This comment thread is almost entirely people who think NPR of today is worse than it used to be (with some exceptions for local news).
It makes me wonder if NPR news leadership thinks they are doing a good job? Is there an audience out there that think NPR is doing a good job in absolute terms? It's easy to say they are better than Newsmax or some other outlet, but that's not the same as saying NPR is good all by itself.
I don't think there's much audience that thinks they're doing a good job, but there are very different reasons for those opinions.
On one hand, you have the majority of bewildered moderates who are increasingly annoyed about getting a lecture about their "privilege" every time they want to read the news, and seeing everything reduced to a small set of talking points in a very forced and artificial manner.
On the other hand, you have genuine progressives who very much buy into the whole privilege stuff etc, but at the same time they are broadly anti-establishment, and - quite rightly - see traditional news media, including NPR, as establishment. To that audience, it just all feels like a very crude and meaningless attempt to pander to them to get their attention (and money). If they want news told from an authentic perspective that aligns with theirs, they are much more likely to get it from podcasts, blogs etc.
The first thought that came to my mind was the Google Gemini debacle, as a useful analogy. How did Google release it in the state it was in? How did they not notice the problems? How did leadership think it was a good idea? I think you'd find a lot of similar answers in both cases.
I agree with most of the criticisms regarding NPR's decline, but totally disagree with the idea that it's at all comparable to the Gemini situation. NPR is deliberately pushing an editorial agenda, not a product that they immediately took offline because it was performing poorly.
Every diffusion image model produces all kinds of arbitrarily bizarre behavior, this particular permutation just happened to catch fire in the media because it's culture war tinder. The idea that Google leaders thought it was "a good idea" to generate black Nazis and native American founding fathers is a caricature.
It makes me wonder if NPR news leadership thinks they are doing a good job? Is there an audience out there that think NPR is doing a good job in absolute terms?
Yes and yes. As rags have become increasingly partisan, the only ones that are sticking around and engaging/paying are those that have also become increasingly partisan. And they think the rag is doing a swell job so the execs only have their echo chamber of ardent supporters to get feedback from.
It seems to be a mix of donor capture and lack of relevance at the national level.
Local NPR affiliates produce locally relevant content, but national level NPR has no actual differentiator. The forces them to be much more heavily dependent on their donors (who have clearly chosen a specific side) and also means they aren't top of the list to get breaking news (no Congress member is going to spend 1-2 hours interviewing at NPR when they can have multiple interviews with nationally prominent news sources).
This seems to have caused a vicious cycle for NPR as they need to keep their donors and listeners happy, but at the expense of the long term feasibility of the product.
Furthermore, podcasts are a major portion of national NPR's "bundle", and the podcasting industry is extremely democratized/commodified now.
> and also means they aren't top of the list to get breaking news (no Congress member is going to spend 1-2 hours interviewing at NPR when they can have multiple interviews with nationally prominent news sources).
This has been a problem with NPR forever though, at least since the late '90s. Donor capture and the podcast market are probably bigger reasons.
I think it's institutional capture by a group, coastal liberal elite progressive woke, whatever you want to call them, and they have their own subculture and viewpoint that are disconnected from the majority of Americans. You have similar things happening in a lot of other news agencies too.
My two cents is that Berliner was just dead wrong and his opinion based on some really spurious reasoning. He pretty badly mischaracterized several key stories and then cherry-picked some bits and pieces of articles where guests said things he didn't like.
Saying the Mueller report disproved collusion is disingenuous. Collusion isn't a legal term and and the Mueller report absolutely enumerated communication and coordination between the campaign and Russian agents. I don't think NPR ran anything untrue before during or after the Mueller investigation. They certainly never asserted conclusions without evidence. It was more a fantasy of the right that the MSM was overly credulous of anything.
Hunter Biden's laptop may have been mostly a real thing but it was not and still is not newsworthy. There have been zero revelations from it that weren't public record.
And lab leak also remains a dubious topic. For one, there is no solid proof one way or another. And two I heard more than leak advocate given air time to espouse their theory and answer critical questions.
Honestly my absolute bar none go-to source for dissecting hot button issues and their coverage is On the Media. Technically it's WNYC but I think it's carried in a lot of markets.
This comment thread is mostly populated by people who are more like Uri Berliner than they are like Katherine Maher, so isn't surprising that they agree with Berliner about the issues he brought up.
It makes me wonder if NPR news leadership thinks they are doing a good job? Is there an audience out there that think NPR is doing a good job in absolute terms? It's easy to say they are better than Newsmax or some other outlet, but that's not the same as saying NPR is good all by itself.