2. "But america are the good guys" is the exact kind of thing you see uniformly from all American media including NPR.
The fact that this needs to be spelled out is a bit sad. One of the first things an editorial board of an actual news service does is to assert its independence, if it can't do that then they will resign in a very public way that leaves no doubt about what is going on.
For instance, the large number of people that resigned from Twitter when Musk took over (and that was besides the ones that he fired because he couldn't get them to do his bidding) made exactly such a statement.
If you've been ingesting a narrative since middle school, and the BBC reinforces it, well that's just good neutral unbiased reporting.
Do you see these fights for independence in Chinese and Russian news channels? And do you really think them similar to the BBC and NPR?
Are they the exact same? No, but they're not so different when you zoom out. You don't need explicit censorship when you can manufacture consent at the hiring and promotion stages.
I have a lot of criticism for the US, but the US can at least punish its rulers at the ballot box. The US isn’t chucking journalists out the window or vanishing them on a regular basis. Objectively, it’s hard say the three are similar, as two of those countries deserve more criticism. They are not the same when you zoom out.
I am not an American.
If we're so much better in the west, maybe we can hold ourselves accountable and question our own biases.
Information that contradict their narrative become disinformation or conspiration. Or you get labeled racist/transphobe/Trump supporter at the first doubt
Give me little hope for our country at the moment.
Regardless, I doubt whatever you have in mind is anything similar to an authoritarian regime that literally murders critical journalists and poisons opposition politicians. It is an absurd comparison.
> State media or government media are media outlets that are under financial and/or editorial control of the state or government, directly or indirectly. [1]
Even that page makes a distinction between state funded and state media[2], but that is not how youtube[3] or others [4], [5], and I am sure many others[6 time based google] do not make the distinction. For better or worse 'State funded media' is often interchangeable with 'state media' and NPR is not state media even if some of its funds come from the state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_media#:~:text=State%20me.... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_media#:~:text=Not%20to%2.... [3] https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/state-media-wa... [4]https://www.prindleinstitute.org/2019/03/whats-wrong-with-st... [5] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/194016122092283... [6] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22State+funded+media%22&rlz...
It has always been known in the arabic world that AJ is a complete puppet of the Qatari royal family (and even staffed by members of the royal family) and it can't be a coincidence that AJ's coverage is almost always a mirror image of qatari foreign policy talking points/positions. It is the equivalent of Saudi Arabia's Al Arabiya, just with more international presence.
NPR is very high quality when it comes to art, science and other shows, but fails spectacularly when it's a political subject.
NPR has the opportunity to be a world class media group, like BBC and Al Jazeera, but they chose to waddle in mud together with the democratic party, estranging half of the US population - which could have been an easy win for them.
"controlled by the government" means: left-wing when the government is left-wing, right-wing when the government is right-wing. Was NPR right-wing when Trump was president?
If not, it is the proof that the label "government funded" is really really bad: it does not identify outlets that are biased by their funding, it just find an excuse to label as biased while not labeling as biased others than are as biased.
It does not mean NPR is not biased, but if you want to add a label to warn of a potential bias, you need to do it properly, and label ALL outlets that are similarly biased and identify properly the reason they are.
Funnily, NPR could also drop the 4% of revenue from government funding and continue to publish the same stories with exactly the same bias, and people who are arguing that NPR is biased should therefore argue then that NPR is not biased anymore.
I was mainly expanding on the fact that NPR chose to not represent 50% of the US population, and also miss having a chance of being a world class service, like the BBC or Al Jazeera.
I don't really agree about "controlled by", that's like asking someone "who have you voted for" and after they said X, then saying "so you don't have any free will, you are just controlled by X". It's ridiculous: it's not because someone agrees with some party that the party controls them.
But being biased is not in itself a problem: every media is biased, only stupid people believe in neutrality. For example, giving 50-50 time to present each side's opinion is not unbiased: in a parallel universe where one side is, by chance, way bigger than the other (which is very easy to obtain as political trends are strongly based on charisma of few people), then, the 50-50 strategy leads to totally different coverage of the situation. The 50-50 strategy is not being neutral, it's being a sell-out that want to please everyone. Another example is these situations where the journalist gives equal share to a person that says "it's currently raining" and a person that says "it's currently sunny" (and, please, avoid "it can be raining and sunny at the same time", obviously, my example corresponds to a situation where it is not the case).
At the end of the day, it's not a problem: you have left-wing media, you have right-wing media, as long as they are not lying and that you don't have a society too stupid to live in an echo chamber, then, citizen are given all the information they need to make their own opinion. And if they are living in their echo chamber, the problem is not the existence of biased media, but a society problem.
But in this discussion, the problem is that the label is not "this company is ideologically biased", but "this company is controlled by the government". You cannot blame me for talking about the subject in question. The question of NPR being left-wing is irrelevant, but pushing this in the discussion is in fact even a problem: like if intellectually dishonest labeling are ok because NPR is left-wing.