I love public media and have worked in the public media industry, and what I think what we really need is PBS for conservatives.
Can you name a _single_ conservative PBS/NPR host or program? Was there a _single_ time in the past 5 years they gave any legitimate consideration to the viewpoints that 50% of the country hold, or acknowledged the material conflict underlying their ideology?
It's no wonder that a) Republicans are constantly pushing to cut public media funding and, more worryingly, b) that conservative-minded people end up going down the Alex Jones/QAnon/Alt-Right/Whatever rabbit hole, due to the total void of any rational discussion or intelligent and honest media leadership for the conservative and working classes.
NPR already airs opposing viewpoints regularly. I've heard them interview Republican senators and conservative commentators many times this year right alongside with people on the other side of the aisle.
If you mean NPR needs to carve out some time dedicated to a particular political view, then perhaps your perception of them is the rest of the time they present an opposite view? In these highly politicized times perhaps it seems that way since people have trouble agreeing on things that are widely accepted and based on science, as one example. So any news that presents that as fact will naturally be dismissed as biased by anyone who disagrees. Personally I don't think it's really incumbent upon NPR to create more air time for that kind of disagreement; they should stick with the facts. People who disagree with fact-based journalism already have many other outlets and are (IHMO) disinclined to seek out anything that will challenge their views.
Even so I daresay if someone is on a journey to find and listen to opposing viewpoints, the person who finds NPR to be a bastion of liberal values would be far more challenged by listening to Pacifica. If someone wants to really hear viewpoints left of center, they should try listening to Democracy Now for a week.
Maybe some of this is regional. I listen to WNYC from New York and WHYY from Philadelphia, maybe the coverage is different in other regions.
To give some examples, Bob Garfield and Brian Lehrer were openly hostile towards Trump in such a way to disparage all of the people who voted for him, which was half of the country. Now, this isn't actually the thing I have a problem with, and I think I actually prefer it when hosts wear their hearts on their sleeves. But, you could never find the level of distain of Obama for his drone strikes, surveillance and massive wealth transfers to the rich that you could find of Trump for his racist demeanor, xenophobic immigration policies and massive wealth transfers to the rich.
A lot of my opinion is from working on the inside. Public media in the US, at least in the urban areas where I worked, is staffed _exclusively_ by Warren-type Democrats. They really believe that there is a correct view of the world, and that it is to be socially liberal and economically conservative - manifest through complex policy. Any other opinions - notably Bernie-ism or Trump-ism, are populist and to be dismissed as unserious.
I am admittedly a big fan of PBS, so maybe I'm blind to it, but I don't see the bias. I can't name a single conservative show, I suppose, but I can't name a single liberal show either. News and televisions don't have to have a political slant. I think we are all (in the US) too accustomed to opinionated news programming and are left searching for the bias when presented with plain information.
PBS presents a lot of history and art. I wouldn't consider either of these politically charged in their presentation. Again, maybe I'm just missing it, but I watch a lot of PBS programming.
I disagree and this is a condescending response. I know what it means to be objective. Hell, I probably lean right of the median on HN. I’m just presenting the observations of someone who could probably be called radically centrist I guess. I genuinely view PBS as the middle ground between Fox News and MSNBC.
>I can't name a single conservative show, I suppose,
Firing Line[0]
>but I can't name a single liberal show either.
Frontline[1]
The thing is that William F. Buckley, Jr. (who originated Firing Line), were he alive today, would be demonized as a RINO and closet socialist by those who claim the mantle of "conservative" today.
Mostly because those who claim to be "conservative" aren't. Rather, many (not all) are radical reactionaries and not at all conservative.
Feel free to disagree, but if you look at the policies and priorities of such conservatives as Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes, the only policy priorities that have been retained by those who currently claim to be conservative are support for big business, hatred of anything non-white, and bible-thumping morons.
Everything else (small government, individual rights/liberty, equal opportunity, etc.) have fallen by the wayside.
Feel free to disagree. Or don't and take the easy way out. But there's a reasonable and reasoned discussion to be had in that space. If you don't participate in that, the loss is yours.
Thanks for the references. The latter bit of your response rings true to my experience. I grew up in a conservative rural area, and the mainstream conservative ideas from then are unrecognizable in today’s version of conservatism.
Because conservative commentators have no interest in being part of PBS when their private sector competitors are far more lucrative and have 0 standards for accuracy or decency (which these days sadly fits their programing just fine).
Their history shows tend to only be political if you perceive different viewpoints as political slant. The hosts undoubtedly are liberal elites, but I think they strive for objectivity more than most media.
I don't think this comment really needs to be addressed, but since you're making my point for me: public media doesn't need to chase ratings, and thus doesn't need to chase outrage, allowing for more nuanced and in-depth reporting.
If you don't chase ratings, you're not chasing viewers, and you're not having much impact on discourse. The current toxic sludge of cable news sprouted up decades after public broadcasting had been around.
Why is having an impact on discourse important? It should not be the job of any media to alter arguments, viewpoints etc... it's job is to provide the facts for people to make their own opinions. The fact that we think media should be able to shape opinion is really the main problem here. Cable news chases profits and profits come from viewership which gets us into that negative feedback loop. Take away money and a lot of problems disappear.
Why bother to exist at all (besides profiting) if nobody is changing their actions based on the reporting or programming you provide?
It's a fantasy that there was ever objective reporting, or that NPR/PBS was ever capable of producing it. All news media is propaganda and always has been. Even "liberal" outlets like NPR News spout extremely right wing, reactionary, pro-capital viewpoints while they pretend to dig deep for objective truth.
Smart political actors and media types have woken up to the fact that there isn't much value in pretending to be "fair and balanced" anymore. This is the reason why middle class people who think of themselves as centrists (meaning that they had accepted the liberal consensus which dominated popular media for decades) have begun decrying "polarization."
Moving beyond news content though, PBS also makes entertainment content. What does it mean to have a factual/objective version of /Arthur/? Do we need political officers in PBS Kids storyboarding sessions to make sure left wing concepts like sharing or feminism aren't accidentally introduced to the population?
It would be equally as foolish to say the logical conclusion of liberalism is Stalinism. The underlying fallacy is the idea that politics has any conclusions at all.
> The underlying fallacy is the idea that politics has any conclusions at all.
I'd say that there are certain flavors of political thought that have an unfolding utopia built into them. With enough of XXXism, an optimal state is reached.
It's an exercise for the reader to determine which sorts of philosophy of human organization have that notion built-in.
Either your vagueness is intended to make the point that "both sides are just as bad as each other" (which is unhelpful because there are more than two sides to politics), or you're dogwhistling that it's "the other side" that has the terrible philosophy.
Let me therefore try to clear up that ambiguity by offering a solution to your exercise: The most dangerous political philosophy is ethno-nationalism.
>you're dogwhistling that it's "the other side" that has the terrible philosophy.
I'm simply making the point that some political systems imply moving towards an ideal goal, others do not.
It isn't like monarchies (by far the most common setup) are moving towards some ideal beyond stability. Communism most certainly was viewed as a work in progress.
(side note: I'm sick of the term 'dog whistling'. That term itself implies a belief system.)
I would say that monarchism is similar to democracy in terms of its lack of an ideal goal.
As for economic systems, I suppose you could say that the philosophy of communism is more future-looking than capitalism, but that is largely due to the fact that capitalism has already been implemented whereas communism has arguably never been fully implemented.
For comparison, suppose there are people out there who think that society was organised best under feudalism. They would support a move towards reinstituting that system, presumably in stages, so they would be equally "utopian" as the communists except they would have the benefit of an existence proof that their ideal society was achievable and sustainable (at least given certain initial conditions).
Fascism has also been tried before, and there are probably more people who support its return in some form than support the return of the feudal system. I can imagine its supporters suggesting that their policies would lead their nation towards an idealised future too, so I don't think that utopian thinking is common across the political spectrum and becomes more pronounced the further from the status quo its adherents want to take society.
(Side note: I'm also not a fan of the term "dog whistling", as I find it slightly ambiguous. For what it's worth, what I meant by it is that you were attempting to signal to like-minded people what it was you were really trying to say, without "saying the quiet part out loud". There might be good reasons for that on a forum like this, but I decided that the topic of your comment was potentially too important to not be subject to scrutiny).
Yup, this article is pretty hilarious and is just another example of how mainstream media continues to stick their noses up at any consideration of alternative viewpoints. PBS has largely followed the herd and has become yet another liberal lifestyle outlet that caters only to their liberal audience. How about we fix that first before talking about something else?
PBS is consistently rated as a reliable and unbiased source of information. You think it's a "liberal lifestyle outlet", but what evidence do you have to support this claim? What is your unbiased alternative?
Studies that looked at bias in the media found PBS to be the most centrist of the major news organizations. People on the extremes of the political spectrum see PBS as biased against them, as they would any centrist organization.
Wow, this chart perfectly illustrates my original point. There is a great gaping hole in the upper right of that graph - there is no high-quality, right-skewed news, even though this is where I would assume just over half of the bulk of Americans would actually place their political beliefs. There's nothing of significance in between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, after which there is a steep cliff towards Breitbart and all of the horrors that come after it.
Many possibilities for why this is apparently the case though. Could be a miss-match in who people identity/affiliate themselves with and where they actually land. Lot of talk of the "window" having moved in the passed decade. Possible middle-left bias ate up a bunch of those who would have been middle-right? A lot of moderate right pundits have landed at left biased orgs over the past years. Would be interesting to see what this chart would have looked like 15-20 years ago.
It could be that media corporations are in cities, which have become strongly leftist in the last few decades. The rural areas simply haven't had the density of human organization to create a reliable corporate media.
Another theory is that reliable corporate media is stocked with university graduates, and universities have also gone left.
> Would be interesting to see what this chart would have looked like 15-20 years ago.
Indeed, I think most of these were centrist news organizations 15 years ago!
What I find strange is that the only media outlets that actually cover local rural topics in detail is my local NPR station.
Often they're lumped together as "yet another liberal" with PBS .... but they're more and more often the only ones covering those ares / giving voice to folks out there media wise.
I love public media and have worked in the public media industry, and what I think what we really need is PBS for conservatives.
Can you name a _single_ conservative PBS/NPR host or program? Was there a _single_ time in the past 5 years they gave any legitimate consideration to the viewpoints that 50% of the country hold, or acknowledged the material conflict underlying their ideology?
It's no wonder that a) Republicans are constantly pushing to cut public media funding and, more worryingly, b) that conservative-minded people end up going down the Alex Jones/QAnon/Alt-Right/Whatever rabbit hole, due to the total void of any rational discussion or intelligent and honest media leadership for the conservative and working classes.