I've listened to and read NPR for many years, and I've perceived (perhaps falsely as perception is not infallible) an increase in the amount of stories that I found to be questionable in terms of neutrality. In my observation, the comments section in many of these stories, on NPR and on other sites, had been pretty good about calling out slanted stories and offered an alternative viewpoint. Granted, the signal-to-noise ratio on purely factual stories was pretty poor, but I think the value of a comments section really came out when an article that was more about narrative than about reporting slipped through.

Again, in my observation, it seems like more news outlets are cutting their comments sections as the incidence of the comments calling out poor reporting increases.