How NPR lost the public's trust

[Luvnit2]

(04-09-2024, 11:55 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: From an NPR employee of twenty-five years plus.

https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust


It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

He goes on to describe just how and why things went to had left at NPR.  I know several posters here listen to NPR, they used to be on my daily read list, but dropped off sometime around 2016 as I already had several left to hard left news sites I read daily (Guardian, HuffPo, Politico).  What I found most interesting his his repeating almost verbatim, my point about the media after Trump's election.

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.

NPR is hardly alone in this, but it's nice to see it being actually acknowledged by those inside the system.  The media made it personal, and in so doing became exactly what Trump had, previously incorrectly, described them as.

The article is an interesting read, I'd recommend reading the whole thing.

I used to be a huge CNN fan, then I slowly watched them go extreme left. NPR, Politico and others also went far left. I thought I read somewhere there are only 22% conservative journalists in the US. I understand liberals love the lack of balance, but is it really good for our country?