Growing up I though of NPR as a bastion of the left but the older I get the more cynical I become. Your take reminds me of the most infuriating story I heard on NPR about Amazon Seasonal workers.

They spotlighted a retiree couple would supplements their income with it in the winter and drives south to gamble in the summer and it just sounded like a profile of a charmed life, somehow I imagine that isn’t the case for most people who work there...

They have monthly fundraising drives where they ask listeners to pay up for fearless journalism but a lot of it sounds like it was written by and for entrenched industries.

https://www.marketplace.org/2017/12/21/business/holiday-seas...

I hate to pull politics into this, but their coverage of the 2016 Presidential really opened my eyes to their biases. Bernie Sanders was not treated as a serious candidate through then entire race, but they absolutely fawned over Hillary Clinton. The same is happening now for all 230 candidates v Joe Biden. Any story they air treats most candidates as fringe, but Biden as the only serious contender.

Honestly, I love NPR, but. . .

Honest question, do Hillarys power circles now latch onto Biden? Or are they distinct?

Seems they are going Biden and Buttegieg

I hear more ads on NPR than before. Has their funding mechanism changed?

I also get the sense it's increased over the years. If you count all fund-raising time (drives plus the at least tens of minutes on ordinary days they push donations or giving them cars), promoting their own podcasts, and the now-seemingly-much-longer sponsorship messages (straight-up ads) I'm not sure it's any better than commercial radio.

They only get 16% of their funds from public sources.

No, it is still funded from listeners and corporate interests.

I agree that it’s a bad article, but problems with generics aren’t new or shocking.

If you’re on generic hypertension meds and monitor your BP, you’ll find that your pressure will vary when manufacturers change. Usually it’s minor, but I’ve seen cases where there is significant variance.

Do you have a link to a double blind study where this was tested?

I don’t.

My cardiologist pulled out a sheet with instructions on how to complain to the FDA, so I’m pretty sure it was common for that drug.

I have personally noticed large differences in side-effects between various generic brands of SSRIs. That's anecdotal, but now I always pick the same generic brand out of the ~5 I have tried for the same compound.

Same here. I always believed that generics were identical until one time the pharmacy gave me a generic for an SSRI. I was suddenly enveloped in physical pain in my chest and neck, so I called my doctor. She told me it happens, generics can cause different side effects and reactions, so she gave me a new prescription specifying the brand and the pain went away...until much later when there was a shortage of the brand name and I had no choice to go to the generic. And the pain came right back.

I believe there's probably some differences - especially in packaging. Some medications are different between generics or between generics and name brand in bioavailability. The title of the article isn't backed up by the content though in this case.

Why do you change manufacturers? I always get the same generic when I get my hypertension pills.

The fact that this is even a consideration is scary, and frankly, what the book was apparently about. I always believed generics were identical.

What I’ve heard anecdotally: The “generic” part of a generic drug is the active ingredient - that should be essentially the same between manufacturers. What differs, however, is the delivery mechanism. So for something that is extended release, the mechanism for releasing over time can vary between manufacturer.

I’m not entirely sure that this is the full story though, I haven’t researched the problem enough.

The pharmacy will change drug distributors, which will change the manufacturer supplying their inventory.

I don’t. I get a different manufacturer every few months.

Well, it was an interview of a book author; it sounds like the book has a lot of detail in it. And the fact that generics are not actually identical, but reverse-engineered best efforts was a bit scary.

I was a kid in the "generics are identical but cost less" generation. I agree this felt like a piece funded by big pharma, but I also can't help but feel I was probably really naive about what a generic really is.

You may be interested in an article by the person being interviewed in the OP, which has a few more details and at least one specific instance of impurities:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/opinion/sunday/generic-dr...

Bad article, but probably related to the series of contamination issues that various generics have had (eg NDMA contamination in Sartan).

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/04/th...

Remember when Excedrin was unavailable for over a year because of contamination during manufacture circa 2012?

Be wary of only doubting things when you personally disagree with them. It's good to be careful, but you'll soon surround yourself with like opinions if you're not careful

I feel like NPR has gotten worse in the last 10 years. Completely ignoring the topic of bias, (because it's a fruitless minefield) it seems difficult to encounter a story on NPR that isn't primarily about emotions. NPR seems to believe that a story is only accessible if there's a single person (or small group of people) who can directly emote about the wrongness of a situation. A caricature of an NPR story might go something like this "As violent insurgency breaks out in [some country], we bring you no details about the local politics, tribes, or history, but instead 15 minutes of an individual mother telling you just how miserable her life is. And here she is along with some ambient sounds so you can really feel like you're there."

I'm aware that there's a group of folks who believe that personal stories are relatable, while statistics are easily ignored. At best, I feel like this view is shortsighted: not everyone works this way, and sympathy shouldn't be limited to cases with emotional proximity. (ie, rational ethics are possible) At worst, NPR is deciding how you should feel about the story by inserting an emotion-based testimonial.

It depends a lot on the topic. For example, their reporting of Supreme Court decisions is generally factual and straightforward with decent analysis. But there are definitely a lot of stories like you describe. I often get bored with it and switch to something else.

My local station plays BBC News for an hour in the mornings and the contrast is strong. The BBC still does those kind of stories, but a lot less. The most remarkable contrast is interviews. NPR seems to believe that the purpose of interviewing someone is to give them access to an audience so they can say what’s on their mind. The BBC seems to believe that the purpose is to question them and extract information from them.

> Completely ignoring the topic of bias

Colloquially, people say "bias" when they want to say "agenda" but scientific-sounding, and that is probably fruitless to discuss.

I think bias is useful to consider in terms of cognition and process.

A journalist has a perspective and there are simply parts of it that he's not consciously aware of, especially missing knowledge.

But the process is also important. A news operation needs to attract readers and their readership's interest is what dictates what is "newsworthy." (They also need sponsors, and this can get bad enough that some trade publications essentially just reprint press releases. But that's less NPR's issue.)

It sounds like NPR is playing to their readership, and this can be a vicious cycle: you can start out with a more diverse audience and more diverse reporting, but by playing to a majority and losing your minority audience over time, you wind up with a monoculture.

Nailed it. I haven't been able to put it into words, but you absolutely nailed it.

You get that people are suffering, and even a glimpse into how, but absolutely no reasons why, except 'the Houthi rebels have been fighting for ten years' or some other one line plug.

There's less and less actual news on NPR and more, and more emotions.

So accurate, and perfectly describes the article I complained about in another comment[1]. The best part is, when NPR focuses on personal stories they really get to choose the narrative. Linked article happens to be two retirees who love gambling and working seasonally for Amazon, why them instead of some other family whose forced to work seasonally and can't get health insurance? No clue, but the framing sure makes Amazon look good.

[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2017/12/21/business/holiday-seas...

Like everyone else they're devoting a lot of time, very early (it's NEXT F*CKING YEAR!) to the US Presidential election, and, as usual, 90% of their time is horse-race crap. How should so-and-so's campaign handle this jab? How're those poll numbers looking? Issues and fact-checking statements and positions are a rare afterthought. It's awful.

Plus my local station spends so much time on ads anymore (sponsor messages, promos for other NPR programs, trying to convince me to give them my car) that it's nigh-intolerable even if the coverage were any good, which it's not.

What irks me is that I either have to agree that they track me or I'm redirected to "text version" of the site, but in the latter case they redirect me to the list of articles, usually even without the one I came for, as if showing that without tracking I'm completely useless for NPR and I could as well go away. This attitude speaks louder than words.

It's oddly enough not consistent. Often enough, it redirects me to the article, but not always. Maybe they don't do it for all parts/categories of the site?

I agree with your analysis. This seems in line with the "feeling > facts" ditch our society seems to be slowly sliding into.

Anyone remember when NPR had correspondence in Syria with rebels?

I thought it was odd at the time.

Now in retrospect, NPR was cheering on the now Terrorists.

NPR is generally vacuous. Some Public Radio shows do/did have in depth coverage (e.g. Diane Rehm show, but she is now retired). The fact is many people like it at that level...they want the human story and the gist. They do not want a nuanced and detailed understanding of geopolitical and cultural events, etc. For that, I've moved on to other sources...but these tend to be specialized policy blogs.

NPR is as much of a mouthpiece for the elite as any other mainstream media source. Their two top contributors are Lockhead Martin and Walmart, yet you don't hear many ads for them over the air, so how is NPR paying them back for their contributions? That would be maintaining the Overton window and publishing stories that support the military industrial complex and neo-liberal agendas.

My attempts to discuss NPR's shortcomings in an apolitical way are off to a terrible start.

I don't really take my comment to be that political. More about corporate control of the power structures. Is there something incorrect about my comment? Shouldn't root cause be discussed when talking about shortcomings? I do believe their emotional story telling is an intentional weakening to avoid hard hitting true journalism that challenges power structures.

Edit: ironic that the original comment was about NPR being too emotional and yet a discussion about factual details is emotionally down voted as "political".

Exactly; there was a oped w/ similar voice in NYT about a week ago. US Pharm companies are losing the ability to fix prices on their preferred generics, so they're switching to fear PR to promote their 'premium generics.'

I guess one of the problems that seems to be cropping up in pro sports that do testing is that traces of other drugs appear in unrelated drugs do to the equipment not be thoroughly cleaned between batches. Seems like an inspector / cheapening of production issue more than a location issue.