Yeah and what's his bias? Or in his case, agenda. Absolutely every reporter in the history of journalism has bias. That's human nature. NPR is highly factual, broad-based and reliable. Having per-story bias, writing a bad headline, missing a detail. You may as well criticize them for not all having washboard abs. It's an unrealistic standard. FOX news is taking dictation from politicians and consulting their stock price while writing scripts for things they know are false.
I actually took some classes from professor Boghossian. His agenda is to make you think, I'd put money on it. He loves the discussion and debate. He's a true philosopher, loves digging into things for the sake of it and to discover what's there.
If there were a per-story bias, or even a per-author bias, I might agree with you, but NPR has a very clear per-topic bias. And the goal of every reporter should be to eliminate their personal bias and report the facts. NPR's bias is so pervasive on certain topics though that one can only conclude that they too are taking dictation from some overlord, or are so caught up in group-think that they have fundamentally misunderstood reality.
I don't actually think this is too bad, as long as you know what you're getting and can correct for the bias.
I think the most tragic part about NPR's decline is that they veered so far into activism, they often don't bother presenting the other side of contentious issues. As another commenter pointed out, NPR covered a variety of perspectives on the American War on Terror. That seems to happen less often nowadays.
News orgs are not obligated to present sides of issues as though they're equivalent. Just because a point of view is prevalent doesn't mean it's valid. But as I've pointed elsewhere in the thread, On the Media handles controversial topics better than anyone. They are exceptionally good and digging in to even the most conspiracy-laden topics with clarity and fairness.
Consider the most recent geopolitical conflict involving the US, the war in Ukraine. There are a number of articles on NPR's website about the possibility of the US sending F-16 jets to Ukraine.
I've read many of them, and they tend to support the US sending planes. Some of these articles include quotes from Ukrainian defense officials who are obviously in favor. Some articles speculate as to why the US has not done so (e.g. the overhead of training pilots).
My issue with the reporting is that the writers never really bothered to explain the arguments from the opposing side. Obviously, this decision involves many tradeoffs and it was not taken lightly. NPR's reporting on this subject was not very informative and it just left me asking more questions. As a reader, I want to understand the tradeoffs behind important decisions.
This isn't the only topic with shoddy reporting. It's just the first one I noticed where activism got in the way of journalism. There are legitimate arguments in support of both sides of this issue (and I say this as a supporter of Ukraine). Readers are entitled to read/hear them, and writers should present them fairly.
https://allthingsreconsidered.buzzsprout.com/