It’s not just NPR. Partisanship in media has been a colossal turnoff for me, and it’s on both sides of the aisle, for that matter.
I used to subscribe to The Atlantic and cancelled my subscription after it kept running articles arguing for Obama. I don’t even particularly have a problem with Obama, but I’m not going to pay someone to feed me political advocacy garbage.
I cancelled The Economist more because it was a firehose – I needed maybe one article a month on hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, not several articles per issue – but it was grating whenever it decided to put something political in relating to the US; British political positions didn’t always align with my American ones.
I used to read the New York Times and Washington Post – albeit not subscribe – but their coverage of Trump was horrific, and really discouraged me from wanting to read them. I don’t like Trump at all, but they disliked him so much that they were willing to drop their journalistic standards to try to get more-exciting stories about him. And they didn’t need to do so. They had plenty of legitimate fodder to complain about. And frankly, I don’t really want to read about Trump on a daily basis. Trump isn’t the entire world.
And NPR is probably one of the less politicized sources out there.
It’s never going to be absolutely possible to have a perfectly detached position, but I really feel that the media was better prior to the social media era. I thought that maybe it might just be that I was suffering from the gilding of history, but I went back and looked at The Guardian’s headlines when Cameron was elected in 2010, and it was pretty sedate and reasonable, no “death of democracy” type stuff of the sort that it was running about Johnson.
Like, if I want political advocacy, I can get all I want for free and in enormous volume online. I don’t need to pay anyone to get that for me. What I’d like a journalist to do, if I’m going to pay them, is to filter out overwrought hand-wringing, nonsense claims, and all that, preferably talk about new and interesting things that I didn’t know about. I don’t especially want even more political advocacy. I don’t want a 24/7 factcheck of Alex Jones, because I ignore Alex Jones, and don’t really want the subscriptions that I pay for injecting Alex Jones into my life.
It’s not just NPR. Partisanship in media has been a colossal turnoff for me, and it’s on both sides of the aisle, for that matter.
I used to subscribe to The Atlantic and cancelled my subscription after it kept running articles arguing for Obama. I don’t even particularly have a problem with Obama, but I’m not going to pay someone to feed me political advocacy garbage.
I cancelled The Economist more because it was a firehose – I needed maybe one article a month on hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, not several articles per issue – but it was grating whenever it decided to put something political in relating to the US; British political positions didn’t always align with my American ones.
I used to read the New York Times and Washington Post – albeit not subscribe – but their coverage of Trump was horrific, and really discouraged me from wanting to read them. I don’t like Trump at all, but they disliked him so much that they were willing to drop their journalistic standards to try to get more-exciting stories about him. And they didn’t need to do so. They had plenty of legitimate fodder to complain about. And frankly, I don’t really want to read about Trump on a daily basis. Trump isn’t the entire world.
And NPR is probably one of the less politicized sources out there.
It’s never going to be absolutely possible to have a perfectly detached position, but I really feel that the media was better prior to the social media era. I thought that maybe it might just be that I was suffering from the gilding of history, but I went back and looked at The Guardian’s headlines when Cameron was elected in 2010, and it was pretty sedate and reasonable, no “death of democracy” type stuff of the sort that it was running about Johnson.
Like, if I want political advocacy, I can get all I want for free and in enormous volume online. I don’t need to pay anyone to get that for me. What I’d like a journalist to do, if I’m going to pay them, is to filter out overwrought hand-wringing, nonsense claims, and all that, preferably talk about new and interesting things that I didn’t know about. I don’t especially want even more political advocacy. I don’t want a 24/7 factcheck of Alex Jones, because I ignore Alex Jones, and don’t really want the subscriptions that I pay for injecting Alex Jones into my life.