I was previously a long time listener and donator to NPR (similarly for NYT), but their progressive bias for the last decade has seriously degraded the quality of their reporting. I remember when their articles and radio coverage was much more balanced.

For that, I think The Economist is much better. It has more direct reporting, with seemingly less editorializing. Try their news in brief to keep up.

I think the main reason I've pulled back from the consuming mainstream media is directly tied with the change in reporting style rather than the news fundamentally being more depressing or anxiety-inducing.

For example, I was listening to Left Right and Center until a few weeks ago when Sarah Isgur departed. The show really should have been called Left Left and Center, because if anything Sarah Isgur was more center leaning while Steve Inskeep is definitely quite progressive. Now the show feels even more lopsided. It's as if journalists are so entrenched with their point of view that they can't see the wider landscape. I truly wonder if social media has clouded journalists' perception as well, which might be contributing to this phenomenon.

I really do want balanced coverage. I want to know what each side of the political debate actually thinks, from their own mouth. It turns out that a lot of the people I was indoctrinated to vilify, were in fact people who believed differently than I did, but certainly weren't so toxic as to be simply pilloried for their beliefs. That approach is tiresome and I've lost hope that such reporting will return. That's why I've given up.

What I've observed is similar to what you describe, but in my view the cause is different. NPR's reporting is much the same as it has always been; what's happened is there has been a huge shift to the far right the last decade, and reporting on where the right used to be now looks like left leaning bias.

The same is not true of the left. What's labeled "progressive" really isn't; the left has moved right too. 15 years ago, the US was on the verge of passing universal healthcare. That's not even on the radar today.

Media orcs have not all kept up with these changes. Something that was "left right and center in 2015, would look as though it was mostly leftist today, because the ground has moved.

You're assuming the left stays static. The left lost interest in economic issues after 1990 and shifted to cultural issues. The modern Democrats are not more right wing than they used to be unless you ignore all the issues they've taken up that wouldn't have been recognized by Bill Clinton era Democrats.

Totally disagree. The left has absolutely moved further right.

Firstly, the example above with healthcare.

Secondly, deregulating things like zoning are rather popular with the modern left, and generally free-market approaches to housing. Dems are less friendly to unions than they were, lip service aside.

I don't think there's much that wouldn't be recognizable to a Clinton dem. The identity politics around trans rights etc are the same civil rights the left has been supporting for a century. Abortion is the same debate we've been having since the 60s.

The left has either not changed stance, or moved right, on all issues.

We're in agreement. The mainstream left abandoned their economic agenda because their economic agenda was stupid and as the 20th century progressed that became ever clearer, until the steady collapse of the USSR in the 1980s finally made even the dimmest of voters lose their appetite for it.

So by 1990 the left lost interest in economics, and began the pivot to race/gender/sexual intersectionalism. They even explicitly rebranded themselves. Clinton's Third Way campaign was adopted with vigor by Tony Blair, who even renamed his party New Labour to emphasize the break with the past. And Third Way/New Labour leftism was not particularly committed to intersectionalism at that time, even though such tendencies did exist on the left since the 1950s. In fact intersectionalism was rejected by mainstream left wing parties - look at the treatment of Sister Souljah then vs what would happen now - but it kept ramping up and by 2012 that had turned into full blown culture war. The new left went all-in on things like "defund the police" that would have been mystifying to a typical 1950s leftist.

None of this means the left moved right, unless you only care about economics in which case it's true. They simply dropped one set of causes and picked up another, with exactly the same kinds of tactics and aggression that characterized their campaigns 100 years ago.

NPR is definitely not the same as it was in 2005-2010. I was a heavy listener and donated for many years. But, now most of the time I have to turn it off - too much virtue signaling over critical thinking.

Do you have an example?

I'm not saying you're doing this, but often when people say something is "virtue signalling" it's actually "critical thinking but with either base values or a conclusion I do not agree with"

Actually, it's exactly that: they completely omit the values or conclusions that they don't agree with or understand. I hear it every day. They dismiss half of the country as 'extremist', 'far-right', 'uneducated' - those are the actual words I heard used today to describe the types of people who make up over half of my neighborhood.

A couple of days ago, I heard a host and a reporter literally mock and make fun of RFK Jr. when they should have been trying to educate him and his supporters. Trust in institutions (including the news) has completely eroded, and instead of trying to build it back, they double down on what hasn't worked.

This is exactly a good example though, because they wouldn't have made fun of a right wing politician way back when- RFK jr is just that ridiculous. Linking vaccines to autism, stopping vaccine and cancer research which is going to cost millions of lives, and more.

You're asking the impossible, such a person can't be reasoned with, and will certainly not listen to education from NPR. Mocking is the correct response. To me, your example exactly underlies the point that NPR didn't get more extreme, but the news they cover did.

Take that thought process to the logical conclusion and you may see why people on the right are justified in being scared of you. I.e. what happens when most people are incapable of following your "reasonable" rules? Virtue Signaling leads to Pharisees which leads to Totalitarianism

> what happens when most people are incapable of following your "reasonable" rules?

The black death returns? I am only half joking. RFK jr believes in miasma theory of illness and thinks the germs theory is wrong. If all of us start to act like him, we will have millions of deaths. I vehemently dislike the "believe in science" ~crowd~ [e: I should say dogma], and on other issues I've said virtually the same thing as you've said in this comment.

But not here. If we truly can't agree that something as stupid as reviving the miasma theory of illness ought to be mocked, then we are lost.

> For that, I think The Economist is much better. It has more direct reporting, with seemingly less editorializing.

I appreciate The Economist, but I find that they do editorialize, they're just up front about it. They use the word "should" regularly. They have a pretty clear and consistent viewpoint advocating for classical liberalism, but they're honest and unashamed about having a stance.

> I remember when their articles and radio coverage was much more balanced. For that, I think The Economist is much better. It has more direct reporting, with seemingly less editorializing.

The Economist definitely has bias. All reality has a bias. You may not like some topics, that's fair. But to call a report "good journalism", it should exclude fabrications and baseless accusations. The latter are tools of propaganda.

The last decade has brought us Trump, which has broken countless political (and other) norms -- that has made passive observation a lot more challenging.

I've listened to NPR for decades and the only thing I've noticed as far as "progressivism" is that the weekends include shows that speak to non-white audiences (Black and Latino).

I'm curious as to what you think was "too progressive".

I prefer GroundNews and in particular the blindspot. I gave up on NPR around 2022 because it was pushing extremely biased takes. I say this as someone whose news came primarily via NPR from ~1993-2022. I just can't stand them anymore. If there's a way to tie literally everything to some stupid social movement, that's all they can do nowadays. The best thing our local NPR station does is run BBC very early in the morning.

A bit ironic that their news for today offer another means of reducing anxiety - https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5529325

Sharing it because it hasn't been posted yet but CNN has a similar thing: https://lite.cnn.com

So does CBC:

https://www.cbc.ca/lite/

In a similar vein, text TV news has been repopularized in Sweden lately.

https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100

You're describing rss feeds.

I’ve been using The Economist’s “The World in Brief”, which sounds like much the same thing. I’m six weeks in to the news diet, and am much less angry all the time.

I used to read the UK Financial Times ("the pink 'un") as a source of world news rather than fincancial news - it was always a lot more sober and objective.

I thought the "pink 'un" was a horse racing paper or odds sheet? I get the color of the paper is the same.

I see there is a sporting / football newspaper (or former newspaper - now web site) also called the pink 'un, and apparently there had also been a green 'un focusing on horse racing, but growing up in the UK I had never head of these.

The FT post-dates the original pink 'un sporting newspaper, but was also, and still is, commonly referred to as "the pink 'un".

The FT isn't objective. It doesn't even pretend it's objective these days. It literally flew the EU flag outside its offices for years after the UK left, and its editorial line was exactly what you'd expect.

Sitting on the fence, giving equal time to both sides, and ignoring reality is not being objective.

If being a member of the EU was objectively a benefit to most UK businesses then that is what I would hope to read in an FT editorial, not some Kumbaya "it's all good, we have no opinion".

The FT has a bias towards Finance of course, but it is read by people who make financial decisions based on world economic events and these people need it to represent reality.

The reason they were pro-EU is that there were no realistic arguments where Brexit would benefit The UK’s businesses, finance sector or economy as a whole.

In the past, yes, the FT was like that. But not for a long time. It's like thinking professional economists all read The Economist. I know professional investors, a few of them read the WSJ but not yet met one who cared about what the FT think. Mostly they get info from more specialized publications.

They were pro-EU for ideological reasons. Leaving had no effect on the British economy, which isn't what they predicted.

> Leaving had no effect on the British economy

I think this statement contradicts reality somewhat.

Look up the data for yourself. Imports/exports glitched briefly then went right back to their prior levels and trends. There's no observable Brexit impact in economic performance: Britain has continued to roughly follow its neighbours in terms of GDP growth etc.

The UK has suffered massively due to Brexit - many industries such as construction and hospitality (hotels, restaurants) are still heavily understaffed due to the fallout of foreigners leaving.

Is any news site these days even pretending to be objective? The best news sites these days are aggregating all the biased sources together and presenting the full spectrum.

Something like Ground News, but even there I'm not sure I trust their algorithmic weighing.

But maybe you should be angry? Anger is a great motivator for people to change governments and policies.

Maybe the real source of anxiety is people have justified anger but no where to direct the anger to affect change?

Maybe it is better to keep reading the news and organize people to make it so we do not have any bad news to report.

Thanks. I'm not a USian but thats a nice summary to have. I might whip up a quick greasemonkey script to strip out the links so it's just a set of simple summaries.

Ofc NPR may not be reliable, or even exist, soon due to Trump's retaliatory budget cuts. But meanwhile, nicw to have. Thanks again.

You missed the point.

Part of the anxiety is the bias of the media and their attempts to get attention by sensationalizing the news, and often by lying.

Having the lies in text without photos does not fix the issue.

Edit: if you find yourself disagree, then it's because of your political position. I did not see it was NPR when posting this. replace NPR with Fox News and then read my comment again, see how you feel.

>if you find yourself disagree, then it's because of your political position

How does your political leanings affect how you react to clickbait? NPR makes clickbait, Fox makes clickbait. Images make it easier but text can still be effective.

I don't see the spin here. Yes, news across the spectrum is lying more and more. Or at least severly downplaying some heinous events. That shouldn't be a partisan stance.

>No comments section or any other distractions.

I think in this age of information wars where my country's administration is unironically posting memes about their policy: it's almost as important to be informed of the "pulse" people have towards news as it is to understand the news itself. In a increasingly post-truth society, being informed of reality isn't enough.