[AssertErNullNPE]

Are you sure that article wasn't an interview with an author who wrote a book that took that stance? Having a conversation with someone who has arguably extremist views is very different from holding that extremist view.

[nataliste]

Funny, I was told "if a Nazi sits down at a table of ten people, there are eleven Nazis at that table" for years (and in particular by NPR listeners), but suddenly there's now a use/mention distinction for platforming extremist views when it's your side that does it? Color me shocked at the hypocrisy.

[triceratops]

> platforming extremist views when it's your side that does it?

Irony it's called "viewpoint diversity" when your side does it, and "platforming extremist views" when the other side does it.

[kaishiro]

Sorry, but exactly what point are you trying to make here? Are you suggesting that NPR has never interviewed - say - Christian fundamentalists (they have)? Are you suggesting that they should interview more of them? What, precisely, would make you happy here?

[nataliste]

As I've been told for the last decade, "everything is political" therefore NPR can't provide unbiased or neutral coverage of anything, therefore there should be no federal funding of NPR or PBS. Ideologues and corpirations donate more than enough money to sustain both without the pretense of impartiality provided by federal funding.

[kaishiro]

If "everything is political", then eliminating federal funding from NPR and PBS doesn’t solve the problem - it guarantees that only corporate and ideological interests shape the narrative. Public funding exists not to claim perfect neutrality, but to create a space where journalism isn’t entirely driven by profit motives or partisan agendas. Strip that away, and you’re not removing bias - you’re institutionalizing it.

[nataliste]

Journalism, and specifically NPR, is already driven entirely by corporate and ideological interests. Your supposition that federal funding helps remove bias is trivially disproven by the last decade of coverage of NPR, where I literally (literally!) have not been able to turn it on without race, gender, or Trump being mentioned within a minute (it became a game). To be fair, there was one exception. and that was a replay of a David Foster Wallace interview from 2003. Which was immediately followed by a current interview with two women talking about white men's obsession with Infinite Jest and how their podcast was helping deconstruct toxic masculinity or something like that. The comparison in quality was stark.

The time for caring about and preserving civic-level notions of neutrality and objectivity was a decade ago. I don't care anymore. If wingnuts want to unduly influence Americans through broadcasting, they can do it like everyone else--without taxpayer dollars.

[kaishiro]

If your position is "I don't care anymore", then you're not making a principled argument - you're venting. That's fine, just don't pretend it's a policy stance.

[next_xibalba]

Is it? Show me a similarly soft pedaled, deferential NPR interview of a right wing extremist.

Someone else in this thread posted a diffed view of the interview demonstrating how NPR reshaped the article a week after publication. Very, very instructive.

[greenie_beans]

> Show me a similarly soft pedaled, deferential NPR interview of a right wing extremist.

not making a very good argument with this

[McGlockenshire]

> Show me a similarly soft pedaled, deferential NPR interview of a right wing extremist.

Steve Inskeep did 30 minutes with Steve Bannon this week. They did a piece with Chris Rufo yesterday (he's the guy that got right wing media to start freaking out about CRT, and then DEI). But please, do go on clutching your pearls about the WORST POSSIBLE THING EVER: PROPERTY DAMAGE!! Nope, not civil rights violations or gleefully platforming some of the most objectively harmful viewpoints on modern politics, nope, it's PROPERTY DAMAGE that is absolutely the most important possible thing to get upset about.

[zmgsabst]

Harvard and UNC lost at the Supreme Court when sued over their DEI programs being illegal discrimination.

Comparing calling out that illegal bigotry to people trying to justify looting is precisely what people are saying is biased.