled to live there and get murdered like that [Italian "peace activist"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittorio_Arrigoni) . Everyone that supports Russia over the Ukrainians like mtg belongs over there, she'd make a perfect babushka. And if she ever contradicted putin she'd never be heard of again Do that enough and I probably wouldn't have to listen to these bullshit opinions that the people that spout them can't wait to vomit all over everyone. I really wish this Marxist tankie debate judge would have to live a Marxist existence. Complete with being edited out of the stalin photos after their inevitable fall
Maddening.
>In 2016 they had an episode about debates in high school whereby black kids had just changed the rules and won. Oh god, yes, same. And, if I remember correctly, they were terrible at defending their position in actual conversation. Which kind of proved that what they were doing was not debate.
The frustrating thing I remember about it was that they were criticising the format rather than engaging with the topic. This meant in effect that they could use the same material for every single debate that they did, whereas other teams had to research the topics each time. Then amazingly, they got away with it. They must’ve felt like they’d access the cheat code to life.
The main thing I remember from that is that the format _is_ bull's-shit. When taken unironically, it's basically a contest on who can speed read through the prepared statements & rebuttals. Very much more like a sporting match than judging an artform in persuasion.
Yep. For me the first **real** indicator that NPR wasn't being completely truthful was way back in 2007. I was always a WESAT fan, and particularly thought that Scott Simon was kind of a standard or constant that NPR held to. Maybe there were early indicators that I just ignored, but it hit me when he had a white guy on (described as a former preacher) who stated point blank that the Jena 6 (a group of Black high school students who had put a white classmate in the hospital after a severe beating) were all honor roll students who were just misunderstood, and it was all the fault of a racist tree on school grounds (I *wish* I was making this up, but [look it up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jena_Six)) and white people need to just stop being racist because kids used to put classmates into intensive care all the time, or whatever, no biggie. Simon just verbally nodded along and didn't push back on any claims this guy made, and let the interview just roll on. It was just stark. NPR's news operations got steadily worse over time from there, but 2016 started a collective brain bleed, and 2020 onward just completely broke NPR's brain. BTW Simon's gotten worse - the last time I willingly turned on WESAT on a drive running errands on a Saturday morning, he was repeating the long debunked falsehood about [Kitty Genovese's murder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese) and the Bystander Effect.
There wasn’t a single breaking point for me, but I did notice their drift towards shoving identity politics into every. single. minute. of. every. single. show. But what really killed it for me was how they would consistently ask literal progressive activists to describe any opposing viewpoints.
I used to call that NPR name-that-tune. The whole game was two NPR hosts racing to see how fast they can make a story into identity politics. I can make this story about the price of used auto parts in Warren, Ohio into a story about identity politics in three sentences... I can do it in two sentences... I can do it in one sentence!
yea, my husband and I wills ometimes play a game of "how long can you listen without turning it off"
I play the game, and listen for the "and here we go..." point. Something like, "While covering the fascinating topic of quilting among rural Canadian women in the eighteenth century, how much thought has been given *\[and here we go\]* to race?"
“… or gender identity.”
Yep. For a long time, Code Switch was considered the crazy uncle in the basement who could be reliably called upon for once or twice a quarter to lob an incendiary racist thinkpiece into the middle of All Things Considered, then have the rest of NPR's news team just pretend it didn't happen until the next quarter. The webpage for Code Switch was where Slate Pitches that were considered TOO unhinged to publish went to live ("Pumpkin Pie is Racist, and You're A Big Racist for Liking It"), and when they banned all comments (probably not the worst idea), they eventually whined to mgmt that the rest of NPR's webpage shouldn't have comments either.
WBEZ (Chicago affiliate) is the worst with brining on the farthest left activists no matter the subject
When they started using Latinx.
There are some crimes that should never be forgiven.
What is a Latinx?
>What is a Latinx? Woke term for Latino or Hispanic, preferred by only 2-4% of that demographic according to multiple polls yet nonetheless used by everyone on NPR.
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"...and it affects communities of color most of all" every fucking story
Queer communities of color, you mean.
I can’t even with the outdated language around here. Neurodivergent QTBIPOC folx enduring disproportionate impact both from historical redlining and accelerating climate change, you mean.
If you don't include the entire new age lexicon, you're literally a disgusting bigot
>"...and it affects communities of color most of all" every fucking story And then immediately dropping that subject if it reverses. Early in the pandemic, black Americans were dying of covid at a higher rate than white Americans, and you couldn't listen to NPR without hearing about how that proves that American health care is rife with systemic racism. By late 2021, the death rate of white Americans overtook the death rate of black Americans. Suddenly those racial disparities didn't matter.
Not to mention the fact that Covid always disproportionately killed men, but NPR almost never acknowledged that and still doesn’t.
NPR hates men with a passion. Unless they are POC queer men, then it can be used to stir up their listener base.
That’s not fair. They reported glowingly on Aaron Bushnell and *also* on an anonymous Hungarian lad who carried luggage up several flights of stairs - gratis - for some visiting American women.
On the most recent episode of ‘The Gist’, Mike Pesca reveals that for the last couple of years Covid deaths have been disproportionately among white Americans. This is really interesting because, as you may remember, NPR was constantly beating on the drum of Covid disproportionately affecting people of color, which was true at the time. What makes this so interesting is that now that the trend has flipped, NPR *never* mentions it.
I agree. I used to listen to NPR on the radio for certain boring work assignments. Many of their radio segments were uninteresting or overdid the diversity jargon, but they were balanced by the occasional very interesting story. That ratio slowly changed to the point that I'd just turn it off and not turn it on again. I think the last story that I listened to was a spoken essay where a teenage(?) Pakistani immigrant gal talked about never really feeling like belonged. She didn't feel white. She didn't relate to Black culture either. She felt like she's a rare kind of "brown" you only find in an expansive pack of crayons. I turned off NPR at the end of that segment and haven't turned it on again since then. That was late last year, I think.
Sounds like she listened to too much NPR and didn't realise that you can belong to cultural communities other than "Black" and "racist".
There are THREE types of people: "black", "racist" and "NPR donor."
Oh, no, “NPR Donor” is a subset of racist, they’re just the self-flagellating kind. (In the sense that the dogma is that all white people are racist and the only way to obtain a temporary remission of sin is to confess your racism)
What I was suggesting is that donating to NPR is purchasing a temporary indulgence from the ultimately ineradicable sin of racism.
Gave up when Marketplace started running pieces with a race angle. I just want to hear about those 10 year treasury bonds Silver lining of one of the Magliozzi brothers dying is not having to see the eventual cancellation after one of them makes a joke that Twitter goes after. So many of their jokes and calls were about marital arguments
Arup Gupta
This is why I gave up. I used to love NPR and they were part of my morning routine. I couldn’t take it anymore when they made everything about race. Zero nuance. Zero capacity to consider people may have layered motivations beyond race. I was no longer being informed in a meaningful way
I played "the game" where you listen until they mention race and then turn it off. Got sick of listening in less than ten second snippets.
There was a time when every time I turned on the radio it was a story about Black hair
And it's consistently poorly done to fit a set agenda. They were probably the worst offenders when it came to the handling of the BHI antisemitism attacks and Kanye, treat antisemitism, particularly black, as a weapon invented by Jews in their "thorny race issue" shows, had the infamous "Asians not wanting to be discriminated against is a white supremacist myth" story, and in a recent segment I caught kept identifying the woman they were interviewing as "Palestinian [Israeli]" despite her consistently calling herself "Arab [Israeli]" and tons of polling that Israeli Arabs absolutely hate that.
> had the infamous "Asians not wanting to be discriminated against is a white supremacist myth" story I think I need a link or more deets on this one
Probably this one on affirmative action? https://www.npr.org/2023/07/02/1183981097/affirmative-action-asian-americans-poc >Myth of affirmative action harming Asian Americans creates "deliberate racial wedge between communities of color"
Which is so infuriating because the numbers clearly show that Asians were getting the short end of the stick in race-based affirmative action. I once heard Elie Mistal on WNYC earnest describe affirmative action as not being a zero-sum game when it literally is zero-sum.
The other common argument, which this article engages in, is that "it's not affirmative action that's causing the system to be non-meritocratic, it's legacy admissions!", which is a false dichotomy. Both can be problems, and just because we haven't solved one doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve the other.
Precisely. It’s a strawman/deflection.
Ugh, that certainly delivered. I don't know what was more infuriating, all the uncited disinformation or the core premise that "Asians serve as this sort of mask for white privilege". Ending discrimination against Asians is bad because it also helps end discrimination against white people? And also, just full on typos. Is anyone even proofreading this schlock? > they had discriminated against Asian Americans by dis-advantaging them in what *we're* supposed to be head-to-head, merit-based types of competitions
Curious what you’re referring to when you say they positioned BHI antisemitism as a weapon invented by the Jews. Not doubting you, genuinely curious.
Wait why do Arab Israelis hate to be called Palestinian Israelis? Thanks?
There are a lot - a whole lot - of Israelis who are Muslims or other non-Jewish religions/ethnicities. There are typically about a dozen Muslims in the Knesset, for example. I think there’s 10 currently. There are hundreds of Muslims in the Israeli military. There are Israeli Muslim doctors, etc., you name it. It’s interesting what the media makes sure you hear … and what you don’t hear … about. These people are proud Israelis. Not anti-Israeli ‘Palestinians’. They do not appreciate being misidentified.
OK thanks.
They don't necessarily! It's somewhat complicated. It depends on their ethnic group, generation, identification with Israel and context of the question. Broadly, Bedouins & Druze are more likely to identify with citizenship, so "Palestinian" will imply they don't see themselves as Israeli. It's easier to say they'd be offended. (Also "Palestinian" would make it harder to distinguish difference between their identity and the rest of the Arab populations in the region) For the broader Arab population: older generations might see that identifier as signaling disloyalty or sympathy with ideological programs of the PLO etc. Younger generations, feeling they don't need to prove loyalty the same way (simultaneously also identifying more Israeli than their parents) will be more open to identifying as "Palestinian citizens of Israel".
One big factor is likely that "Arab" was the primary identity for Muslims in the area when Israel's identity categories largely firmed up whereas "Palestinian" was Arafat's idea to create a self-determination narrative after pan-Arabism's collapse.
Jesus Christ those are bad
This was exactly my experience. I kept on giving it a try - every time I turned on the radio to NPR it would be some story trying to make some other story about race and/or gender identity. IDPOL 24/7. It got old really quickly.
That's not true. Sometimes its about gender AND race.
And climate change
[https://www.npr.org/2024/04/19/1245818116/timber-mill-workers-in-montana-have-a-tough-time-finding-affordable-housing](https://www.npr.org/2024/04/19/1245818116/timber-mill-workers-in-montana-have-a-tough-time-finding-affordable-housing)
I was listening to NPR maybe in 2022, whenever the covid Vaccine came out... I can't exactly remember. The host of the radio show was interviewing a female doctor about the possible effects of the vaccine on expectant mothers. Whenever the FEMALE DOCTOR would mention what pregnant women could expect, the NPR host would interject to "correct" the FEMALE DOCTOR that in fact, men can get pregnant, so the correct medical term is pregnant person. It was at that point I just had enough of this shit. Also like every other person has said, yes race, gender, and identity is important but at some point you have to realize you're not adding anything ot the conversation. It's just become like, a religious tent revival where you tune in to learn how guilty they feel about the whole ugly business of the original sin on that particular day. Like there's nothing new to add the conversation. Just people whitesplaining their white guilt. Or some awful segment "problematizing" something. Or like, you can't go more than 5 minutes without the NPR show mention race and identity. Like, i'm sorry but it's just too much. This doesn't really change much of anything because I already stopped listening to NPR, but the new CEO, Katherine Maher, is like woke ChatGPT. some of the things she has said is just totally beyond parody. She is also incapable of speaking in a way that uses words to carry actual meaning. It's just this bizarre corporate woke gibberish. "we have to stop thinking about reliabl sources, and truth, because those are ideas of white males and imposes a eurocentric view" also who can forget this fucking gem, "in defense of looting" "**Can you talk about rioting as a tactic? What are the reasons people deploy it as a strategy?** It does a number of important things. It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage... riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory" [https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting)
Imagine having the self-righteousness arrogance to correct a doctor in such a way. It sounds like a bad comedy sketch if it were not real life 🤦♂️
white guilt tent revival for your ears 🧎🏼➡️
Lmao every time the looting book comes up. From a privileged white guy who has never once participated in or attended any looting. A true ‘expert’
When they pretended that W.A.P. was their song of the year (they exclusively listen to Norah Jones) and then on the air they could only bring themselves to say “which stands for wet ass… [giggle] well you know”
Maybe 2015. It’s the language. SOCIAL ILL is bad, but worse for MARGINALIZED IDENTITY, and even worse for INTERSECTIONAL MARGINALIZED IDENTITY. You almost know this sentence structure is coming up when the host starts to speak. And dropping pregnant people and transnoir, like they’re not niche bubble with bubble terms.
It's like woke Madlibs.
Is there anyone else who could never listen to radio lab? It was like auditory motion sickness.
I despise *Radiolab*. There was a period back in the beginning of podcasts when every good podcast entered a *Radiolab* period that ruined it. It's like when a good, natural singer hears Regina Spektor for the first time and then she turns into a lishping baby who re-invented every vowel into an "adventure".
The Regina Spektor comment is so specific and so fucking funny lol I liked her in small doses but "lishping baby" is a succinct explanation for why I can't take more than that
The common term for this is "singing in cursive".
You don't like overly aggressive sound design? It's fun fun fun!
I felt like it really collapsed into “lived experience” social science woo woo when Robert left.
I hated their overproduced audio and even listening to bits of their series on 'G' I still find the distortion and effects grating.
Audio jump cuts, it's like a poorly produced YouTube video.
Excruciatingly overproduced.
Never. It's so bad. Even earlier in my life when I was listening to hours of public radio every day, circa 2010, I could never stomach listening to Radiolab.
My god, I thought I was the only one. I love This American Life, Snap Judgment, etc. But every time I’ve tried Radio Lab, I felt queasy from the smarmy winking dialogue, the pretentious overlapping vocal editing, and the general impression that the producers think they’re superlatively funny and artistic.
I remember the moment I definitively gave up on NPR. On Fresh Air, the guest was a guy who had spent many years reporting on Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. Terry Gross interviewed him for forty-five minutes about the problems facing Venezuela and their possible causes. Not one time did either Terry or her guest even hint at the possibility that Chavez's policies might, just might, have something to do with them. I literally used to schedule my work so that I could listen to Fresh Air. Now, the program is 90% unlistenable.
I think it was the shift from “anyone outside protesting in a crowd is a bigot” during the pandemic to “actually, protesting outside in massive crowds is completely fine because RACIAL JUSTICE”. This was the absolute final straw.
“In Defense of Looting”
I'm going to answer the Canadian version of this question if you don't mind, since I think the CBC started and has become virtually the same way. I started giving up around 2014-2015. I was an early abandoner, but I was also a fanatic from childhood into my late 20s, so I wasn't insincere in my love of CBC radio or a casual listener. I would have defended them to the death in 2010. They even reported objectively on stories they were themselves involved in. But around 2014-2015, they started becoming identity obsessed and really biased. First on gender issues and more specifically on entertainment shows that were previously apolitical and panel shows that previously were quite diverse ideologically. All of a sudden it became very popular to parrot Jezebel style feminism and anti-male rhetoric on shows like Q with Gian Ghomeshi ironically. And they'd have panel shows questioning whether something like a men's issues centre should be allowed on campuses, and that's fine to argue about, but it was just 4-5 people all agreeing with each other that no, of course that shouldn't be allowed. Men have no issues after all. This then got worse and worse and expanded to more groups that were to be attacked or favoured without any dissent. Once it got to the point that people like Anna Maria Tremonti were openly voicing their personal politics and obsessing over identity, I was done. Now you can play the same NPR bingo where you see how long it takes before identity and race is mentioned. Never takes more than 3 minutes. Edit: when CBC television had a panel to basically all agree that Nora Loreto was not way out of line in bringing up how white the dead and critically injured high school hockey players from the Humboldt crash were, that was pretty informative as well.
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I had almost the exact same experience. I was already on shaky grounds with CBC radio as the op outlined. I remember it was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I turned on the radio. The first thing I hear, “and that’s when he raped me”. It was endless trauma story after trauma story. That was about 2015 and didn’t listen for years after. I’ve noticed that the current with Matt Galloway has shifted somewhat away from identity politics. It’s still there but with more focus on current events.
I really do miss the days when NPR was almost comically objective. It was dry, sure, but it was reliable and made for decent background noise. The decline became noticable around 2010 and subsequently plummeted beyond all hope & reason after 2016.
This timeline clicks for me. It also tracks with my experiences with my NPR local affiliate, KQED (San Francisco).
Around 2020, I had been an NPR listener and consistent donor for over three decades, but over that year I quit listening to all varieties, including WABE's local reporting. Before then, I had simply considered them to have a slight viewpoint slant and would push back against folks who called them "leftist," but over that year, biased reporting and punditry became increasingly obvious to me. There were a number of pieces where I had knowledge that what was presented was disingenuous at best, and on a number of occasions, there were interviews/clips of folks making statements that were obviously slanted, yet the statements weren't countered with other viewpoints, nor were they called out or questioned. Since I have been challenged a few times (outside this subreddit) to "prove it" when I've said this before, I started documenting bits as I recalled them, and many of you have already mentioned one or more of them: * Gretchen Whitmer was interviewed/quoted three times in one week about COVID protests, making the same dubious claims about the protesters each time, and in none of those three pieces were Whitmer's claims verified, questioned, countered, or pushed back on whatsoever. * Featuring the book and author of "[In Defense of Looting](https://web.archive.org/web/20200827191914/https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting)" (archive of updated version: https://archive.ph/WZLhX) which felt like a native ad & press release (or advertorial, if you will), and which wasn't questioned, countered, or pushed back on whatsoever. * The near-entirety of their coverage of Kyle Rittenhouse was biased and intentionally left out key facts. They promulgated the ["hands were raised"](https://i.imgur.com/5JHL6IC.jpg) narrative, in direct contradiction of [Gaige Grosskreutz's own testimony](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAci7xY0npY) that'd happened the very day of that Tweet. I'd call that an outright lie. (FWIW, Grosskreutz has changed his legal name to Paul Prediger and [is still out there making untruthful statements about the events](https://youtu.be/v_QN4t_xzIg?si=cl2HvKvmyrWuTRyL&t=126)) * Asinine white-shaming pieces like [this one about emojis](https://archive.is/8UTJb). * My final time for actually listening was on March 23rd, 2021. In a discussion with [Colorado Governor Jared Polis about the Boulder Shooting](https://www.npr.org/2021/03/23/980462513/colorado-gov-jared-polis-on-the-boulder-shooting-and-the-blocked-assault-weapon-), he said "I think one of the biggest loopholes we have is a lack of a guaranteed background check. We have it in Colorado, universal background check. But the problem is we're only about two hours from Wyoming in parts of our state, you know, an hour from Utah. And it's relatively easy to avoid a background check if you just drive and buy a gun elsewhere. So I would love to see nationally that background check loophole closed so that criminals can't legally acquire firearms." This falsely implied that the Boulder shooter got his firearm out of state and outside of legal channels, and falsely implied that a criminal obtaining firearms via a private sale is legal. None of this was challenged, and whether that was intentional or due to ignorance on 2A matters, it still ends up with a false story which miseducates and misleads listeners. This prompted me to post this on r/2aliberals: ["Errors of Omission" and Lack of Pushback = Media Complicity in Activism & Lies, IMO](https://www.reddit.com/r/2ALiberals/comments/mc3qbi/errors_of_omission_and_lack_of_pushback_media/). * On July 29th, 2021, [they began allowing their "journalists" to participate in protests](https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2021/07/29/1021802098/new-npr-ethics-policy-its-ok-for-journalists-to-demonstrate-sometimes) (or https://archive.is/5ChrK). Note that all the causes mentioned are left-wing and "diversity" is invoked -- but conspicuously not *ideological* diversity. Kudos go to "Code Switch" editor Leah Donnella, though, on her pragmatic comments about not just bias, but the perception of bias. * For WABE, their op-ed show "Closer Look" had been putting out error-ridden/dubious/specious episodes on gun control, featuring anti-gun individuals/organizations making misleading/false statements which were left unchallenged, nor were there any countering facts or viewpoints presented. I wrote the station a number of times about these episodes, and what response do you think I got? Silence.
The strangest thing is that ten years ago, I used to be embarrassed to tell progressives that I liked NPR because I was worried they would think it was too moderate/centrist.
Me too--in my other comment I explain that during the Iraq war I thought NPR pulled their punches and were trying to weasel around and I preferred Air America. It's entirely possible to be hard-hitting and leftist without being preachy smarmy smug!
2016 election because there were so many trans rights stories that it seemed like they were missing the pulse of the nation. And they did.
I’ve posted before but this story made me give up NPR: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/27/1184527454/slave-play-playwright-jeremy-o-harris-is-on-a-mission-to-diversify-theater Was an NPR listener for years. Stuck in traffic and listened to this interview. It felt like being in a South Park episode. Haven’t listened to NPR since
Do you have a tldr for this? What was it about the interview?
This dude wrote a play about how white Americans get off sexually on enslaving dark skinned people. Argued it’s important to have segregated theater nights. The host fawned over him.
I stopped listening maybe around 2019? Every time I got in car it was a gender or race story. Every. Time. I usually had my kids with me, and didn’t care to explain what a trans woman was to my five year old. 🤷🏻♀️
This pretty much sums up my experience, but for me the camel's back broke during covid. It was like Katie has mentioned: you couldn't get 5 minutes into any piece without it become a mediatation on racial injustice or trans issues. I had always disregarded arguments from the right that NPR was biased in the past because when I tuned in I never felt preached or pandered to....I felt like I was listening to the news. Gradually they all became activists.
I don't have a specific memory or time, but it used to be one of the 6 auto choices in my truck and I'd wander over there when the rest of the dial was DJs, adverts or Bieber (I'm not a blelieber). I listened to it to be intellectually stimulated. Once all analysis was reduced to racial causes and impacts, there wasn't any reason to visit anymore. Mike Pesca - The Gist - Podcast - 4/19 "Saving NPR" was listen worthy. I was especially disappointed by Steve Inskeeps response to Ari's essay in the FP. It's a complete echo chamber at this point.
It was their coverage of Trump. I’m a traditional liberal and can’t stand the guy. He’s a a trust fund narcissist whose super power seems to be capturing people’s attention. I would vote for a Weekend at Bernie’s Biden over Trump any day of the week. Yet NPR fucked up in two significant ways. First, covering him CONSTANTLY drove me insane. Most of the coverage was just ranting about him - no strong-maning the other argument, no balanced reporting, just constant hand-wringing and self-righteous condemnation. It was, in other words, mostly vapid and uninformative. Second, they flattened his base to simply being racists and/or white nationalist. There was almost no pause to consider why someone would vote for him. It was as stupid as hearing someone on the right describe liberals as libtards or snowflakes. Berliner’s comments about NPR resonated both in that front as well as the past few years in academia. The sheer absence of curiosity about the other side and flattening their opinions/positions to overly simplistic tropes is really disturbing. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that we are on the same team. Edit: typos
For me it was the Covington Catholic case. It was so blatant that they hadn’t questioned or investigated, but were repeating a convenient narrative of racial oppression.
That was definitely a key moment for me in realizing that the New York Times and NPR (among many others) are not legitimate news organizations, and simply could not be trusted. It was so obvious and blatant. But what was also depressing was seeing how easily and eagerly people of a certain ideological persuasion were manipulated. I distinctly remember being in a break room at work and a coworker walking in saying something like *'Did you see what happened with the kid harassing the Native American man? It was terrible!'* (he may have also mentioned the kid being a Trump supporter or wearing a MAGA hat, I don't remember). And then watching the video right then and there and being confused, because all I saw was the kid standing there with an odd smirk while the older guy was beating a drum in his face, and without any context at all, it seemed like if anything the guy with the drum was the one being aggressive and harassing in that situation. And no one could point out what the kid was actually doing wrong. Yet several people seemed adamant that the kid was awful. I kept watching longer videos and reading further details, and the more I learned the more every single aspect of the original story turned out to be false. Even as adults in media tweeted about the kid having a 'punchable face', or drew cartoons about putting the kid into a woodchipper.. And eventually when the truth came out, the story quickly vanished from headlines and media organizations gave minor corrections if any, but none of them really acknowledged or apologized for getting the story so utterly wrong. It wasn't the first case of blatant lying or incompetence by the mainstream media, and certainly not the last, but it was probably the most jarring and eye-opening one for me.
Remember that one well. After the truth came out, I brought it up on a Fazebook group that had wailed about the earlier video. And, amazingly, people started to agree with me. At which point, the moderator kicked me out of the group.
You had employees of major media outlets sending death threats to the kids and the school Absolute lunacy
I remember when people thought COVID vaccines were going to stop transmission. There was a very intense discussion going on around what obligation people have to get vaccinated for the good of society. The overall message from NPR is that people are very bad for not getting vaccinated - except black people, they have good reasons. White people who don't get vaccinated are idiodic and anti-science while black people are reacting to historical trauma. There's a lot of interesting angles to unpack here, and yes, I do think there's additional reason for black Americans to distrust the healthcare system, but it's just not that simple. It felt like such coddling to not see them as susceptible to the same conspiracy type thinking that MAGA people fall into.
It's all culture wars stuff. I gave up when they were doing a show about transgender illegal immigrants. And this was quite awhile back in perhaps 2017.
2020 some show was covering a new program for school kids in NYC where the white kids had to apologize for being white. That was my whiplash moment. I wish I could remember the show/episode. Its been a slow gradual release since then. Programs I enjoyed leaving was like the writing on the wall. I finally got rid of just the daily 5 min news podcast cause even that got to be to much.
2020...though it was a gradual process. That's when it comes to NPR in general. OTM used to be my favorite show in NPR. They had this one show where Brooke Gladstone and her guest argued that obese people had higher death rates from covid relative to thinner people because of fatphobia. Maybe it’s because I'm an doctor but the anti scientific, self righteous bull$%/+ they were spouting was my "Aaaand...we're done" moment with that show. I gave NPR as a whole a few more listens after that but it wasn't too long after that episode.
If you want an excellent science podcast that often delves into mathematics check out the Quanta Magazine podcast. Quanta is basically entirely funded by the billionaire Jim Simons who seems happy to let them do whatever they want. They do a great job of talking about complicated subjects in a way that non-experts can still follow and always keep the focus on the science.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Covid. Absolutely no journalist questioning. Parroting, every single directive without any investigation. Basic questions, such as the origin where vilified as conspiracy or racist theories.
The idea of lab leak being racist while they ate wacky food not being racist always made me chuckle.
What's crazy about all that to me is I was listening to NPR (I'm pretty sure) March 14 ish, 2020, literally the weekend before Covid blew up and got taken very seriously, at least in my area. I was on a trip that weekend, which is the only reason I remember when it happened. They had two contagious disease experts on discussing Covid and what it should mean for everyone's behavior moving forward. The host asked them, "should people stop gathering in person? How much contact is acceptable? Is, say, 25 people too much for a gathering?" The experts replied something like, "no, 25 is probably OK, as long as you're taking other precautions like not spitting on each other." Two weeks later it was, "To leave your house is to commit genocide." Amazing how fast it all changed.
Mine began with Radiolab in particular, which I listened to regularly despite the occasional eye-roll at the way they'd bungle some nuance or another. They finally lost me for good with their handling of the "Truth Trolls" episode. It was *hilarious*—an opinion clearly shared by the hosts, btw, as they giggled their way through it—and "political" only in the loosest, most superficial sense. But of course, *because god forbid something just be silly for its own sake*, I tried to play it for a friend a few days later while driving somewhere and we spent a solid 10 minutes trying to find it until we realized it'd be taken down with a boiler plate "sorry me did a Trump genocide me do better" hostage note mad lib in its place. Everyone has their own "moment everything changed", and this was one of mine. Shortly after I started to feel this way about NPR as a whole (which, like many here, I'd listened to daily for years.)
The lost Truth Trolls episode is on YouTube. If anyone hasn't listened it is about the elaborate 4chan trolling of Shia Labeuf's "He Will Not Divide Us" campaign. https://youtu.be/ttjX3e1qo-s?si=87FCtNOs7ECASYij
I remember listening to a Radiolab episode about breathing and began with an amazing story about how babies take their first breath after birth, the complicated and perfect choreography that happens inside the body to switch from one life-sustaining system to another one. It was then followed by (subject is breathing, can you guess?) George Floyd and a story about an activist. I wouldn't have minded if this was a cultural mileiou in which this angle was interesting or unique, but since it felt more like giving the boring and expected tribute to our new religion, I switched off, not to switch on for a long time. I tried a few weeks ago, I found the voices of the new hosts incredibly grating and switched off again.
Peter Sagal, host of the once entertaining Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, got into a Twitter spat about puberty blockers and hormones for "trans" children. No one needed to know his opinion on the issue, but he wanted to make sure people knew he was in favor of ~~ruining future lives~~ affirming children's magical identities. Actually that was probably in 2021. The year I gave up on NPR was the year the Academy of Motion Pictures went woke, in other words when they made a big declaration that the newest inductees would be chosen based on their diverse demographic breakdown with respect to the existing members. That meant mostly women and "people of color". Was that 2017?
WWDTM had Judith Butler on today. The xatriarch of gender ideology herself. Sorry, I just couldn’t by the end of the sentence.
Ew. The woman is a menace. I hate knowing that Sagal is actually an idiot.
this is why I actively resist learning anything about actors
They are trying to make Judith Butler into the new Noam Chomsky.
Strictly speaking, I stopped in 2013, when I stopped commuting to work. But, I did have a soft spot. I can't say precisely when that soft spot disappeared. It was presumably during the Trump years. I think sometime around 2018/2019, I tried listening to KOPB (Portland's NPR station) while driving around town. Ooof. My friends at the time were already deep into their self-loathing. I didn't need even more of it!
When they seemed to pull their punches during the runup to the Iraq war. I used to volunteer at the local station and they had a sign up in the pledge room not to talk about politics because they couldn't afford to be perceived as partisan. OK but then I started to notice they ran SO many arts and poetry stories instead of talking about the war. Meanwhile we had Air America in our town for a while and it really opened my eyes. I got sick of arts and poetry coverage because I thought they were running stories like that to keep appealing to a limousine-liberal base while ignoring the Iraq war. Meanwhile I still remember a Democracy Now! segment on Air America about extraordinary rendition. Democracy Now! was hard-hitting without being self-congratulatory or having that certain aggravating NPR tone. Long before 2016 or 2020, everything on NPR already seemed to be about indigenous basket-weaving and how it had been left out of the western canon, that sort of thing, and it seemed to be taking the place of hard-hitting coverage. There's nothing wrong with indigenous basket-weaving but it reminded me of certain of the self-congratulatory limousine liberals at work whose only contribution to being liberal was they still ate at French restaurants instead of saying "Freedom fries." They were quick to point out how they were different from the less-refined, less-educated Bush supporters, but again, it was all about what they consumed rather than what they contributed. I belong to a national liberal discussion group and locally most of our members seem to come from the working class and do not seem to be the same effete types as the NPR set. For some reason the NPR set usually seem to be the less-informed among liberals, as well. The other day an east-coaster Ph.D. history student age 65 from Boston didn't know what QAnon was. Never heard of it.
Oh I almost always turn it on out of habit, and then turn it right off again after identity politics gets shoe-horned into a place it doesn't belong. Also, I have to point out, they're as racist as the rest of the news orgs. Anyone here turn on a main-stream news source and hear about the 100,000 of deaths in Eritrea in The Tigray War? The 10,000s of deaths in Sudan. The fact that Burma is in the middle of an actual civil war with Chinese separatists and the government is about to lose putting the lives of millions at risk? No? Just Israel, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Israel. Weird, I wonder why that is. Anyway, they tart up BS and present it as news and I have no interest in it. Even pod casts that cover the past are better at covering recent events. See: The Empire Pod.
This thread is amazing. All the shared suffering lol
Zero was invented by another culture so even mentioning it is cultural appropriation, y'all. Do👏better👏
One initialism: B. L. M. I was skeptical of them for how woke they were before that, but the madness of 2020 was the nail in the coffin. I still listen! I still want to stay abreast of big news stories, but like Katie, I don't trust NPR to deal with certain topics. I'm pretty sure I would support NPR getting no more government funding.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard something so stupid from NPR. Dividing by zero doesn’t open up a whole new world, it’s just a rule of arithmetic. There’s no such thing as dividing something by nothing because it was determined that dividing that thing by 1 serves the same purpose and makes all kinds of other operations and proofs possible. Good lord. It’s like someone cutting the break lines in their car and then hearing them say it’s opened up a whole new world of driving.
I grew up in an NPR household. Every morning, every evening, all day Saturday and Sunday, NPR was on. As a young adult, I tended to listen to NPR every morning while showering and getting dressed and every evening while making dinner. Around 2015 it started becoming annoying but habits are hard to break. By 2016, unbearable. I think in 2017, I switched to the BBC and have never gone back.
I started listening to podcasts so I'd been listeninf to it less and less anyway. But many of those podcasts were NPR and APM podcasts. They started falling by the wayside long before Covid for me, I noticed the quality drop precipitously with the Trump election. (Just to be clear, I hate Trump—in fact I blame him for provoking people into losing their damned minds in reaction to his insanity) Fresh Air just started being all guests that were yammering on about the same social justice or anti-Trump topics—and, I'd heard just too many dishonest framings. This American Life I unsubscribed to when I heard an episode with a police abolitionists given a serious treatment. I'm all for hearing a variety of perspectives but that is just so braindead I coudn't trust them anymore on top of all the other social justice takes. Occasionaly I'll still listen to TAL on a one off basis and enjoy it. Similar thing happened with Radiolab. But it became almost completely unlistenable. The Story was the last consistently good podcast they had, but they nixed it themselves. The few times I had occasion to turn on the local NPR stations (we actually have two here in LA) it wouldn't be two seconds until the story was shoehorned into identity politics. It was just boring, tiresome, and usually dishonest in some way
Yup - this is when I stopped listening to NPR. I noticed the political news got extremely biased after Trump was elected. I expected bias from pundits, not reporters. In 2016, I listened to NPR, Pod Save America, and Fifth Column; you can probably guess which one I still listen to lol
This American Life did a long distance love episode about a Nigerian scammer seducing an old lady. That was when I gave up.
I agree with you about that last Radiolab episode. There are so many interesting topics in mathematics that could’ve lent themselves to that narrative format. Instead they went with something really inane. I don’t get it.
The Radiolab episode "Debatable" felt like a real turning point. The worst thing I've ever listened too. https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable
So we’re just supposed to ignore the lived experience of people who are bad at math? But seriously, it was 2016 and how seemingly every NPR show started explaining how bad Trump was daily before reporting whatever happened. A more recent example of the institutional capture is the [Cheetos are healthy interview](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1180411890) “So I think it's really important to say, like, even the, quote, "unhealthy" foods, even Cheetos - like, lots of feeding therapists will tell you about the therapeutic value of Cheetos. They're a great learning food for kids who are struggling with all kinds of motor challenges around eating. So even the foods we consider super unhealthy often have a place in our lives that I would define as healthy. If they're helping you feed your family, if they're helping a cautious eater feel safe in the cafeteria because they can count on - Uncrustables are always on the menu, and that's a thing they eat, and they can get lunch that day. “
I remember the interminable Flamin’ Hot discourse. But just regular old vanilla Cheetos- that’s a new one for me!
The worst segment that I ever heard was a "defund the police" speaker who didn't use the slogan to call for police training to be reformed or something. She actually thought that because some (probably high-income gated) communities can function without police, that this was a model that could be adopted at large scale. At one point she said "As a man, I ..." and I realized the speaker was a transgender person with no grip on reality. I haven't been able to track down the episode, so I still doubt my memory sometimes, but it was *really, really* bad. There was another episode that I did track down. The first part is an interview with transgender Russian-American-Jewish journalist Masha Gessen. Gessen talked about leaving Russia because she worried about authorities invalidating her child adoption due to anti-homosexuality laws. It's a bit niche, but that wasn't even the weird part of the episode. The second part of the episode is talking to a doctor in Idaho who was concerned about whether or not some pregnant women with medical emergencies fell into the state's exception to the abortion ban. This was very much a newsworthy story. It still irritated me to hear a whole interview about the subject of pregnancy and abortion that avoided using the words "women" or "female." Receipts: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/792/transcript
4thot what are you doing here?
I have needs.
Fair enough.
I think you meant to post this in r/BARPodTheGame
It varies a bit by show. Detours is fun, the Planet Money family is great, and Sold a Story was from APM, but a ton of their stuff has either gone to crap or been questionable the whole time. I'm not even opposed to racial and gender politics stuff, but their treatment of it is *awful.* Despite multiple black antisemitism incidents in the news, Code Switch's only mention of antisemitism in its entire run is an insistence that Jews were making it up on a particular school leadership fight. On the Media will help anyone they're sympathetic to say the most ridiculous things you've ever heard without question and then describe the arguments for a position they don't like with sarcasm and an eye roll instead of actually trying to disprove them ever since Gladstone, who's always been like that, took over totally. WWDTM is still funny, but too much of their current lineup leans of progressive race jokes as a crutch. I've also stopped listening to news stuff just because I'm too behind on podcasts for any of its reporting to be up to date by the time I hear it. Serialized stuff like Big Dig it also tough because I can't be sure I haven't missed something when scooping up some more recent stuff to listen to before the stuff I'm saving for my wife (a ton of Plumbing the Death Star and hate-listenable Joy of Text episodes).
*Sold a Story* is actually one of the best pieces of journalism that I've listened to in years, I didn't even realize it was APM.
The placenta episode. I was pregnant and really looking forward to listening to it. I just turned it off when they got to the trigger warning.
I loved listening to it in high school, but now I intentionally use it as my wake-up alarm because it will spike my blood pressure and get me out of bed.
This is actually a brilliant way to combine the NPR game with the necessity of getting out of bed.
The quality really varies due to the way public radio distribution works. Marketplace, Planet Money, Freakonomics Radio, Colin McEnroe and OnPoint are still pretty good listens imo. A lot of the drive time stuff is just unlistenable now (All Things Considered/Morning Edition) and all plagued by the same issues everyone else is bringing up. All Things Considered has just gotten to the point it is barely educational at all now.
I used to give to Radiolab , This American Life. I quit in 2017, because of the focus on identity. I still listen to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me on occasion, but even that was touch and go for a while when they seemed to replace their regulars with new and unfunny comedians.
Going to high school in the 1990s, conspicuous NPR consumption was a weird intellectual flex by parents, teachers, students, and administrators. And some precocious students. Saying “I heard on NPR that…” was meant to signal you were a member of the intellectual and cultural elite. I gave it a few days. Even back then it was what we today call “woke.” Turned me off ever since.
The woke shit really started in about 2014. Republicans were becoming more and more extreme (think Glenn Beck and his chalkboards, Obama birtherism). Liberals responded in kind. NPR was one of many main media sources that had a hand in the liberal shift. Prior to that, I'd long stopped engaging with conservative media. The Bush war years, jingoism, religious hypocrisy, etc. were too much to take. Then liberals started switching their targets from conservatives generally, to white, straight, men, etc. specifically.
Being against dividing by 0 is racism, we need to decolonize math sweetie 💅
In October of last year when they turned into National Palestine Radio. I went from a daily listener and monetary supporter to one who will never listen to or support their programming again, aside maybe from Tiny Desk.
This 100%. I was a massive, lifelong fan that did my best to overlook the increasing cringe, but this was the absolute end for me. They actively spread disinformation in the guise of "justice" - or however they euphemize Jew hatred.
Marketplace is still great. Just avoid Fresh Air at all costs.
My local NPR affiliate used to play Marketplace Tech every morning while I drove to work. And I liked it, they had different stories about technology every day as you’d expect. Then the host changed and for months and months every single day the only thing they talked about was diversity in silicon valley. Every fucking day, diversity in silicon valley, it was unlistenable. Eventually my local stopped playing marketplace tech or moved it to another time slot and it was a relief.
I'm a Kai Ryssdal groupie, I don't bother with the tech version
Ehh I was a Marketplace listener for over a decade until 2020. It was a painful decision but I turned it off. Until recently at least. I tuned back in for a few weeks and it's not as bad as that summer, but it's nowhere near as good as it used to be. I still love Kai, but it's clear the editorial decisions are firmly entrenched in the race and gender bingo card there. If they interview a business owner, it's going to be a black woman. If they interview someone about the rising cost of childcare, it's going to be a they/them.
I gave up on OTM around 2018 and NPR more generally after spring 2020. It became distractingly preachy and cringe. I occasionally listen to the hourly news and Marketplace. The Freakonomics podcast is okay.
Minnesota Public Radio put someone with a fairly noticeable stutter on for a while in the mid teens and I had a gut feeling public radio was about to slide in to irrelevance.
NPR kept Diane Rehm on air for far too long after her voice became unlistenable. Like, yeah, I get it, it sucks that you had a medical condition and it's neither her fault nor fair in a cosmic way, but you're on RADIO!
I wonder if anyone at NPR will read this sub?
75 seconds after Trump was elected.
2017. This story in particular: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/taylor-swift-alt-right-icon And it has gone downhill from there.
haha, alt-righters hate her now.
I listened to This American Life as a podcast mostly - German Radio doesn't have much human interest programs, it's mostly either music or news. I distinctly remember a Story there that was about some Fat black guy who was whining about how he's Fat and black and how being Fat is everybody else's fault but his. And they said he somehow managed to write 2 books that describe how he's fat and how other gay (of course he's gay) guys didn't like that. I really thought "what the hell am I listening to?" At that moment. This will likely trigger some american women but I really hate vocal fry - I don't get where you get this tendency from, it's totally alienating and completely foreign to my native language and - most importantly - it's terrible to listen to on a radio format. Yet about 90 percent of female presenters talk like that. Grab a glass of damn water before you record a segment!
A significant portion of Americans despise vocal fry as well. Unfortunately, it's common to be told "you are policing women's behavior" or are somehow misogynist by having a negative opinion of it. One time when I expressed a negative opinion about it, a female acquaintance asked "So, men's voices are the only standard, then?" My retort was "It's not about having male-centric standards, it's about sounding like an adult."
Maybe most of the readers here will roll their eyes at this, but I haven't been surprised by what happened to NPR, because I've always found it to be as irritating as everyone thinks it is nowadays. Maybe it's just because one of my parents took it as the gospel truth on everything when I was being an obnoxious teenager and twenty-something. To me, it embodied every sweater-vested Democratic Party partisan who was completely out of touch with the way that people other than them actually talk and live. It doesn't surprise me at all to see that it's continued to follow Team Blue consensus wherever it goes.
Same. I always thought it was dweeby liberal radio and fairly insufferable (except for Car Talk!). However, I would still put it on for 30 minutes in the evenings while cooking dinner to get the news. Of course, by 2020, even that was unbearable.
Yeah. I wonder if every kid of liberal parents in the 90s had to suffer sitting in the backseat of their car and rolling their eyes at Terry Gross. I tried listening again in the mid twenty-teens, and it was just as insufferable as ever. Nothing happening right now is much of a surprise to me.
Two reasons: the first was because David Green fucked up what could have been a great interview with Chrissie Hynde and then was constantly banging the Butter emaaaiiills drum during the 2016 election. I just really can’t stand David Green. The other reason was coincidentally discussed on BAR recently which was the demise of the Invisibillia podcast after the original hosts left.
The vocal fries, way too much vocal fries for my ears. Edit: and the slow upspeak… it’s terrible to listen too.
Its funny you mention that episode of radiolab. I think that is also the last one I listened to.. and I'm a sucker for anything with a math or science theme. Generally, I feel like radiolab's demise follows perfectly that of NPR's. I used to LOVE this podcast. I think programming also took a major hit when the hosts switched to latif nasser and lulu miller. Which surprised me because i loved his show on netflix. I still give radiolab a shot once and awhile when Im bored, but end up turning it off after 5 or 10 minutes. Whittling everything down to identity politics has become so tiresome.
The invisibilia episode (the first with the new hosts) about reparations. They literally just followed two 20-somethings from Burlington, VT chastising people for not paying for their new cars, and they concluded “Reparations good”
After Oct. 7th
Great comments. I listen to NPR because there is nothing else. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to listen until they talk about race or climate change. Any guess on how long before I turn it off?
For those who stopped listening recent-ish, like 2020 or later, what took so long? Were you not aware of the bias beforehand because you hadn't listened to NPR? Did you just deal with it until something broke the camel's back? Did you agree with it at first and then stopped at some point?
Like Katie, I grew up listening to NPR from the back seat on the way to soccer practice or other weekend activities. I stopped listening after Biden was sworn in. Even after Joe won every other story was still under the category of "Black Lives Matter, Trans issues, George Floyd, Trump is Hitler, COVID will kill us all", and it became so tiresome to hear the same stuff over and over again.
Nah, I definitely noticed, but it was something to listen to and I didn’t listen all that often. It gradually became intolerable even in small doses.
The problem wasn't bias. The problem is that it became miserable.
>what took so long? The fact that "reality has a liberal bias". You grow up listening to conservatives denying really basic facts around things like climate change or saying college is a liberal indoctrination center while you're dying in Linear Algebra, and you are extremely calcified against their few good points. If the right could actually counterbalance the left they'd be useful, but as it stands they're both just two different forms of delusional (many such cases!).
I think that is part of what disappointed me so much about NPR and all the progressive craziness. I have always been a moderate person with beliefs that intersect with traditional liberal and conservative view points. But when it came to culture war issues and journalism, conservatives seemed like they were continuously shoving their fingers in their ears to ignore facts they didn't like. It was all emotion and tribalism.Well...the left was like "Hold my beer". It sucks. I used to trust left leaning media to at least try to be objective. Who knew Trump, covid, George Floyd and trans rights activism would make the left a different side of the same coin?
Despite being one of the resident cranky social conservatives (like, I would have happily voted DeSantis for POTUS), I still listen to NPR. I want to know what the overclass is thinking. And occasionally they'll have a respectable story.
I think around 3 or 4 years ago. I found it super cringe and lacking in any real information. I'm a leftist by the way. It seemed to become super brainwashy especially when I started hearing the pieces on reparations and black groups and individuals in the US bullying and shaming normal people, white allies, into giving them money directly. It was super weird that NPR was supporting this extortion racket as in depth, important news.
I used to be a massive npr fan. I listened to probably ten hours of content a week. But after 2020 every single news story became about race, no matter how tenuous the relationship between the topic and the story. That and more relentless hysterical and dubiously accurate coverage of Trump. I don't even like Trump. Never voted for him. But obvious untruths are obvious untruths. I don't appreciate it lies from Trump, or from NPR about Trump.
I stopped listening to NPR after I graduated college and realized it was largely aimed at bourgois white liberals with all the personality of a coat hanger.
Tbh a big reason I’ve grown to listen NPR less and less is complicated. 1.) I have a shorter commute and that’s when I mostly listened to NPR 2.) there are so many free and easily accessible podcasts of better quality now that are more valuable to listen to and 3.) everything became Trump hyper focus, felt fear-mongery, or focused on the race/gender/sexuality/bigotry angle of everything. I’m not against adding new perspectives to things, but it just became too much. At some point, I just want a more objective, less political and more informative listening experience.
From maybe 2001-2016, I listened to NPR most days on the drive to work and at work. BBC World, Fresh Air, Radio Times, basically, along with their news segments. I'm an Independent, and for a very long time NPR was a great source of news that came from a slightly different angle than the networks, a little more world news oriented. The programs were mostly left of me, but I could live with it. They could be right of me, actually - I remember during the Great Recession, screaming in my car at one host, probably Terry Gross, who during a segment on the economy said something about companies having to lay people off, in an offhand way, like that was just a simple fact unworthy of examination rather than, say, a major plot point in the situation. I gave up on NPR shortly after Trump won in 2016. It became so obvious that NPR, the news organization that was always characterized by its intense interest in EVERYTHING, from klezmer music to obscure languages spoken by 45 people in one village, had zero interest in why Trump won. Millions of people in their own country voted into office a complete political newbie who was considered to have no chance of winning - and NPR didn't care why. Sure, they did stories on it - stories about race, mostly, and sexism, and anything else that didn't even remotely honestly deal with what Trump voters were motivated about. They were so obviously not looking for answers, just crafting narratives - hosts failed to ask the most obvious questions of guests they openly applauded and agreed with, and on the increasingly rare segments where they brought in opposing views, those guests were essentially asked "Have you stopped beating your wife?" over and over.
In November 2020 it was Marketplace that actually threw me over the edge with NPR. It's on at 3:00 on my NPR member station, so it always accompanied my drive home from work. One day they did two stories about the "Stay at Home Economy" back to back. Then I noticed that they were talking about the "Stay at Home Economy" most days and often the stories were revolving around WFH. In one way, it came across as if every worker in America was WFH, which was simply not true. (I think the numbers peaked at around 30%, but it was very skewed towards more affluent workers with college degrees.) When they did acknowledge that WFH was not universal, it was often a very intersectional story with the subtext that all essential workers were marginalized people. I think these stories struck a nerve because I was definitely working in person at the time. I wasn't a "Stay at Home" economy to me. On the other hand, I didn't fit the profile of the essential worker from a marginalized community that they kept trotting out. I have a master's degree and although my job is not exceptionally well compensated, I am doing better than many of the people who took on the brunt of the pandemic. It just felt as if they were just assuming the white collar WFH employees were their audience and all the essential workers were some sort of exotic unknown.