This morning as per my routine, I was driving our exchange student to school and listening to the radio. It's always a choice between Dave, Shelly, and Chainsaw (a humorous morning show on a rock station) or KPBS radio broadcasting NPR. Today NPR won, and I'm both glad and bothered that it did.
For a long time I've been a fan of NPR because they are sticklers for journalistic excellence and avoid the AM talk radio tendency to be very partisan and loud. Also, it relaxes me and I get to sound like I know what's going on in the world without reading. The reason that I'm bothered that I was listening today is, that I heard evidence that they are not as unbiased as I previously thought.
The topic was the purchasing of 'toxic assets' by private investors for a fraction of their value with the federal government being 'on the hook' for the 'lion's share'. I use quotes here because those were the actual phrases used in context. They also spoke of how the American people are angry, at executives at corporations like AIG getting paid bonuses with the bailout money, reporting that "Obama is sensitive" to the feelings of the American people, but that we can't legislate out of anger.
All of these quotes showing a degree of bias, but I didn't really catch them until the reporter slipped in calling it a "bank bailout", catching himself and correcting it to "federal economic rescue plan". At that point it was just too obvious to ignore anymore. Anytime the same 'stimulus' package was referred to when Bush was in office, it was called a bank bailout, emphasizing the one's profiting from the money were banks and bank executives. Now, it's no longer a bank bailout, but a 'rescue plan'.
5 comments:
I had to laugh the other day. I was listening to talk radio(an obviously conservative station) and they started to play speech flubs that Obama has done. The one that shocked me the most and made me laugh(and wonder why he hasn't been fun of by the media?)was were he was lamenting that he wasn't able to visit all 57 states while campaigning......yes you read that right....57. Usually not one to care one way or another about polotics(they bore me to tears....I know I am a bad person)but that made me nervous that the president of the US could make a flub like that!
I love NPR. Certainly the reporters have individual biases. They probably work for NPR because they love to follow current events in their field and are very concerned citizens. Most people with these attributes are simply called 'opinionated.' Opiniated reporters are deemed 'biased.' Is this evidence of institutional bias? Maybe not.
I didn't hear the bit you're talking about, but it seems to be paraphrasing Obama's remarks about legislating out of anger. He said something like that recently. I just wonder if the reporter was summarizing Obama's remarks, or if he was advocating the view that the remarks expressed.
I agree you have to listen to NPR with a grain of salt. The BBC kept saying "SO CALLED toxic assests" because I think they could see them for what they truly were.
NPR isn't as blatant and loud in their biases, but its about on par with academia in terms of ideology. It makes sense is some ways, and is irritating in others. I don't listen to it much, but its bias comes through to me because I hear my wife talk about things she hears. When she explains what the story was about it's like listening to the Rachel Maddow show, and the wife barely realizes it.
Dave, Shelly, and Chainsaw are lame alcoholics. You should listen to the Mikey Show. He's a recovering alcoholic and much more fun.
Think of it this way. Our country is like a bird. It needs both a right wing and a left wing to fly... and run into windows.
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