I’m pretty sure that’s the fundamental problem they have with it. They want media whose content they control.
(All of this is about control/power, not making things nice or doing things right.)
PBS Newshour is pretty much the best/balanced news programming on US TV at this point. They take deeper dives into issues than most of the other shows out there. And then there's Frontline which is excellent and goes even deeper with a documentary format. The rest of PBS - there are a few good parts like Nova, but a lot of what plays on PBS stations these days is UK crime dramas - man, there seems to be a lot of mayhem going on in merry old England these days.
Haven't watched this since I was a kid. Just scrubbed through the latest episode. I was surprised, it's not bad. Left-leaning to my eye, but FAR less so than any other left-leaning mainstream TV media I can think of. And as you point out, more substantial and meaningful coverage than you typically get anywhere else. I would be happy to encourage anyone to watch more PBS Newshour based on that
I'm not trying to be dismissive of your viewpoint, but why should anyone bother speaking to this? Absolutely nothing new was divulged. It's not the media's responsibility to give airtime over every government press release.
All you see are staffers at the Hillary campaign discussing the news of the Russian influence campaigns (which this report reiterates are real) and how they can use it for their campaign.
Nothing in here is novel or even that salacious. How is this newsworthy?
Epstein was not some Darth Vader or Joker (The Dark Night version) or Commodus (from Gladiator) or Sauron or Voldemort type of villain who was openly villainous and did not have a public good side (either an actual good side or a front to try to hide his villainy).
Epstein was more a Han from Enter the Dragon kind of villain.
Epstein had a fairly extensive public good side (maybe real, maybe just a front, probably a mix of both) appearing as a legitimate businessman and a philanthropist.
A big part of his philanthropy was directed toward supporting scientific research, universities, and the arts. He liked to invite top people from particular fields, like physics and AI, to events on his island where they (the invited people) would discuss major scientific and philosophical issues from their field. Get an invite to one of those, and it was a chance to go spend a few days for free in a resort setting, participate in some pop science level discussions to keep the rich guy happy, and maybe try to talk him into funding your lab.
Because of this most of the time it isn't all that interesting when some famous person shows up in Epstein's documents.
It becomes interesting with Trump because he spent a lot of time using his opponent's Epstein connections against them in ways that made his followers come to believe any association with Epstein is practically proof that you are an active pedophile.
He did this even though he knew he himself had connections to Epstein (including to people who actually were part of Epstein's villain side). And now that's biting him.
.. Stephen Colbert
Ah yes, the news show that has a weekly politics round table that brings in a balanced approach to see issues from both sides: The side of an anti-Trump Democrat and the side of an anti-Trump Republican.
Good riddance!
This administration makes a point that they only do interviews with sources favorable to them. They can't opt out of the media and then pretend to be victims.
There's plenty to pick from. The problem is that having someone effective in that position would anger the one people that PBS actually cares about, their donor class. It doesn't matter that Trump won the popular vote in the most recent election, they'll still go out of their way to ensure that the token conservative voice is against him.
> This administration makes a point that they only do interviews with sources favorable to them. They can't opt out of the media and then pretend to be victims.
This is the most accessible and transparent administration in decades, if not longer. The POTUS has held more interviews, with just about every national media organization, and regularly holds open ended press conferences with pools of reporters.
What you're describing is the previous administration which not only hand selected the reporters, they even gave Biden a cheat sheet of reporters (with pictures!) so he would know exactly who to call on: https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-defends-bidens-cheat-sh...
Is that your paragon of media transparency?
No there's not. Name three.
>This is the most accessible and transparent administration in decades, if not longer. The POTUS has held more interviews, with just about every national media organization, and regularly holds open ended press conferences with pools of reporters.
This is simply an absurd lie with no basis in reality, I really don't know why you even spouted it. It contradicts observable truth. Strange.
This is funny because BBC is a prime example of being a propaganda channel for the government of the day. And that's not new at all just look back at the coverage of the Troubles or the miners strikes in the 70s-80s.
Yes it's not on the level of CGTN or Russia Today but BBC is not neutral at all
https://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-how-biased-is-the-...
I highly suggest using Ground News (ground.news) for a week or a month as your sole portal into news stories, and then use their features to analyze bias in your selection of news stories and outlets.
I use it regularly to try to offset my own biases.
of _course_ there is bias at the BBC. But to comparing it to Fox is uncharitable at best.
The thing is, though, there are a few components here: there's level of favorability toward a certain kind of politics, which some barely-popular left-leaning outlets roughly match Fox News on, plus propensity to lie and exaggerate. And there's reach.
Nothing left-partisan in the US that I'm aware of touches Fox on either of those latter fronts—propensity to just make shit up, and (certainly not) reach.
Nobody's putting Democracy Now! on in waiting rooms. Hell IDK maybe at Planned Parenthood, never been, wouldn't know, but not at a dentist's office or at the auto shop or what have you.
There are equivalents to Fox News on the Left (Fox News viewers think it's MSNBC because that's what Fox News and AM radio told them, LMFAO, no) in the US, in terms of level of commitment to supporting partisan causes. There's nothing like it as far as willingness to deviate from reality to do so, nor in reach. Nothing remotely close.
It’s pretty much the only place I know to find news on all the conflicts that Western media tends to ignore.
I'm not a fan of the continued reification of "left" and "right". I have heard conservatives lament that MAGA isn't truly conservative. I've heard economic reformers lament that liberal social policies are sucking the oxygen out of the room for real structural reform. In both cases the idea of a single "left" and "right" as a group, or even worse as the two sole options on the menu of how to think, is severely damaging to productive political dialogue.
Framing everything as left-vs-right is like doing PCA and taking only the first principal component - sure it might be contain some signal, but it flattens any nuance. Critically, it also pre-frames any debate into competing camps in a way that harms rather than serves. I would challenge groups like Ground News to offer other framings - why not "owners vs workers"? Why not "rural vs urban"? We should ask why they chose the framing they do. I have my own cynical opinion but I'll refrain from sharing.
All national media services have their own bias and propaganda, but if you switch them up it becomes obvious very quickly. It also means that I miss out on most of the US political noise [1], which is a benefit to my mental health [2].
[0] Hot/lukewarm take: "consuming news" is a waste of time, and should be minimized. This really hits you like a brick to the head when you see the stuff that foreign countries are obsessing about, and how tiny it feels to you. Guess what: your news media is filled with the same crap.
[1] I still get the foreign opinion on it, obviously, but this is usually pretty mild. Most countries don't care about the US nearly as much as US citizens think they do.
[2] If you think that CPB/NPR don't have bias, I strongly suggest that you try this. You're probably in a bubble, and an "international perspective" is something that most NPR listeners claim to value. Removing US media from my life eliminated a huge source of angst (particularly after 2016), and revealed that all of the major US media sources are various forms of hyper-polarized clownery.
Indian media is broadly worse if anything, latin american media is a trip if you have any understanding of the complicated political landscape, Aus is central to the Murdoch news dynasty, and East asian media has lots of famously partisan organizations. Maybe middle eastern media, explicitly funded for soft power political goals or African media, which span the gamut from bloodthirsty factional rags to leftover colonial institutions to tightly controlled extensions of the state apparatus?
They're differently biased, but you can't escape consuming media critically. "Averaging" by listening to a lot of different perspectives is 1) a lot of effort and 2) also something that can (and is) manipulated by making sure there's lots of "both sides" messaging present.
I went out of my way to head off this exact criticism, but I guess I didn't put it in blinking, bold, 30 point font.
Again: every national media outlet has bias (indeed, every media outlet has bias). My experience is that it's pretty easy to notice when you switch your sources regularly.
It doesn't take me any effort to do this, and even if I hear a hyper-partisan take, it doesn't melt my brain. I go "oh weird, so that's what the Indian government thinks" -- which is still vastly preferable to hearing what some reporter at NPR or CNN or whatever thinks about what India thinks.
Leads to shallow discussion where all news sources are tossed out for bias leaving nothing (or what ground news wants you to listen to). God forbid we critically examine for ourselves the information we consume.
Ground news links all of their sources on a per article basis and you can simply scroll left/right through each news source. And you can add your own sources!
I'm not going to argue with them saying that Fox News is right wing or that MSNBC is more left wing. "Duh".
Maybe we're looking at this from a different angle, or maybe we just use the service in different ways.
The "bias" part that is relevant is showing you the difference in headline and contents between dozens or hundreds or thousands based on historical leanings of the news org, and which ones are even reporting on a particular topic.
It's not saying a particular article leans a particular way, it's saying the source does.
I think that the media bias ratings on Ground News are slightly biased and the factuality ratings are highly biased, not intentionally but due to flawed methodology of their sources. I have contacted their support to raise that issue.
I still find the site tries really hard to make you aware of your own predilections, and I think it does well as that, and if you find yourself gravitating towards one set of sources you can always sample the “other side”.
I agree that left-right doesn’t capture the richness of American politics but for better or worse they are convenient labels for our two party system.
I'm not sure anyone that is familiar with this has been able to take what they say seriously since because they are so clearly on such a short leash.
How is it not neutral ? I follow some of the news. They've criticized both Conservative and Labour governments. Of course there are problems like the whole Martin Bashir thing but recently I've seen the BBC be more self-critical than other private TV channels. If we're comparing mistakes from the past then in the 90s, Roger Ailes was molesting women behind locked doors. Lewd comments were the norm across several news rooms. Doesn't mean that all private media is bad.
this is really the main problem with the bbc. for example one week they publish a story talking about something horrible israel has done then the next they publish another seemingly taking their side on something. it just ends up annoying and confusing both sides instead of one
I think you could argue it had a sort of pro-Cameron lean to it for a while simply because he initially positioned himself as quite a boring centrist, but I don't believe there was any policy alignment generally.
Less sure re: the scottish independence vote but I think in that case the BBC was sort of paralysed by what the outcome would mean for it, and that may have made it difficult for it to comprehensively handle.
Channel 4 news is surprisingly now the better news source for actual events.
They're also living on borrowed time. Channel 4 is publicly owned but completely self funded, largely through ad revenue. Ad revenue for TV is not what it used to be.
There's been serious consideration given to the idea of merging Channel 4 into the BBC to share admin costs but keep it editorially separate.
State media is inherently going to be pro-establishment and failures to report on their own internal scandals I think should give everyone pause about being all-in on something like the BBC.
Do you have a specific grievance? How could it be better?
Every household that watches BBC in the UK needs to pay £174.50 ($230) a year. (the wording here has to be done carefully, let's not digress into being exact on who has to pay it)
Federal funding for public media distributed out to $1.54 per person in the US last year.
There's... uh... a bit of a difference in the national funding for the BBC and public media in the US.
I dunno, the Odd Squad has almost as much green screen as a Guardians of the Galaxy movie. If that's not flashy, I dunno. And Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman was pretty out there; a space ghost style host ordering kids around the streets of Boston.
Also, the reboot of CyberChase was pretty clearly on the Ag agenda, all about Organic this and that. Maybe that doesn't count as an Agenda because the department of agriculture was funding it.
Also, Sesame street has always been in the pocket of those letter and number sponsors.
It really surprised me to learn this; it always felt so Ohio to me.
Peg + Cat relies on numerology and emphasizes DEI above all else.
Alma’s Way is pro-illegal immigration and unbelievably on the nose about it.
I can keep going. Point is, PBS Kids should have been shutdown a long time ago.
/s
I hated Fox News because it's so full of lies. I hated CNN because it's making mountains out of molehills and manufactured outrage. MSNBC was less yellow, but it's still full of opinion shows engineered to make you upset. NPR didn't do that, ever. They'd say when democrats screwed up just as much as when republicans did. It was true.
Right now I'm drinking out of my NPR mug that I pay $12/month for. I've been a daily listener since college, it's my default radio station in the car, and when I road trip I like searching for the local station. But I disagree with this. There are a number of nationally syndicated shows (at least, in all the markets I've lived in) that I'd put in this category. 1A just off the top of my head. Reveal is another, but that's because their mission is to find things that need to be revealed and they're usually pretty upsetting.
I didn't mean to say there's never incorrect or partisan content.
The other tragedy is the PBS Kids Games app on iOS and Android. It is chock full of educational games that tie into the various shows.
To them, anything that’s not outright support for their view is “bias”
Do a mental exercise, if they had joined the MAGA loving trump train, would that have saved them?
Now you have your real answer. They're not going to fund anything unless it's a bunch of lackeys
All free.
Donate. Recurring is better.
I wasn't very happy with the PBS defunding. One of their best shows was Frontline and the amount of just straight down the middle documentaries they did was great. For a lot of the issues that became very politicized, I would regularly turn to them for an unbiased view of what was going on.
I agree on the educational stuff as well. How many generations of kids grew up watching PBS kids shows? My parents donated regularly and supported PBS the whole time.
Hopefully they can continue, I'm sad to see such a pillar of goodness go away.
I’m rather looking forward to public radio programming that would strike you as liberally biased, now that public radio productions no longer have to please Republicans in government.
I look forward to at least some of public radio going full pinko commie since Republican as a group have spent so much time demonizing them. With the government funding gone, there's no point in trying to stay in Republican good graces when public radio's listeners and donors are elsewhere.
> I have found public broadcasting to be one of the least biased sources of headline news and information available
> kids programming is the absolute best
Fixed that for you:
> I USED TO FIND public broadcasting provided the least biased sources of headline news and information available
> kids programming WAS the absolute best
I totally support public broadcasting of all stripes, and do not advocate for this POV at all, but ... there are people who claim the opposite. Sesame Street is 'full woke', apparently, because it has talked about skin color and race with muppets.
What many people consider normal... is 'full woke agenda' to others.
I think you're really badly confused, and this is also not how you educate or convince people. I'd suggest you log off and go touch grass.
It is not my job to educate people. In fact, I receive advantage if I live in a world where you're more ignorant than I.
The term goes back to the 1970s or the late 1960s, and was invented by the puppeteers on Sesame Street. It's documented. It might be generous to assume they were making a tasteless joke, because not everyone who makes such jokes engages in such behaviors, but given their sexual orientations I'm reluctant to give them the benefit of that doubt. Of course, none of this would have been known to anyone in those decades, or even until much later when the internet made obscure trivia available on a global scale. But it's all ok, as it turns out my wife and I didn't have any problems teaching our kids to count to 10 by ourselves.
>I'd suggest you log off and go touch grass.
I'm at work. But even if I weren't, I'd not take any advice from you. It's apparently news to you that the children's shows are all made by perverts.
No more of this, please.
No more of this, please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've been breaking the site guidelines for a long time and we've asked you many times to stop:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44451861 (July 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43991640 (May 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38536018 (Dec 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11899889 (June 2016)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9389854 (April 2015)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9386763 (April 2015)
If you keep this up, we are going to ban you—yea, even after 10 years. Please fix this.
Where, exactly, is this "documented?"
Perhaps my Google(well, DDG, actually)-Fu is deficient as I was unable to find any links to "analingus with a reach around" associated with Sesame Street. The only broadcast media references I could find were radio and movies references from the 2000-2010 period.
As such, please do let me know where to find this documentation. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
No more of this, please.
I'm looking at your WETA TV guide and it is completely standard material. We've got kids cartoons, Bob Ross, some selections from BBC and Bloomberg, and Ask This Old House (one of my favorites). OETA has almost identical programming.
Where's the programming where they bully people about race and sex? Are you talking about that couple that give the good financial advice? Or maybe those cooks on America's Test Kitchen? I never did trust that Wishbone dog...
Oh yes that must have been it. I suppose I'll keep voting for defunding.
Say what you mean or go away.
Neither do you.
The local stuff though was quite questionable. For example they’d support different causes or efforts by referencing a single poorly supported research paper. Usually those research papers supported some narrative. It could be homelessness, drug treatments, etc., however there was little if any scrutiny of the paper the whole effort or narrative was based on.
They also had annoying presenters like Kai Ryssdahl. He was insufferable but hardly the only one.
Also, despite being a public system, individual comp is high relative to their listeners', I'd say[1]. I'd guess most listeners would not imagine their comp being as high as it is, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Public_Radio
[1] In addition, those at the top enjoy perks like being invited to elite events, and the perks of schmoozing for donations. Those are experiences that are alien to the average listener.
Can we break this down?
You open with a effectively derogatory accusation about conservatives making things up…which I have no opinion on.
That immediately shows your own likely liberal bias and then you say you saw no problem with the programming.
Isn’t that exactly the issue? That you saw no issue and everyone that disagrees is just wrong?
How do you know? How would you know if CBP’s biases weren’t just your own?
Do you know the arguments against the biases of CPB, NPR, PBS from the people that can make their most effective arguments against those orgs, or do you know the lines of the people that already agree with you?
Jon Stewart Mill’s On Liberty has a great part about this… [It is not enough to know the refutations from your own teachers, you must learn them from the people that present them in their truest form].
Maybe these are true, but I don’t see the basis for it here.
And this is a liberal site; regardless of how the “intellectuals” like to talk about ACKSHUALLY it’s bla which ends up being San Francisco liberal with more steps.
I consider my estimation to be two points of evidence. Along with the user’s post history of course.
There is a degree of quasi-political messaging in PBS children's shows. I can say this because I've watched more hours than I'd like of several of them, but I'd like to focus on on Molly Of Denali. It's a good children's show about an inuit girl who lives in Alaska and teaches children general good morals and specifics of inuit and Alaskan culture.
When I say it's political, I mean that it makes points without nuance on historical and current issues which range from widely accepted and important ideas (example: They didn't let Native Alaskan People vote in the past, so it's important to exercise the right to vote now), to what I would consider less widely agreed upon and important ideas, such as it being deeply upsetting and disrespectful for a "white" teacher to call a native child "T", because she had trouble pronouncing his native name. Another example is them introducing the importance of "land acknowledgements" in a children's show. A final example is the "clueless white" trope wherein the offensive rude white visitor has to be educated by the wise natives over and over and over.
I'm not trying to say that any of these examples are "right" or "wrong", but they do represent "politics" in the mind of wide sections of the population.
This said I like the show and of course we need to fund public broadcasting, I would just prefer if we did our best to keep the most controversial stuff for when the kids are a bit older to make it a smaller target for outrage (from the right or left).
The most jarring part, to me personally, is the drastic shift in tone and presentation for injustices with wildly different levels of impact. Perhaps rudely, I think to myself in the voice of the Inuit grandfather from the show "The white man took me from my family, did not allow me to speak my language, beat me and did not allow me to vote, and worst of all...... He did not let me smile in photos"
I don't mean any of this as racist or disrespectful and I hope this is a nuanced comment for consideration and not a kneeejerk reaction or evidence of my subconscious biases run wild.
And since PBS has backed away from making episodes like these.
Offensiveness of difficultly in pronouncing native Alaskan name - I believe this would be grouped under the umbrella of something like "linguistic imperialism" by people of particular political bents, which is an issue that at least heavily relates to politics.
Land acknowledgements - As far as I can tell, these have always been politicized because they originated "with indigenous Australian political movements and the arts" at least according to Wikipedia. I don't know much about the subject
Rude clueless white trope - I think this is to some extent a "positive" inversion of the "noble savage" trope, which Wikipedia tells me was historically political.
They have several shows that depict interracial marriages, while some people might try to take this as a political statement, most of us would not see it that way.
In a similar vein, I don't see how pronouncing names correctly could be a political issue.
I would also agree with you that pronouncing names generally is not (and largely probably should not be) a political topic, but that it necessarily is in this context because of it being included in a show about native Alaskans. If the teacher were inuit, or the student also white, or it was presented a simple misunderstanding along the lines of "can I call you T" "No please don't" "okay sorry I'll do my best" it would not be "political". Because it's in this show in this context and explicitly connected to previous abuses of native people being made to use "white names", my contention is that the creators of the show intend for it to be political .
Imagine not finding it disrespectful for your teacher to just completely ignore and disrespect your heritage and you're expected to just accept it and be totally OK with it.
IMO kids should be taught to be proud of their names. Apparently, that's a political stance.
I have many coworkers who I have trouble saying their names. I try as best as I can to say their names and be as respectful as possible. I wouldn't just go "I can't say your name, so you're just T now."
I find, if we strip this from the colonial context, or remove it from the racial context entirely (this is now a conversation between two Han Chinese people of the same social class, for example) there is some relationship between what I perceive to be an increasing focus on the critical importance of a child being called their exact name and no abbreviation, mispronunciation, standard nickname, or contextually assigned nickname, to be a symptom of an American hyper individualism and "rights culture".
As an aside I have been told by more than one person with a foreign name before even attempting their name that they would prefer I just call them an Americanized abbreviation of their name for convenience. Obviously I want to try to do what they would like, but if they were to insist on a name I struggled with, I would consider them to be a generally annoying person.
It is literally someone over you stripping you of your own choice of identity.
Even if we removed the idea of teacher/student relationship from this, are you still fine with people just arbitrarily renaming you? That someone respects you so little they won't even respect your own choice in name, that's fine?
I'm absolutely fine with someone who has a name which could be difficult to pronounce in the local language choosing to go with another name. It is their choice. That's the big difference. They're choosing to go by that name in those contexts. It wasn't just arbitrarily chosen for them.
Another example of this: when Mr. Rogers invited an African American neighbor to share his pool. It certainly wasn't widely agreed upon at the time.
I disagree that this is a useful or accurate way to engage in discussion about an entirely different and specific subject in an entirely different context. The only way they are related is with this "chain of social progress" framework, and even within that framework, they are not the same issue.
I perceive it to be a dismissive approach which shuts down conversation, and I think it's clear when viewed plainly in the opposite direction: "If you have concerns with any of the political messaging in children's shows, you would not allow a person of a different race into your swimming pool", or in a slightly different way, "If you have concerns about this you are explicitly the "bad guy"".
The way that they are related is that PBS childrens' shows deliberately address political content, and have done so for many years, and that is both important and good that they do so.
Where I might disagree with you, if I understand you correctly, is in how applicable your comment is as a response to my mine. At the outset I attempted to communicate that some of the things that the most likely to be outraged people would take issue with (the importance of exercising the right to vote - especially if your ancestors didn't enjoy the right) are pretty universally accepted and even presenting it without nuance inside of a children's show is acceptable because it is done so with a positive focus (be involved in the democratic process).
If I misunderstood you I apologize.
So we shouldn't talk about the 19th Amendment[0] because it's no longer an issue because your mom, sister, wife and daughter are now allowed to vote? As such, we should actively stop talking about the fact that there was ~150 years of activism, protest and discussion before half the population was "allowed" to participate in the political life of the US?
Is that your contention? If not, claiming that we should ignore those same issues around the right of indigenous peoples to vote seems more than a little hypocritical.
Your thoughts on this would be appreciated. Thanks!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
The original premise of the first comment I replied to was that PBS kids programming does not include political content, and I wanted to provide examples of two kinds of political content it included.
I don't in any way blame you for misunderstanding what I was trying to say, because I think a lot of people who read my comment did based on the negative point score (?) it ended up with. I think that we (and I include myself in this we) tend to jump past the specific content of a response, and only "hear" the tone of the response and presume intention from it. This isn't necessary an ineffective strategy online where there's a Tsunami of legitimately (from my perspective) evil positions (some of which I previously held and now am ashamed of, shout out God) and the odds are that a person (or bot or person working for an influence campaign) stating anything other than complete excited agreement is probably trying to convince people they should also hold a particular evil view.
The trouble is, this tends to kill nuanced conversation. I get it, I'd be furious if I thought the person I was replying to online was telling me they don't want me to be able to vote, but it's entirely possible that's not what they're saying.
Another example might be "How many Jewish people died in the Holocaust". If you asked me this I would answer, based on my limited knowledge "Somewhere between five and a half and six and a half million, probably closer to six.". I would do better socially if I simply said "like six million what a terrible tragedy", but my goal wouldn't be honesty it'd be social positioning. I understand that most people who don't instantly say "six million what a terrible tragedy" are doing so because they are trying to do an evil thing (Holocaust denial/revisionism), but that's not the only possible reason someone could do it.
I hope this makes sense.
Fair enough. However, you didn't really (at least IMHO) make that much of a contrast, especially considering the "contrasting" example (a teacher misnaming their student because they can't even be bothered to try pronouncing their name properly). You've significantly clarified that in the comment to which I'm currently replying -- and thank you!
>I think that we (and I include myself in this we) tend to jump past the specific content of a response, and only "hear" the tone of the response and presume intention from it.
That said, the negative reaction to your comment[0] isn't all that surprising, given what appears to be the tone you've taken.
While the HN guidelines clearly state that one should try to see the comments of others in the best possible light (and I tried to do so -- which is why I asked about it), but there's a more universal idea: who you are -- at least as far as others are concerned -- is how you are perceived by those others.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be true to yourself and your principles. Rather the opposite. That said, it might not be a bad idea to try and see how others might perceive you based on what you write.
I am emphatically not telling you what to do here. Rather, I'm just pointing out that others likely don't see the decent, fair-minded person you consider yourself to be -- because all they have to go on is what's right in front of them.
https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
Next you're going to tell me the New York Times has a liberal bias, right? Save it.
The “left” in terms of voters is against the genocide in Gaza and for socialist policies and candidates like Mamdani. Plenty of polls and evidence supports this.
NYT undid their endorsement policy to specifically Not endorse mamdani and is very biased against Palestine. Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.
In terms of mainstream news sources, I consider the Guardian US to be a reasonable big tent news source for the center left.
NPR is centrist. They take no sides even if (imo) one is obviously correct.
NYT and WaPo is the ‘reasonable right’ (still report facts but with a right wing spin- see their billionaire owners).
Fox etc. are not news they are ‘entertainment’ and do not report facts and are a vile propaganda engine that must be destroyed
You’ve cherry-picked a few stories where the NYT leaned more right, but on the whole the NYT, WaPo, and NPR certainly lean liberal or left of the general American public. The point of labels like right,left, liberal, conservative, etc. are relative valuations to the general American public. Just because the NYT leans less to the left on issues you are more to the left on does not make the NYT right-leaning.
I am operating on: if they are to the right of mainstream democratic voters, those that won Mamdani the primary and overwhelmingly support Palestine, then they do not get to claim to be left wing.
Not only are "left" and "right" vague relative terms used to classify the electorate in the US, they also encompass a whole array of issues an things that aren't binaries that fit on the axis. Someone can be pro-Israel and yet overall of the left; just as someone can be very pro-Palestine and yet overall of the right. In fact on this particular issue this seems more and more common - the real divide is probably generational versus political. I recently heard a segment on the radio from a convervative evangelical bemoaning that their future leaders were increasingly "anti-Israel" and this was a huge problem.
In America, we simply roughly assign Democratic positions - left, Republican position - right. These are both really big tents. "Left" positions include support of candidates like Sanders or Mamdami but also in practice even stronger support for candidates like Clinton and Biden.
Arguing that someone is "on the right" simply because they don't support your candidate of choice is silly; it's sort of like the rightists out there arguing Trump is a liberal RINO because he doesn't support the bedrock conservative principle of free trade.
> Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.
NYT does make a show of having a "balanced" opinion panel and David Brooks is one of the token (2 of 11 in the source link) conservatives, but it seems strange to describe such a bland, anodyne person (also anti-Trump, by the way) as a blowhard. IIRC one of the complaints from the opinion editor that got fired for printing pro-Trump letters to the editor was that not one single columnist was pro-Trump and therefore obviously didn't represent any mainstream conservative audience.
edit: this was the nyt article I was thinking of: https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-...
Obviously NYT is rarely explicitly pro-Trump but they will very often give a liberal’s framing on right wing talking points.
For example, they ran the manufactured Claudine Gay story front page 10 days in a row. They give the “sensible liberal”s take on why trans people should not get healthcare. Article 3 today is pro tariffs.
But the value of pointing to things and saying they’re right or left or conservative or liberal is a relative valuation measured relative to the general American public. And relative to the general American public the NYT is liberal. Just because you are more liberal than the NYT doesn’t make the NYT conservative.
https://steveinskeep.substack.com/p/how-my-npr-colleague-fai...
> When I asked Uri, he said he “couldn’t care less” that I am not a Democrat. He said the important thing was the “aggregate”—exactly what his 87-0 misrepresented by leaving out people like me. While it’s widely believed that most mainstream journalists are Democrats, I’ve had colleagues that I was pretty sure were conservative (I don’t ask), and I’ve learned just since Uri’s article that I am one of several NPR hosts of “no party” registration.
To a broader point, viewpoint diversity != unbias. If I staff half a newspaper with Stalinists that doesn't mean the reporting is going to become more factual or the coverage less biased. If it's become a Republican party position to attack mainstream media, we shouldn't expect them to even be applying for these jobs.
It's like if you wanted a diversity of opinions designing a rocket so you decided to pull in flat earth's as well as new earth creationist. You're not getting a better rocket. Perhaps a better fireworks show, though.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-trump-bump-the-republican-fer...
That’s not true. It just matches your agenda which you feel is no agenda. Of course you are against getting rid of instruments of persuasion that agree with your world view.
In the end it’s better for you too. Government shouldn’t support media.
In particular, their kids programming is the absolute best. Nothing flashy or exciting, but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda. And the PBS kids apps are one of the few things I can hand to my kid worry-free. And the fact that it's money-free and ad-free to access in this modern age is a miracle.
The only people who could support this are not just wrong, they are people out of touch with reality. These are people who think public parks are a waste of space. Or that having nice things to share is elitist.