re: NPR editor resigns and roasts NPR for its biased presentations

NPR: 3 year old transitioning from Jack to Jackie

NPR: Trans inmates need access to gender affirming care

your tax dollars at work.

quote:

---

The Trump presidency mentally broke a huge number of people on the political left. They were already prone to embracing delusions and lies, after all, they wouldn’t be leftists otherwise. But he absolutely made them lose their last bit of a tenuous connection to reality. You could be debating with a leftist whether strawberry or grape jelly is best on a PB&J, and they’ll bring Trump into the argument. It’s quite funny, yet pathetic at the same time.

---

I believe that Trump brought out the inner nutjob in people from all different walks of life. Trump and social media have given people permission to say things and act in a way that they never would have said or done in a public setting of their peers and contemporaries previously.

I found slates article by Alecia Montgomery about the issue fascinating. She basically disagreed with him about topics that were personally important, agreed with him about topics that didn’t interest her, and didn’t address any of the culture that benefitted her. …it’s not hard to picture how so many myopic viewpoints result in absolute chaos.

quote:

---

NPR has been leftist garbage long long long before Trump "broke" anybody. Sure they had some non-political variety shows mixed into the lineup, but NPR has never been objective in their news. Ever.

---

Agree that they have long been left of center but things (as the resignation letter details) have degraded enormously over the last twelve (and especially the last eight) years.

This was more visible first at the more expensive and prestigious universities. But the language of intersectionality, oppression, and eventually purely democratic party talking points did not used to obliterate the actual reporting of facts on the ground. Now they do.

Around the time of the Bush presidency left leaning media gleefully emphasized a series of surveys. Why? Because they demonstrated the more conservative media people consumed the more likely those individuals were to have factually incorrect understandings of current events (most famously links between Hussein and Bin Laden but WMDs and similar war time propaganda which washed out as nonsense on the balance).

What about now? I bet big money that the more NPR, CNN, MSNBC, etc a viewer consumes the more likely the are to have fundamental misunderstandings (read factually incorrect ideas) about a range of topics on:

- race including the historical trends associated with performance which reversed and worsened with several specific government interventions
- the destructive combinatorial roles of bad teachers, bad parents, and bad schools which destroy opportunity for inner city kids
- trans issues such as suicide, hormone use, and the similar social contagion effect seen with clusters of trans youth versus anorexia and bulimia in the past
- police shooting data including the approximate annual numbers from different groups
- the lack of ideological balance at universities, and the impact of DEI statements in further radicalizing already ideologically limited faculty
- the number of women versus men in college,
- the number of men versus women who are victims of crime,
- what Trump actually said at various misquoted press conferences,
- what happened on October 7th,
- what happened on January 6th,
- what's in the Tik Tok bill and the impact on first amendment rights,
- what the Biden administration tried to establish as an Orwellian style minister of truth
- what the UN data actually say on the climate science,
- what was in the Twitter files,
- where COVID 19 came from (e.g awareness of the first people in China diagnosed well before any wet market transmission)

TLDR, the term misinformation is a bit radioactive but clearly news reporting has been captured by ideology instead of reality.

The willingness to report in a nominally nonpartisan fashion was always imperfect - but is nearly absent today. Even the likes of Matt Taibbi (who wrote a good book about the 2016 election called "The Insane Clown President") are routinely misrepresented as Trump apologists or right wingers for veering away from a strictly partisan reporting style.

Hardly a surprise for most of us.