There's no journalism outfit that can beat back this criticism from someone, all things not being aligned with every ideology. Perfect neutrality doesn't exist, and very arguably isn't desirable anyway.
NPR hasn't even been close to neutral for years. I say that as someone who was a regular listener from high school until 2020, and nominally on their side of the political spectrum.
I feel like things really started to turn south after 2016 -- lots and lots of content about feelings and opinions presented during "news" times. But only for a super-narrow class of people, and never called out as opinion content. They did and do regularly mix editorial content with "news", and the line between each has been getting fuzzier with each passing year.
To be fair, the entire news media went crazy after 2016, but NPR was clearly on the left before, and went hard left after that. It's essentially propaganda now.
What's your local NPR affiliate? KQED is all identity politics, all the time. It's been over 10 years since I was in the DC area, but WAMU always seemed to have better political shows (even though some of them touched directly upon, e.g., race long before KQED went down that road), and from what I can tell their lineup is still far better than KQED.
I still regularly listen to WAMU's The Big Broadcast; they may be more selective about the classic episodes they play, but I wouldn't know as they haven't turned it into a virtue signaling exercise. Ditto for Hot Jazz Saturday Night.
Some of the national, NPR-produced shows definitely recite identitarian narratives more often than they used to, but compared to KQED-produced content it's still a massive difference in tone and content.
WNYC listener here. They've gone hard identity politics over the past decade, definitely got way worse in 2016.
Their reporting on so many topics has been biased bordering on being intentionally disingenuous so for a long time now.
I do occasionally listen however because I try to expose myself to a lot of points of view, especially when I know I might not agree with them. I was listening to Brian Lerher a few weeks back and it was so sad. I wish I could recall the exact topic but it was exactly some identity politics nonsense, presented in a way which was designed to stoke the most outrage possible (anyone who disagrees is knowingly trying to harm the other side, they can't possibly have good intentions but disagree with us!) and it was all over some trivial thing too.
Add onto that it just sounded like Lerher, someone I used to idolize, someone who used to be incredibly passionate, just sounded like he was phoning it in. It was very disheartening.
I remember WNYC was the place during the Afghan/Iraq wars where I could get some reasonable and balanced coverage of the situation, especially in the first few months/years when things were very in-flux (and I recall Lerher being an intimate part of that). Air America was the lib-left perspective, NPR would echo that but give me a reasonable perspective of what the other side thought. That seems completely and utterly dead now.
The thing is I’m generally in support of these things, but jeez the amount is just exhausting. You but you, whoever you are, but I’m also a supporter of shutting up about how you identify and doing something else with your life. (No “you” in particular)
On my station there’s at least a 50/50 chance that when I turn the radio on within a minute they’ll mention identity politics. Today it was right when I changed the channel, and I changed right back to a music station.
> NPR was clearly on the left before, and went hard left after that. It's
essentially propaganda now.
Do you understand that actual leftists consider NPR to be a voice of the corporate right-center?
Anyway, the correct analysis of NPR, like most "mainstream" media outlets, is that they are biased but not consistently left or right (or any other direction in whatever N-dimensional political space is now fashionable); their bias is pro status quo. That is, their bias is always towards the idea that we live in something roughly approximating the best of all possible worlds, that it requires a bit of tinkering, some careful tweaks to get it dialed in even closer to justice and desirability, but that's about it.
The concept that we live in something that is basically, fundamentally broken on the deepest levels is very difficult for mainstream media to tackle, and even though some occasionally do try, it is quickly put back in the box so that we continue to consider how best to tweak and tinker with what we already have.
The hard left is not a place, it's a movement that exists to move further to the left, to the point of insanity.
The hard left is offended with the definition of a woman as someone born with female reproductive organs.
As a feminist liberal man I do find it amazing that we fought for women's rights for over 100 years only to make the term "woman" meaningless. I still enjoy some NPR shows, but they've gone way past what I'm comfortable with ideologically.
If I were standing in Times Square with you and I asked you to point out the women as they walked down the street, would you reply "I can't, I can't see their vaginas"?
There's more to being a "woman" than having female reproductive organs.
That doesn't render the term "woman" meaningless. It just means there are a large number of characteristics that define "woman" and each woman exhibits a varying set of them.
And unless you're planning to mate with them, their vagina is none of your business.
It’s very obvious all mammals are dual sex, no more no less. It’s a fact that there are only 2 sexes when it comes to mammals. They also have average behavior differences due to hormones and their structure, but this only goes so deep. Bulls for instance are more aggressive than cows on average - this is because their hormonal differences that stem all the way back to their chromosomal differences, but also due to their body differences (like extra muscle and size) that give them the ability and perception by other cows.
These things are the same in humans: we have our “run-time sexual differences” that come from hormones, and our “static sexual differences” from how those hormones have built our bodies over time. Men behave differently on average because of the hormones profile in their body is different from that of women. Men also behave differently because those hormones over their life time have changed their body to be larger on average, and this on another level has led them to have different experiences than women that have shaped their mindset and behavior (eg being larger means people treat you differently, and that reinforces different behaviors).
All this to say that the differences between the sexes are almost entirely immutably biological at the base (including the social construct aspects). The differences between men and women start from the chromosomes, and that decides hormones and body structure, and those two affect how people treat you naturally (a larger, more aggressive organism is treated differently than a smaller, less aggressive person), which creates over time what we call gender roles.
Some examples: men being deemed “protectors” isn’t just some arbitrary gender role out of the blue, it stems from the fact that one sex of the human species is obviously larger, and so naturally expected to step up in these situations throughout their life. Aka: if you reset everyone’s memory of gender roles, they’d likely come back and be pretty similar in broad strokes very quickly, because they are determined at the base by chromosomes > hormones > body structure > how others perceive you and the experiences you have in your life as a result.
Men can never be women and vice versa. You can change the hormones, but you can’t change the body structure, the chromosomes, the experiences of the individual and others, and consequently how others naturally react to them. Those aspects all together are what makes a man fundamentally different from a woman.
And: you keep saying "on average" without acknowledging what that implies: there is a distribution, and that distribution overlaps. Some women are stronger than some men; that doesn't make them men. Some women are more aggressive than some men; that doesn't make them men. Some women are larger than some men; that doesn't make them men. All of that means that you can't simply define man/woman on the basis of size, strength, or aggression.
Looping back to gender: it's a social construct, and there is no way for a non-human mammal to declare what they think or feel in a way we can understand or interpret. (Lack of) examples from the animal kingdom have no bearing.
My point is that sex deeply influences gender. Gender expression and gender roles have a direct line to sex via chromosomes > hormones + body structure > how you behave and how you're treated.
You can of course call yourself whatever you want, but expecting others to adhere to that, or even being bothered that they don't, is senseless.
So when a man calls himself a woman, and says it's on the basis of some internal feeling of being a woman - how on earth is he supposed to know what that is like? Being male, he has absolutely zero reference point for what it's like to be female.
He might desire to be a woman (and claim to have a "female gender identity" because of this), but that's not the same thing as actually being a woman. And if you look on the trans forums where these males discuss this, you can see it's all about performing stereotypes of femininity. Often related to being sexually aroused by the thought of cross-dressing - the so-called "euphoria boner", as they put it.
Furthermore, most of these men use their claims of having a "female gender identity" to demand access to women-only spaces, disregarding and violating women's boundaries, and defeating the whole point of why we have sex-segregated spaces in the first place. Gender identity is a dangerous, misogynistic concept that is harming women and children.
Thanks! Your saying "Being male, he has absolutely zero reference point for what it's like to be female" made me think.
That said, I disagree :-)
I'm male -- both in chromosomes and in thought -- but I know that (generally) being a woman involves wearing skirts, makeup, and in general softer, more elaborate clothes; paying more attention to grooming a certain way; maybe wearing makeup, at least a little; being deferred to in lesser matters like who goes first through a door, but expected to defer in more serious matters like where to go and how to get there. I don't have to experience any of the above to envision what they feel like, or to know whether I would be more comfortable experiencing them one way or the other.
Calling these things "stereotypes" is a silly minification of them. If they are just stereotypes, then women should be able to discard them whenever they wish, but that is far from the case when it comes to negotiating, advancing, getting their way, etc., etc.
"And if you look on the trans forums where these males discuss this, you can see it's all about performing stereotypes of femininity." You've done extensive research? :-) And again, "stereotypes" is dismissive.
Your last paragraph is an unjustified panic, but I'll at least reply to say that if I were to be concerned about someone in the bathroom, it would be concern for someone who presents as a woman, but is forced to use the men's room because beneath their poodle skirt they happen to have a penis.
Men and women have different chromosomes. They have different skeletal structures. They have different amounts of hormones. They have different averages.
Women can have children. Men cannot.
The fact that people are trying to argue otherwise is frankly insane.
Saying men and women have different chromosomes is circular logic. You're saying that XX = woman and XY = man, and then defining "man" and "woman" in terms of the standard you set up for them.
As I responded to in a different reply, skeletal structures exist on a distribution. Those distributions generally overlap, meaning there are some women closer to the "male" average, and some men closer to the "female average. That doesn't determine their gender or even their sex.
Edit to add: you list hormones as a determining factor -- but hormones can be adjusted. Would you agree that a person who achieves "male" hormones through pills or injections qualifies as male? Or vice versa?
Saying they have different averages ignores that distribution, and again would arbitrarily classify some people as the opposite of their chromosomal classification.
"Women can have children" -- even among XX women, that's clearly false. Or are you saying that women who can't bear children aren't women?
Your use of the word gender is effectively "personality". Yes people have different personalities.
Yes XX is a woman and YY is a man. Mammals require one of each to reproduce. Creating a clear, simple definition is what science is supposed to do so that we can better understand existence.
When a woman can no longer have kids she has gone through menopause or had a genetic aberration that prevented her from doing so.
Yes there are bell curves within nature. This doesn't change chromosomes.
No I would not agree that hormones received from an external source make one male or female. If I color my skin green, my skin is still not green. I have simply made it appear that way.
Personality is an element of gender, but they are not synonymous. Even in your definition of men vs. women, there are people of all "personalities" in each "gender".
Yes, science classes chromosomes, and yes, one of each is (generally, let's not get too caught up in parthenogenesis) required to reproduce. Is that all you see in men v. women? You used reproduction as a determinant, but now you're saying that women who can't reproduce are still women because...they're supposed to be able to reproduce? That's not quite circular logic, but it's darn close.
Taking hormones is pretty far from "coloring your skin green" -- by your definition Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't really as muscular as he was, or Lance Armstrong as fast as he was, because they took steroids/PEDs. It's easy to argue that they cheated, but hard to argue that they actually weren't as big/fast as they were.
Your argument seems to simplify to chromosomes. Of course you know that there are people born with neither XX nor XY. You can claim those people are "something else," but if they want to present as male or female, is that wrong? And I'll ask you the same question I posted in a separate comment: if we were standing in Times Square and I asked you to point out the women walking by, would you really say, "I can't until I get blood samples"?
> There's more to being a "woman" than having female reproductive organs.
What is it then ?
Edit: I'm sorry, i realise that this is a troll-leading question, that ensures no good answer, because we can't give a good answer that doesn't offend someone. It shows that we're as a group intentionally ignoring basic reality, which is a shame but it is what it is.
If a person has longer hair, no facial hair, is wearing a dress, has a higher voice, wider hips, and the appearance of breasts, I'd assume they are a woman.
BUT: if a person with all of those traits says they're a man, I'm going to nod, file it away for future reference, and -- most importantly -- move on with my day.
And likewise, if a person with none of those traits tells me they are a woman, again, I will nod, remember it, and move on.
If that's not what you're asking for, then it seems you're asking for a flowchart that determine's someone's gender. Gender being a social construct (as opposed to sex) there is no decisive flowchart other than: ask them; accept the answer. If you want something generally accurate, I stand behind what I said above.
"mindset" is actually a pretty reasonable descriptor I think (I'm not an expert though).
I think a lot of the confusion does come from people having a hard time separating "what does this person want me to call them" from "how do I treat this person". I think (again, I speak only for myself, and I'm not even trans) most trans people would be happy to be called their chosen pronouns and treated in a neutral way.
There is a lot of history backing up a more constrained interpretation of gender and interpersonal relationships, and the present situation is definitely outside many people's comfort zone.
But it isn't just a vagina that makes a woman. They have specific organs that require specific hormonal profiles. Women have different skeletal dimensions than men, to the point where sex can be accurately ascertained from the skeleton alone.
The physical differences between men and women are not just societally imposed, and form the basis for their oppression. This cannot be wished away.
By the same logic a white person could claim they were actually black. The reality is there is far more genetic distance between a male and female than between races.
Yet, anyone who did such a thing would be seriously problematic. It is equally problematic for a man to claim he is woman by exactly the same logic as the oppression against women cannot fairly be appropriated by men.
Men have been screwing over women for thousands of years. It's not ok for them to appropriate their name and identity because of some qualitative feeling they're experiencing. It's not ok.
What's wrong with the term "transwoman" for a transwoman?
The problem is these terms are basically undefined and current 'left' and 'right' trends don't match historic left and right trends. Actual communists (e.g., Stalinist USSR) have had periods that were socially traditional in many ways, up to and including prosecuting homosexuality.
The truth is what we call 'the left' and 'the right' is some kind of attempt to cluster a bunch of orthogonal belief systems that in our contemporary time tend to cluster.
You then also have things like post-modernist ideas that in some sense reject the idea of an objective reality and are idealist, whereas orthodox Marxism is solidly materialist and modern. People don't know what the hell any of these terms mean. Even Marx himself, in comparison to some self-proclaimed Marxists, said something like, "if they are marxists then surely I am not a marxist."
Most orthodox Marxists I know do not consider themselves liberals by the way and many wouldn't call themselves feminists because they may disagree with a bunch of baggage there, while being stridently in favor of equality between the sexes. A common struggle among "the left" (e.g., the "new left" in the 60s) is whether or not it is an intra-liberal struggle and whether or not class is the primary or even only determinate and other 'identities' should be subsumed. It's complicated.
Personally I try to not take on a label that defines for me a set of beliefs that are orthogonal. Someone can disbelieve in the trans movement you identified entirely and also want a workers revolution. It's not actually uncommon.
> The hard left is offended with the definition of a woman as someone born with female reproductive organs.
"The hard left" is something British people call other British people in order to dismiss them. Americans who are calling out the hard left need to stop reading the Spectator.
You fought for rights and are now upset because the word "woman" is more inclusive?
How does that negatively affect you?
You mock people for being offended then get offended.
> Do you understand that actual leftists consider NPR to be a voice of the corporate right-center?
We have to give up on arguing about what "leftism" is. It doesn't mean anything, and Glenn Beck stirred the American brain so thoroughly that there's no way to even give them a general idea of what it used to mean. Just let liberals have it. We have to just talk about our specific political positions on their merits and leave the taxonomies in the history books.
NPR is exactly what you would think its sponsors, which are managed funds, massive health care insurers, huge agribusinesses, silicon valley and chemical companies want it to be. Arguing about whether it's "leftist" with people who think the most "leftist" things are massive banks, Hillary Clinton, and fundamentalist Islam is a waste of your life.
As a person who identified as a leftist and hung with other people like that for 30 years (and continuing), we were calling NPR National Petroleum Radio 25 years ago when it was gutted at the end of the Clinton administration. It no longer has any serious intention to inform; like most media it's staffed by the children of the wealthy, generating content to support current political initiatives.
It’s hilarious to me that you and the OP keep bandying about terms like “left” and “right” but don’t ever give any instances to support what you mean. It’s basically just hand waving - in other words, pretty meaningless other than “I don’t like their viewpoint”.
Not really. I don't have much interest in such labelling and consider it lazy.
However, the OP chose to label an organization "leftist", when I'm fairly sure that the people he would identify as "leftist" would not share the feeling that NPR represents their perspective.
Whether or not NPR represents my viewpoint is not of much concern to me. I don't expect it, if it happens it happens, it probably won't. That's fine.
Another recent front page HN story talks about ChatGPT and other advances in AI. So, defining “no true Scotsman” would be within AI’s wheelhouse. I think Openai needs to verbify the act of using GPTx to summarise ideas.
1. NPR used to have a stricter separation between editorial content and news content.
I agree and you're right I think this got a lot worse after 2016 across the board and IMO NPR has been better than many other agencies about it.
2. NPR took a turn left.
I disagree. I think they continue to be vaguely American center-left and haven't really changed much. In general it's quite hard to define "left" as there's multiple groups, but yes since 2016 the social justice left has become a bigger part of the conversation.
NPR isn't definitionally "corporate" news. It may functionally be, due to the way funding has worked out, but this is not baked into its structure or culture. Yet.
The yet part is what hurts my soul. I've watched the decline for almost two decades in horror, but all I can say is they're the lesser of many, many evils, but as always: buyer beware.
To be fair, the Republican Party went full white-nationalist cult after 2016, which is a real problem for outlets that want to maintain a "centrist" viewpoint.
Is the full-scale attack on reproductive rights boring? Perhaps if you were in a position where you had to pay attention, you’d find it more interesting.
Yeah sure. Every time I listen to "The Indicator" or "Planet Money" or "Throughline" I'm just thinking to myself wow, this is some hardcore left wing propaga;..
> That's what being left wing means. Identity politics are liberal, which is a right wing movement.
I get your point, especially as someone on the left myself. That said, it’s more useful in conversations about American politics to understand the political dichotomy is centered on the American political Overton window, not on the center of all extant political philosophies.
There has effectively been no real left wing party with national political presence in the US in the lifetimes of the majority of Americans alive today. Both major parties and nearly all smaller parties in US politics are right of extant center, but many are left of American center.
“Liberals” aren’t even liberals in the US, anyway. “Liberals” in the US are populist globalists. Identity politics is arguably not affiliated with any particular political philosophy or party, but rather is a cynical methodology employed by many parties to create a social device to shift the political median in their direction. For whatever philosophical rigor you’d assign to identity politics, it’s at best an ideology, but lacks the necessary substance to be a complete philosophy.
The left of the American center is mainly held by populist globalists, with orbiting positions which at its most collectivist aligns to environmentalism. The right of the American center is mainly held by populist nationalists, with orbiting positions which at it’s most collectivist aligns to religious fascism. American society is very deeply individualistic, and this is a major factor why populism holds so much sway and why collectivist philosophies exist in the fringes at best.
Hopefully I’ve managed to short-circuit repeating the same comment subthread about semantics of the term “left wing” that happens in every HN thread about American politics.
I think it's fair to say that they bias leftwards at least.
They may not be, you know, outright communists or anything, but that doesn't mean they don't lean towards the left side of the American political spectrum a fair bit past center. In the standard distribution of political views calling them "left wing" is fair, even if they're not out on the long tail.
Big ones I can think of off the top of my head: Immigration, tax, gun control, abortion, all modern "social justice" issues.
But my point isn't that they're "far left", just that they are reliably left of american center. They make no (or at least almost no) effort to present the center-right versions of the argument.
It is easy to understand how the degrading position of the English workers, engendered by our modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more degraded by the presence of Irish competition ~ Friedrich Engels
> gun control
Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary ~ Karl Marx
> all modern "social justice" issues
None of those are left wing. They're all liberal, which is a counter model to leftism.
> They make no (or at least almost no) effort to present the center-right versions of the argument.
They almost exclusively present the liberal argument, which is the center right.
The label you use to describe your beliefs is the same label that everyone else uses to describe a different set of beliefs, which you at least partially disagree with. We all know it and don't need to go over it every time.
Journalists and the public (often looking up to journalists post-Watergate) have made journalism sound wildly more "truthy" and "neutral" than it really is, or ever was.
Unedited broadcasts of congressional proceedings isn't "journalism" --- that's a broadcast. By the same token, most 24hr news on TV, which is just commentary on some live event, is barely or often not journalism at all.
Journalists write and tell stories. Journalism offers an account of real (or supposed) events. It always involves storytelling in some degree, in the sense that an account of events (in order, or in an order which clarifies the chain of events) is constructed and presented. There's an ideal of neutrality, which is generally understood as a certain set of journalistic "practices", but journalism is ultimately storytelling with the general idea of offering an accurate account of a real event. The idea that journalists have special access to the "truth" is largely just a thing journalists say to make their job sound more specialized than it really is because it has become a "prestige" job. The same goes for 'neutrality' as a relatively recent ideal for journalists to strive for. The history of journalism is actually rife with journalists saying they weren't neutral and never tried to be.
Journalism is important, and vital to democracies, but it's important to understand and clarify why they are because journalists can hang themselves on their own petard. They're storytellers with the idea of "holding people, institutions, and the public to account" by offering the public accounts of events that happened, which the public could not immediately witness. For instance, an unedited broadcast of congressional proceedings doesn't require nor is it journalism at all because the public can just watch it. The most a journalist could do is offer context...by situating the proceedings in a chain of historical events.
I agree that unedited congressional proceedings is not journalism; however C-Span does have journalists who do not tell stories.
C-SPAN journalists host “Washington Journal” on the TV and “Washington Today” on C-SPAN Radio. They interview newsmakers, authors, and other journalists. On “Washington Today” they do summarize the day’s happenings.
But they’re not attempting to synthesize a narrative. There is no storytelling. On “Washington Journal” they let guests and callers speak for themselves with no attempts to corner them or edit them. C-SPAN shows every day a way of doing journalism that’s about the subject and not about what the journalist thinks.
Seeing as we're a tech audience, I ask you (and everyone else) this: Would anyone be happy if ext4 or NTFS "told stories" of what goes on in their file systems instead of journaling everything fact-for-fact as-is? I am happy to bet noone would be.
Journalism is (and should be) nothing more than a record of what happens or happened. A proper journalist, after all, is writing a journal. If someone is writing a story, they are a storyteller and should not be relied upon as a useful source of objective and accurate information.
In this sense, C-SPAN is as journalism as it can get: Unedited recordings and presentations of the goings-on inside Congress insofar as Congress will allow.
Ah, yes, this is also why my dictionary should solely tell me how to say words, and never tell me their definitions, since the word diction is predominantly associated with speech and comes from the Latin dictare, which is a conjugation of dicere, which means to speak.
Dictionaries have no business in providing definitions! Their business is diction!
What you've described is literal propaganda. Your description leaves our several of the core tenets of journalism, among them: independent verification and contextualization.
Congress generally controls the cameras though. Although, not until after they elected a majority leader and do some house keeping.
That said, unedited broadcasts of meetings isn't really journalism. Journalism is highlighting the portions of the proceedings that need highlighting. It's an editorial process by nature.
That's not to say what C-SPAN does isn't important; it absolutely is valuable and important to have a record of the proceedings, and with video and audio rather than just a transcript or minutes is quite useful.
I loved watching C-SPAN and then comparing to the "news" who picked one or two sentences from a 45 minute speech to yammer about for the next three days.
C-SPAN's mission is to cover, and merely cover, Congressional proceedings and some other governmental affairs, and I would say they are very successful in that endeavour.
I won't say the same of any other "news" or "journalism" outfit in their mission to journal goings-ons. Everyone from CNN to BBC to NHK to Al Jazeera to Wall Street Journal to New York Times can all go screw themselves for being propagandists disguised as journalists.
But by covering Congressional proceedings in that way, they ignore the way laws are actually made.
If you watch only C-SPAN you might think that laws are enacted by Congress after some debate or deliberation on camera about the content of those laws.
But that's not how it works. The way it works is that members of Congress spend a huge amount of time, sometimes the majority of their time, soliciting donations. And then a lobbyist for a company that has donated money to a member of Congress will give them the exact text of a law that they want enacted. The member of Congress will get that into a bill that makes it through committee, possibly by trading votes. Then the bill will come up to a vote, no one will have read the whole bill they are voting on, in some cases that would be impossible, the bill will be hundreds of pages long and it is only given to the members of Congress a few hours before the vote.
Then they vote on the bill that lobbyists wrote without any idea what is in it.
Is that what they show on C-SPAN? If not, why not?
Because someone made a very non-neutral decision that that is what they will show on C-SPAN.
Fact A) Carrots are healthy.
Fact B) Carrots may be carcinogenic.
These are both inherently important facts to any story talking about the health, or danger, of carrots. To present a position on if one should be eating carrots or not, without including both of these facts, is to handpick facts to tell the story you want to tell.
Handpicking, aka gatekeeping, is a core tenet of journalism. It's a requirement of the newsgathering process and determining which facts are relevant (newsworthy) _is_ a reporter's job, while the editorial process provides the necessary checks and balances.
But NPR is doing better than most.