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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2017/12/21/business/holiday-seas...
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.
I thought it was odd at the time.
Now in retrospect, NPR was cheering on the now Terrorists.
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".
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.