[spaceprison]

I grew up listening to NPR, it was always on. Car talk with my dad on the weekends, Prarie home, etc. It's been programed in every car I've owned since I was a teenager. My wife and I have listened together and donated for years. But starting around 2019ish it gotten harder and harder to stay engaged with the programming.

Almost every piece of reporting is now some kind of soft-outrage human-interest pseudo news. I want to listen but every other story is a tale of victim hood and oppression. It's just too much.

[wumeow]

Every time I tune in, I measure the time-to-race, which is the amount of time that passes before race becomes the main topic of discussion. Usually it’s less than 15 minutes.

[jiscariot]

20 year listener here. I now listen until they force identity politics in to the subject at hand, then change the channel. In my experience it's much less than 10m, but could be my market too.

[unethical_ban]

Similar!

I think some of the flagship programs talk nonstop about LGBT and minority issues, but this has been a thing for some years. I remember pre COVID driving to work chuckling at how every time I turned on the radio, it was a story on those topics.

There is a lot more going on in the world that can also be discussed.

I like Weekend edition and All Things Considered, and their hourly news updates.

Finally: there is a distinction between a faux "both sides" centrism and constant focus on identity. Having a liberal bias can exist while providing a wide range of coverage and de-emphasizing identity politics.

[LVB]

Sprinkle in climate change, and you'll be down to 5! I may be grading them too critically at this point, but in recent years, it feels like that XKCD about Wikipedia and how all roads lead to "Philosophy." Sometimes, I'll sit there wondering how the leap will be made from some benign story to these anchor topics, but they usually manage. I don't like that predictability at all.

[sobellian]

I once tuned in to NPR when they were talking about artificial intelligence, and they were talking about how the seminal figures in the field (e.g. McCarthy) were white men. I reflected that if I had to pick the least interesting possible topic on AI, it would probably be how white the AI researchers were in the 1950s.

I think this is the transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1161883646.

> The Dartmouth conference has become an origin myth... Of course, the origin myth served to empower these men to tell their own story. And it's a story full of erasure... We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationship that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserving reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking.

(later, same show):

> White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.

I mean, seriously?

[xracy]

Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race?

I think this is an under-discussed topic for how pervasive a problem it is in our country. And I think we do ourselves a disservice by trying to hide from it. The more we talk about it, the easier it is to pick up a discussion where we left off.

And my guess here is that the proportion of news about this relative to proportion of people affected by that news is way off.

[ordinaryradical]

A useful heuristic for measuring news quality is to ask yourself, “Am I more informed about what’s happening or about what people are angry about.”

Like you, I was a life-long listener and donater. I stopped both during the pandemic when I noticed NPR was playing the anger game, like every other outlet, for social media points.

[lainga]

Big context shift for me was realising roughly 2019 that Portal:Current events could efficiently replace 95% of my news scrolling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

[BeetleB]

> I grew up listening to NPR, it was always on. Car talk with my dad on the weekends, Prarie home, etc.

Note: These are not NPR shows. They're merely shows that your (and most) local NPR affiliates purchased for broadcasting.

If you think your local affiliate doesn't have enough of these types of shows, let them know! Many local affiliates have wide discretion on the programming.

More details: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178640915/npr-stations-and-pub...

[CoastalCoder]

> Note: These are not NPR shows. They're merely shows that your (and most) local NPR affiliates purchased for broadcasting.

That seems like a pretty fine distinction. If nothing else, NPR makes decisions about which externally produced shows to license. In the end, NPR deserves all the credit / responsibility for what it broadcasts.

It reminds me of the distinction NPR makes (used to make?) between "advertising" and "underwriting". Maybe the distinction was relevant for some legal / regulatory things. But it wasn't relevant for e.g. discussions about whether or not they were subject to "advertiser" pressure on their content.

[eurleif]

Car Talk was an NPR show.

[Modified3019]

Yep, many years ago NPR was quite eclectic and a great way to satisfy my curiosity on weekends as a kid or later at my factory job.

Incidentally, it now occurs to me that HN is basically my current replacement. Even if I have zero interest in a linked topic, I’ll often find a comment or discussion that’s enlightening and furthers my perspective of something in a meaningful and positive way.

[kulahan]

I treasure this site and the insightful comments I read. It’s one of the last places I’ve found on the internet where someone can bring up a controversial topic and get legitimate responses.

[aaronax]

Images of what I imagine to be their yearly performance goals rush through my head as soon as it turns to victim, race, oppression, etc.

"25% of stories uplifting Black voices" etc.

It just seems so forced.

[kenjackson]

Would “a focus on making sure we also give the conservative angle“ also seem forced?

[ripper1138]

American Fiction satirizes this aspect of modern media incredibly well.

[gosub100]

I wonder if it has parallels to the Salem Witch Hunt? If they spend x/2% of their time accusing others of being racist, they must expend x/2% "uplifting blacks" so they cannot be accused of it as well.

[trashface]

I don't listen anymore but still like to use text.npr.org for news, its pretty easy to scan the headlines and mentally filter out most of the social justice pieces (and there are a lot of them).

TBF I don't think NPR is really much different then most other mainstream lefty sources. I think axios is way worse than NPR (a lot of their "articles" are just vibes with really poor evidence, at least NPR still tries to do some traditional reporting).

[doublepg23]

You may like https://brutalist.report/ - very easy to filter just by changing the URL query too.

[bevekspldnw]

Same, and it’s pretty good. Not sure what the complaints are as I only use the text only version.

[SubiculumCode]

NPR has been downgraded, intellectually. They follow the rest of the news, discussing the same topics with the same framing as the rest of the media, following whatever hot topic there is at the moment, no matter how trivial. News and discussion is often spoon-fed in bite sized chunks that miss nuance and lack the willingness to go past the headlines to the real meat of the issue for fear of boring less sophisticated listeners. Its become boring, repetitive, and uninformative in the vast majority of the stories I hear on NPR One. It is a sad state of affairs.

[karpatic]

A lil game I play is to see how long until a pandering buzzword is said from the time I turn on the radio. Usually T < 3 seconds if not the very first word I hear.

[tick_tock_tick]

> Almost every piece of reporting is now some kind of soft-outrage human-interest pseudo news.

God yes I hate it! I can listen for 20 minute and not walk away with a single fact or learn anything new.

[resource_waste]

One time they said that fast food was cheaper than grocery food.

It was so wrong, that I never listened to NPR since.

[DoreenMichele]

I've been thinking about this recently and articles that make cost comparisons of that sort tend to compare only the cost of ingredients and assume you have the equipment to cook it, the skills to cook it and that your time is worth zero.

I don't know how to come up with good metrics for measuring that but I think currently all such articles are seriously bad because most don't even list their set of implicit assumptions concerning the costs that they are bothering to measure.

[dekhn]

That's factually correct- it is often cheaper to buy the equivalent of a hamburger, fries, and coke at McDonalds, Burger King, or other similar stores, for less than you can buy the ingredients at the supermarket. This is actually a "known thing" which has been factually verified.

I wouldn't stop listening over that.

[gosub100]

This comment sparked a really good debate - one which I am pretty sure I remember seeing on HN before. But what it makes me think of is seeing the parent issue: that accounting can be abused to spin the truth however you want. I really want to go in the meta direction with this and say I wish accounting shenanigans could be identified and labelled as fallacies or at least sneaky tools used for persuasion, just like people are becoming wise to established fallacies like strawman or relative privation.

Does it "cost more" based on calories/dollar, or weight of food, or cooked-meals-per-dollar? (I'm not asking for an answer, thats what everyone below your comment has been arguing about I assume). Are cigarettes "just as addictive" as heroin? Well, it depends on how you measure/define _____. I keep seeing effort wasted in arguments that all point back to the "well, it depends on how you measure it", but to me, the arguments never actually get anywhere and nobody seems to realize that they are playing with movable goalposts.

[alistairSH]

A Happy Meal is frequently sold for $3. YOu're saying to can buy the raw ingredients for a hamburger, fries, apple slices, and juice box for less?

[krapp]

> One time they said that fast food was cheaper than grocery food.

It often is. I can get a burger and fries at McDonalds for far less than the cost in ingredients to make it myself.

[kelipso]

Same, used to be my default radio and podcast listening, then a few years ago they had a major jump in their style/producers/journalists and just couldn't keep listening anymore.

[resource_waste]

Their podcasts went from non-fiction stories to advertisements for peoples random cultural book.

[listless]

I used to love listening to All Things Considered followed by Planet Money every day on my grueling commute home from work. It was my only companion. I haven't turned it on in years.

I mourn the loss. Living in a red area NPR was a much-needed breath of Fresh Air.

[jmbwell]

In fairness, all that soft-outrageous shit is actually happening.

But yes, turning off the news from time to time is, in general, good for your health.

[bradleyjg]

There are 8 billion people on the planet. You can fill 24/7 with whatever kinds of stories you wish—-sad, maddening, inspiring, funny, joyful, and outrageous too. It’s pure choice to pick the last one, it’s not in any way forced by reality.

[forgetfreeman]

Some years ago I had a deeply weird conversation with a conservative political operative in my area wherein (among other things) they advanced the claim that liberals had demonstrably and totally won the culture wars, and then proceeded to go totally off the rails. I balked at the notion at the time but as the years have gone by I've come to the sullen realization that they had a point.

[bryanlarsen]

The indicator on NPR is one of my favorite podcasts, and doesn't play the outrage games.

[photonthug]

And Berliner apparently helped to start planet money, which indicator is a spin off of. That’s almost the sum total of real news that’s still available at npr :(

[pyuser583]

I live in a very liberal part of America.

Wokeness is not popular with anybody.

20% of America is outraged, 60% is willing to give woke media a try as long is it’s entertaining and not too preachy, 15% gives extra points for “representation” but still wants a good story, and 5% thinks it doesn’t go far enough.

Part of this is generational.

In the workplace, I suspect “representation” is a proxy for age discrimination.

I’ve seen too many old white men pushed aside for much, much, much younger minorities.

Seems like thats happening at NPR.

[chiefalchemist]

If you think NPR has fallen - and it has - try following The Economist on Instagram. Talk about a once reputable media outlet losing it's way. Nearly every post feels like they fell asleep next to a BuzzFeed pod.

[sandspar]

The Economist has a firewall between its magazine and its social media team. The magazine is still good.

[Tokkemon]

Stick with Consider This and the NPR News. NPR Politics Podcast is great too. I tend to avoid the opinion stuff since, yes, it's definitely got an overly-lefty outrage-bait angle.

[DarmokJalad1701]

I used to listen to NPR quite a bit after moving to the US, mostly during my commutes. Over the last few years, it has gotten worse and worse. The point where I stopped listening to it and switched to podcasts was when they had someone claiming that office breakrooms were "basically white spaces" where non-white people do not belong (and calling for remote work as the alternative). And the interviewer essentially took them at face value.

Have these people not heard of office breakrooms existing outside of white-majority countries? I would bet that having food together in a communal setting is a team-building and fun activity throughout the world regardless of skin-color. Most likely, this was some young, introverted person who was uncomfortable being in a group and wanted to somehow bring in race into that to justify their viewpoint.

As someone who isn't white, this sort of coddling non-sense is simply infuriating. I do not want to be judged based on what I look like, and platforming/pushing these sort of views does exactly that.

They have become the very caricature of what right-wing news makes out liberals to be.

[unholythree]

I recall hearing an NPR piece in the past couple months that was discussing how best to handle reparations for slavery. The entire piece clearly came from the conceit that reparations would be good and desirable. All of the expert interviewees supported and spoke favorably of reparations with no counterpoints, the few opponents were extemporaneous "man on the street" interviews. The end effect was an one sided piece almost contemptuously disregarding any opposition. Certainly not a convincing message to the 68% of US adults (including 49% of Democrats) that don't support reparations.

More than the staking a clear political position on the matter, it was the presumption and condescension that was the most off-putting. Far too often their pieces have adopted that tone. With the "right-thinking" guest or guests interviewed by the "right-thinking" host about a issue clearly the listener would agree with too... if they are "right-thinking."

[elevatedastalt]

You've always had narcissistic people make everything about themselves or seeing victimhood everywhere.

However what's new is that as long as claims being made are of a certain type, they are not only accepted uncritically, but in fact trying to challenge them can be dangerous for your employment status. So essentially no one can call BS on their ideas because no dissent on these topics is allowed.

[nsagent]

I similarly stopped listening to NPR around 2018, because they really leaned into news commentary with a very one-sided bias. I could no longer stand the preachiness of their newer programming, and it seemed that the more established folks like Robert Siegel and Steve Inskeep got roped into toeing the line as well. I think the Trump era really broke a lot of news sources I previously relied on.

[johndhi]

Car Talk with my dad was so fun

[WalterSear]

Sure. It's a real problen. But that was a verging-on-cover-story part of Berliner's criticism, which was just another crypto-fascist diatribe, of the kind that are currently so depressingly ubiquitious.

[voidwtf]

It's hard to say how much of that is manufactured outrage and how much is an unsettling new reality. It may not be your reality, but for an increasing number of people quality of life is deteriorating. Not saying you're wrong, just saying that we shouldn't completely tune out everything that doesn't fit our own reality.

[AnimalMuppet]

> It's hard to say how much of that is manufactured outrage and how much is an unsettling new reality.

There's plenty of unsettling new reality, I'll give you that. And it should be reported on, even if it makes people uncomfortable.

But how is it reported on? There's a difference between "here's the economic reality of 20% of of the population" and "you should be outraged about the economy". And if you listen in order to analyze the way the story is told rather than to hear what the story is about, you can tell which is which fairly reliably.

Much of the left has gone from "we're going to report the stories that happen" to "we're going to report the things we think need to be reported, like poverty" (which is all right, as long as they also report the news), to "we're going to report things so as to make you become politically active on the side that we think you should". That last step is highly problematic. For one thing, once you're that blatantly a cheerleader for one side, can I trust that you're telling the truth about what you're reporting on, or are you distorting it out of all resemblance to reality?

[pkulak]

Yeah. There are sooo many good podcasts (so much so that I am still a “sustaining member” of OPB because of all the value they bring me), but if you turn it on in the car at a random time, you’re going to die of boredom.

[xracy]

Is this discomfort with the state of the world? Cause I think the goal is that you feel inclined towards action on that. The state of the world isn't... all good. We've got some serious issues right now. And it seems like a lot of people are complaining that they have to hear about that (I will point out almost no other news station is doing this, so also as a proportion of news this seems kinda reasonable) rather than that others are experiencing the bad things.

It's funny to me because their used to be a conservative take that liberals needed safe spaces to talk about all of this stuff, and when it's actually in the media people don't want to grapple with it. I would bet that the most vocal proponents of changing this dialogue lean conservative as well.

[thinkingemote]

It's true that there's big problems and it's true that things should change.

The issue is that the solution that is proposed to the problem is to have more attention to the problem. This result in a virtuous circle where things have to address the problem more and more. It does help address the problem though, it's not falling on deaf ears and it is educational.

This then becomes a kind of noise drowning out other signals. It's the signals that listeners want not the noise.

Is anything actually improved, do people benefit? I would say yes!!

But it's a move away from signal and information towards problem education and political or social messaging.

The virtuous circle can get reinforced by objections to the changes. Objections or "discomfort" are often proof that more changes need to be made. The signal is further reduced and those in change become blind in their virtue. Metrics in how good they are doing are perceived in terms of the messages that are put out not in quality productions. A kind of seige mentality makes it hard to determine the difference between criticism of the content or format and political objections of the added messaging to the content. Both positions become opposition and encourage more of the same.

To me, the change to add more unbiased views or thoughts from the other side seem artificial and miss the actual change in content. It makes things more political and less about life.

[BeetleB]

> Is this discomfort with the state of the world?

There are two separate critiques going on:

1. There is a lot of bias in the news coverage.

2. There is a lot more to a radio station than covering the state of the world (news, social issues, etc). There's stuff like entertainment, humor, etc.

A lot of people are arguing about 2 above.

There's always malnutrition somewhere in the world (and yes, in the US). But we don't criticize the existence of movie theaters.

[tick_tock_tick]

> The state of the world isn't... all good

That's true it's fucking amazing! It's so much better then any point in history it's hard to image how far we've come.

[goatlover]

I don't think it's the media's place to make us feel inclined to take action. What action, exactly? Progressive, conservative, green, techno-optimist, religious, etc? It's their job to report on whatever is news-worthy, and it's up to viewers what they want to do with that information. I don't agree with pushing agendas disguised as news. That used to be mainly a Fox News and AM-talk radio thing. It's dissapointing to see the rest of media follow suit.