Contrary to the conservative spin over the years, I have found public broadcasting to be one of the least biased sources of headline news and information available. (For their national broadcasts at least - local ... can be hit or miss).
In particular, their kids programming is the absolute best. Nothing flashy or exciting, but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda. And the PBS kids apps are one of the few things I can hand to my kid worry-free. And the fact that it's money-free and ad-free to access in this modern age is a miracle.
The only people who could support this are not just wrong, they are people out of touch with reality. These are people who think public parks are a waste of space. Or that having nice things to share is elitist.
> one of the least biased sources of headline news and information available
I’m pretty sure that’s the fundamental problem they have with it. They want media whose content they control.
(All of this is about control/power, not making things nice or doing things right.)
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Why is that a problem?
Because it’s morally reprehensible and I don’t want my tax dollars used for that purpose that’s why. Clearly you do but fortunately we live in a democracy where you’re outnumbered.
Facts have a well known liberal bias
Thats expected. In functioning democracies state media is run for the purpose not profit. It doesnt have the corrupting influence of political money. PBS in the US could be so much better. Just look at what BBC is able to do in the UK.
> PBS in the US could be so much better.
PBS Newshour is pretty much the best/balanced news programming on US TV at this point. They take deeper dives into issues than most of the other shows out there. And then there's Frontline which is excellent and goes even deeper with a documentary format. The rest of PBS - there are a few good parts like Nova, but a lot of what plays on PBS stations these days is UK crime dramas - man, there seems to be a lot of mayhem going on in merry old England these days.
>PBS Newshour
Haven't watched this since I was a kid. Just scrubbed through the latest episode. I was surprised, it's not bad. Left-leaning to my eye, but FAR less so than any other left-leaning mainstream TV media I can think of. And as you point out, more substantial and meaningful coverage than you typically get anywhere else. I would be happy to encourage anyone to watch more PBS Newshour based on that
Is there a specific example of the left-leaning bias you can mention?
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias"
.. Stephen Colbert
The show had six guests on- 2 left, 1 right, 2 neutral(?) and 1 CIA deep state mouthpiece. The show gave mostly balanced coverage of every issue covered, but declined to dig into the Epstein issue beyond "Trump+Epstein", gave the deep-stater seven minutes to defend the CIA without meaningfully pressing into any of the other questions raised by the latest declassifications (such as HRC & DNC involvement in orchestrating Russiagate), flashed a debunked/misleading statistic on screen about Russians influencing the the 2020 election via social media, and gave a one-sided take on redistricting in Texas ignoring the side that says redistricting after a Census is normal and routine.
> such as HRC & DNC involvement in orchestrating Russiagate
I'm not trying to be dismissive of your viewpoint, but why should anyone bother speaking to this? Absolutely nothing new was divulged. It's not the media's responsibility to give airtime over every government press release.
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/declassified_d...
These documents don't really contain anything.
All you see are staffers at the Hillary campaign discussing the news of the Russian influence campaigns (which this report reiterates are real) and how they can use it for their campaign.
Nothing in here is novel or even that salacious. How is this newsworthy?
Texas already completed redistricting in 2021 after the most recent census (2020). They are only redrawing the maps again now because Trump is demanding an even more egregious gerrymander.
In that case I wish Newshour had made that detail plainer. I see now they lightly brush over it in the intro of the segment. Thank you for the clarification.
Is there much to say on Epstein besides "Trump+Epstein"?
Epstein was not some Darth Vader or Joker (The Dark Night version) or Commodus (from Gladiator) or Sauron or Voldemort type of villain who was openly villainous and did not have a public good side (either an actual good side or a front to try to hide his villainy).
Epstein was more a Han from Enter the Dragon kind of villain.
Epstein had a fairly extensive public good side (maybe real, maybe just a front, probably a mix of both) appearing as a legitimate businessman and a philanthropist.
A big part of his philanthropy was directed toward supporting scientific research, universities, and the arts. He liked to invite top people from particular fields, like physics and AI, to events on his island where they (the invited people) would discuss major scientific and philosophical issues from their field. Get an invite to one of those, and it was a chance to go spend a few days for free in a resort setting, participate in some pop science level discussions to keep the rich guy happy, and maybe try to talk him into funding your lab.
Because of this most of the time it isn't all that interesting when some famous person shows up in Epstein's documents.
It becomes interesting with Trump because he spent a lot of time using his opponent's Epstein connections against them in ways that made his followers come to believe any association with Epstein is practically proof that you are an active pedophile.
He did this even though he knew he himself had connections to Epstein (including to people who actually were part of Epstein's villain side). And now that's biting him.
> PBS Newshour is pretty much the best/balanced news programming on US TV at this point.
Ah yes, the news show that has a weekly politics round table that brings in a balanced approach to see issues from both sides: The side of an anti-Trump Democrat and the side of an anti-Trump Republican.
Good riddance!
How many pro-Trump Republicans actually want to engage in a fair round-table style debate?
This administration makes a point that they only do interviews with sources favorable to them. They can't opt out of the media and then pretend to be victims.
> How many pro-Trump Republicans actually want to engage in a fair round-table style debate?
There's plenty to pick from. The problem is that having someone effective in that position would anger the one people that PBS actually cares about, their donor class. It doesn't matter that Trump won the popular vote in the most recent election, they'll still go out of their way to ensure that the token conservative voice is against him.
> This administration makes a point that they only do interviews with sources favorable to them. They can't opt out of the media and then pretend to be victims.
This is the most accessible and transparent administration in decades, if not longer. The POTUS has held more interviews, with just about every national media organization, and regularly holds open ended press conferences with pools of reporters.
What you're describing is the previous administration which not only hand selected the reporters, they even gave Biden a cheat sheet of reporters (with pictures!) so he would know exactly who to call on: https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-defends-bidens-cheat-sh...
Is that your paragon of media transparency?
>There's plenty to pick from.
No there's not. Name three.
>This is the most accessible and transparent administration in decades, if not longer. The POTUS has held more interviews, with just about every national media organization, and regularly holds open ended press conferences with pools of reporters.
This is simply an absurd lie with no basis in reality, I really don't know why you even spouted it. It contradicts observable truth. Strange.
>Just at what BBC is able to do in the UK.
This is funny because BBC is a prime example of being a propaganda channel for the government of the day. And that's not new at all just look back at the coverage of the Troubles or the miners strikes in the 70s-80s.
Yes it's not on the level of CGTN or Russia Today but BBC is not neutral at all
https://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-how-biased-is-the-...
A lot of people are unable to see their own political bias; they look at BBC or Fox News and see “unbiased true reporting”.
I highly suggest using Ground News (ground.news) for a week or a month as your sole portal into news stories, and then use their features to analyze bias in your selection of news stories and outlets.
I use it regularly to try to offset my own biases.
I think comparing BBC new to fox news is a piss take.
of _course_ there is bias at the BBC. But to comparing it to Fox is uncharitable at best.
The comparison for something as openly partisan on the left as Fox News, in US media, would be something like Democracy Now! or maybe The Nation.
The thing is, though, there are a few components here: there's level of favorability toward a certain kind of politics, which some barely-popular left-leaning outlets roughly match Fox News on, plus propensity to lie and exaggerate. And there's reach.
Nothing left-partisan in the US that I'm aware of touches Fox on either of those latter fronts—propensity to just make shit up, and (certainly not) reach.
Nobody's putting Democracy Now! on in waiting rooms. Hell IDK maybe at Planned Parenthood, never been, wouldn't know, but not at a dentist's office or at the auto shop or what have you.
There are equivalents to Fox News on the Left (Fox News viewers think it's MSNBC because that's what Fox News and AM radio told them, LMFAO, no) in the US, in terms of level of commitment to supporting partisan causes. There's nothing like it as far as willingness to deviate from reality to do so, nor in reach. Nothing remotely close.
Also the Wikipedia Current Events portal [1]. It’s definitely biased by the Wikipedia editors decisions on what to add there (especially the “Topics in the News” box) but it gives a more or less neutral dump of the daily events.
It’s pretty much the only place I know to find news on all the conflicts that Western media tends to ignore.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Notably when I was checking the Current Events Portal for a while, most coverage of the Israel/Hamas war was sourced from Al Jazeera and it definitely felt biased. Checking it just now, it appears to be more balanced now.
At your recommendation I took a look at Ground News.
I'm not a fan of the continued reification of "left" and "right". I have heard conservatives lament that MAGA isn't truly conservative. I've heard economic reformers lament that liberal social policies are sucking the oxygen out of the room for real structural reform. In both cases the idea of a single "left" and "right" as a group, or even worse as the two sole options on the menu of how to think, is severely damaging to productive political dialogue.
Framing everything as left-vs-right is like doing PCA and taking only the first principal component - sure it might be contain some signal, but it flattens any nuance. Critically, it also pre-frames any debate into competing camps in a way that harms rather than serves. I would challenge groups like Ground News to offer other framings - why not "owners vs workers"? Why not "rural vs urban"? We should ask why they chose the framing they do. I have my own cynical opinion but I'll refrain from sharing.
It's also showing you Where and IF people are even talking about the issues in their bubbles.
I don't know about your suggested site, but I use foreign news for this. I have switched to "consuming news" [0] almost entirely from a variety of English-language foreign services.
All national media services have their own bias and propaganda, but if you switch them up it becomes obvious very quickly. It also means that I miss out on most of the US political noise [1], which is a benefit to my mental health [2].
[0] Hot/lukewarm take: "consuming news" is a waste of time, and should be minimized. This really hits you like a brick to the head when you see the stuff that foreign countries are obsessing about, and how tiny it feels to you. Guess what: your news media is filled with the same crap.
[1] I still get the foreign opinion on it, obviously, but this is usually pretty mild. Most countries don't care about the US nearly as much as US citizens think they do.
[2] If you think that CPB/NPR don't have bias, I strongly suggest that you try this. You're probably in a bubble, and an "international perspective" is something that most NPR listeners claim to value. Removing US media from my life eliminated a huge source of angst (particularly after 2016), and revealed that all of the major US media sources are various forms of hyper-polarized clownery.
I suspect most people who look at international media and think it's better are using rose-tinted glasses.
Indian media is broadly worse if anything, latin american media is a trip if you have any understanding of the complicated political landscape, Aus is central to the Murdoch news dynasty, and East asian media has lots of famously partisan organizations. Maybe middle eastern media, explicitly funded for soft power political goals or African media, which span the gamut from bloodthirsty factional rags to leftover colonial institutions to tightly controlled extensions of the state apparatus?
They're differently biased, but you can't escape consuming media critically. "Averaging" by listening to a lot of different perspectives is 1) a lot of effort and 2) also something that can (and is) manipulated by making sure there's lots of "both sides" messaging present.
> I suspect most people who look at international media and think it's better are using rose-tinted glasses....They're differently biased, but you can't escape consuming media critically.
I went out of my way to head off this exact criticism, but I guess I didn't put it in blinking, bold, 30 point font.
Again: every national media outlet has bias (indeed, every media outlet has bias). My experience is that it's pretty easy to notice when you switch your sources regularly.
It doesn't take me any effort to do this, and even if I hear a hyper-partisan take, it doesn't melt my brain. I go "oh weird, so that's what the Indian government thinks" -- which is still vastly preferable to hearing what some reporter at NPR or CNN or whatever thinks about what India thinks.
I've been a subscriber for a few months now and it's well worth it.
Ground News worries me because now we don't need to use our brains the app just tells me the bias! Ground News could be biased!
Leads to shallow discussion where all news sources are tossed out for bias leaving nothing (or what ground news wants you to listen to). God forbid we critically examine for ourselves the information we consume.
I don’t get the sense that Ground News is trying to influence what news stories I select; I think they are presenting metadata that allow me to look at the story from my preferred frame of reference and from the opposing frame of reference. I find it valuable; you might not.
I think that the media bias ratings on Ground News are slightly biased and the factuality ratings are highly biased, not intentionally but due to flawed methodology of their sources. I have contacted their support to raise that issue.
I still find the site tries really hard to make you aware of your own predilections, and I think it does well as that, and if you find yourself gravitating towards one set of sources you can always sample the “other side”.
I agree that left-right doesn’t capture the richness of American politics but for better or worse they are convenient labels for our two party system.
This makes 0 sense
Ground news links all of their sources on a per article basis and you can simply scroll left/right through each news source. And you can add your own sources!
You didn't address the meat of my argument. The sources are irrelevant. They try to tell you the media bias which can itself be biased and gamed and which (I think) leads to readers not critically examining sources for themselves.
If somebody is going to be uncritical I don't see how any of this actually helps, but that's totally on them.
I'm not going to argue with them saying that Fox News is right wing or that MSNBC is more left wing. "Duh".
Maybe we're looking at this from a different angle, or maybe we just use the service in different ways.
The "bias" part that is relevant is showing you the difference in headline and contents between dozens or hundreds or thousands based on historical leanings of the news org, and which ones are even reporting on a particular topic.
It's not saying a particular article leans a particular way, it's saying the source does.
In fairness to the BBC on the rare occasions they do cross paths with the government this happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry
I'm not sure anyone that is familiar with this has been able to take what they say seriously since because they are so clearly on such a short leash.
To quote David Mitchell - "news is a very small of the BBC...BBC is an organization that is loved around the world for its drama and stories and not just the ruddy news".
How is it not neutral ? I follow some of the news. They've criticized both Conservative and Labour governments. Of course there are problems like the whole Martin Bashir thing but recently I've seen the BBC be more self-critical than other private TV channels. If we're comparing mistakes from the past then in the 90s, Roger Ailes was molesting women behind locked doors. Lewd comments were the norm across several news rooms. Doesn't mean that all private media is bad.
>They've criticized both Conservative and Labour governments
this is really the main problem with the bbc. for example one week they publish a story talking about something horrible israel has done then the next they publish another seemingly taking their side on something. it just ends up annoying and confusing both sides instead of one
The BBC has routinely been called biased by all sides of the spectrum - it is effectively the best we are going to get in terms of neutrality.
It would help a lot if you would offer some points of comparison for which channels you think do a better job in this area.
The BBC is pro-Establishment rather than in favour of the government of the day. I.E. Strongly pro-EU / anti-Brexit. It's also decidedly pro-Woke.
I do think it is pro-establishment but as a remainer I was exasperated by both the outsized presence Mr Farage got on BBC programming and also the uncritical nature of the coverage of the post-Brexit negotations and treatment of dissenting MPs, so I am not convinced at all the BBC had a particularly pro-EU position.
I think you could argue it had a sort of pro-Cameron lean to it for a while simply because he initially positioned himself as quite a boring centrist, but I don't believe there was any policy alignment generally.
Less sure re: the scottish independence vote but I think in that case the BBC was sort of paralysed by what the outcome would mean for it, and that may have made it difficult for it to comprehensively handle.
BBC has unparalleled quality TV programming for both kids and adults, but their news channel has been compromised by conservative influence (namely the director Tim Davie) for a while now.
Channel 4 news is surprisingly now the better news source for actual events.
Channel 4 unfortunately doesn't have the breadth of news coverage (though they definitely have the depth) that the BBC has. They don't have anything like the local/regional news coverage and have to be very selective about what they report on. They're also 1 medium only (TV) whereas the BBC are TV, radio, and what is effectively the UK's biggest online newspaper.
They're also living on borrowed time. Channel 4 is publicly owned but completely self funded, largely through ad revenue. Ad revenue for TV is not what it used to be.
There's been serious consideration given to the idea of merging Channel 4 into the BBC to share admin costs but keep it editorially separate.
> PBS in the US could be so much better.
Do you have a specific grievance? How could it be better?
BBC is not 100% neutral on all issues. No one is. One could argue that it is less bad than the for-profit channels in the UK but no channel is without biase.
BBC is a bad example because they clearly cater to local politics and their monopoly on programming and news for large swaths of their country is not particularly healthy.
State media is inherently going to be pro-establishment and failures to report on their own internal scandals I think should give everyone pause about being all-in on something like the BBC.
Monopoly?
State media doesn’t have corrupting influence of POLITICAL money? It’s inheriting my political! Government media is the worse possible thing.
>Just at what BBC is able to do in the UK.
Every household that watches BBC in the UK needs to pay £174.50 ($230) a year. (the wording here has to be done carefully, let's not digress into being exact on who has to pay it)
Federal funding for public media distributed out to $1.54 per person in the US last year.
There's... uh... a bit of a difference in the national funding for the BBC and public media in the US.
Agreed. My argument was that US has a much stronger economy than the UK and clearly bigger state coffers. With proper funding there's no reason why state run media can't put out good quality stories and content. Not just news.
Every household that has a TV, regardless of their use of the BBC. I don't know why people who essentially use a TV as a monitor for games consoles need to pay it.
We don't.
True. I personally do (and I don't currently own a TV!) but I think non-payment is going to become a significant enough issue within the period of this parliament that we will likely see an end to the licence fee shortly after the 2030 election if not sooner.
> In particular, their kids programming is the absolute best. Nothing flashy or exciting, but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda.
I dunno, the Odd Squad has almost as much green screen as a Guardians of the Galaxy movie. If that's not flashy, I dunno. And Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman was pretty out there; a space ghost style host ordering kids around the streets of Boston.
Also, the reboot of CyberChase was pretty clearly on the Ag agenda, all about Organic this and that. Maybe that doesn't count as an Agenda because the department of agriculture was funding it.
Also, Sesame street has always been in the pocket of those letter and number sponsors.
FYI, Odd Squad was/is a Canadian kids TV show.
It really surprised me to learn this; it always felt so Ohio to me.
I believe GP was quite firmly tongue in cheek.
I was indeed unaware that the Odd Squad was foreign propaganda, but a lot of the stations broadcasting it were supported by CPB, so I think it's still fair to call it out as flashy, regardless of the location of my tongue with respect to my cheek. I think it's also fair to call out Guardians as Odd Squad for adults :P
You clearly have multiple kids… or a very niche set of entrainment you prefer.
Just one, but you know, I prefer to say a very rich set of entertainment. Although entrainment might be just as accurate. :)
The world of Daniel Tiger is the definition of a welfare state - too socialist for my taste.
Peg + Cat relies on numerology and emphasizes DEI above all else.
Alma’s Way is pro-illegal immigration and unbelievably on the nose about it.
I can keep going. Point is, PBS Kids should have been shutdown a long time ago.
/s
I agree. I swore off of cable news many years ago because they're ALL toxic. They all have to keep people watching so it's stuffed full of breathless journalism making you think something major is happening any moment now. We'd all be better served with NO 24/7 news networks at all. NPR is not breathless, and is very fair.
I hated Fox News because it's so full of lies. I hated CNN because it's making mountains out of molehills and manufactured outrage. MSNBC was less yellow, but it's still full of opinion shows engineered to make you upset. NPR didn't do that, ever. They'd say when democrats screwed up just as much as when republicans did. It was true.
> NPR didn't do that, ever.
Right now I'm drinking out of my NPR mug that I pay $12/month for. I've been a daily listener since college, it's my default radio station in the car, and when I road trip I like searching for the local station. But I disagree with this. There are a number of nationally syndicated shows (at least, in all the markets I've lived in) that I'd put in this category. 1A just off the top of my head. Reveal is another, but that's because their mission is to find things that need to be revealed and they're usually pretty upsetting.
Sorry, to be clear I was referring to programming labeled as news only, not non-news content. There's lots of opinion content, but they don't call it news, unlike cable news networks.
I didn't mean to say there's never incorrect or partisan content.
Losing PBS Kids will be a tragedy. One of the few high quality sources of kids' programming out there. So much of the commercial options are dreck.
+1. PBS Kids is a goldmine. Time to sails the high seas if you aren’t already :)
The other tragedy is the PBS Kids Games app on iOS and Android. It is chock full of educational games that tie into the various shows.
As a reminder, none of these are going away (yet). So far this only affects smaller member stations and the larger bottom lines of PBS and NPR.
Glad to hear that, thanks for clarifying!
I'm pretty sure it's because it's unbiased.
Do a mental exercise, if they had joined the MAGA loving trump train, would that have saved them?
Now you have your real answer. They're not going to fund anything unless it's a bunch of lackeys
Conservative here.
I wasn't very happy with the PBS defunding. One of their best shows was Frontline and the amount of just straight down the middle documentaries they did was great. For a lot of the issues that became very politicized, I would regularly turn to them for an unbiased view of what was going on.
I agree on the educational stuff as well. How many generations of kids grew up watching PBS kids shows? My parents donated regularly and supported PBS the whole time.
Hopefully they can continue, I'm sad to see such a pillar of goodness go away.
I’m socially liberal by American standards, but on the subject of government funding for media I feel like a small-c conservative. Government funded media faces constant pressure to become propaganda.
I’m rather looking forward to public radio programming that would strike you as liberally biased, now that public radio productions no longer have to please Republicans in government.
Do you have examples where PBS or NPR were forced by the government to spew maga talking points? You'd think that if public media in the US were busy pleasing Republicans all day and all night they wouldn't have had their funding cut
It's not like "spewing maga talking points" is the only way to show fealty — accepting Republican framing of issues suffices, such as "the national debt is a problem so the only option is to cut entitlements". The joke goes that "NPR stands for Nice Polite Republicans".
I look forward to at least some of public radio going full pinko commie since Republican as a group have spent so much time demonizing them. With the government funding gone, there's no point in trying to stay in Republican good graces when public radio's listeners and donors are elsewhere.
Frontline is one of the best (if not the best) current events/documentary shows on US television. It'd be a tragedy if it went away.
Your parents efforts, like many of the the good efforts to move humanity forward over many decades, have been thrown into the trash. The next generations of Americans will have social/educational gaps that CPB/PBS filled for educational, cultural, historical, and sociological reasons; not because they liked influencing little kids ideologically. And the future will suffer for it, as they say, if you don't learn it at home, society foots the bill to correct it.
> but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda.
I totally support public broadcasting of all stripes, and do not advocate for this POV at all, but ... there are people who claim the opposite. Sesame Street is 'full woke', apparently, because it has talked about skin color and race with muppets.
What many people consider normal... is 'full woke agenda' to others.
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What the hell does that have to do with PBS?
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Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
No more of this, please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
No more of this, please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've been breaking the site guidelines for a long time and we've asked you many times to stop:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44451861 (July 2025)
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If you keep this up, we are going to ban you—yea, even after 10 years. Please fix this.
Sesame Street used the term "rusty trombone" in a song by Oscar the Grouch about the wonderful things you can find in trash, written and performed 30 years before there is any documented use of the term "rusty trombone" to refer to a sex position.
>The term goes back to the 1970s or the late 1960s, and was invented by the puppeteers on Sesame Street. It's documented.
Where, exactly, is this "documented?"
Perhaps my Google(well, DDG, actually)-Fu is deficient as I was unable to find any links to "analingus with a reach around" associated with Sesame Street. The only broadcast media references I could find were radio and movies references from the 2000-2010 period.
As such, please do let me know where to find this documentation. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
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Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
No more of this, please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.
https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
Yeah yeah. If you want to find the Republicans in public broadcasting, look at the board members. Same thing happened with newspapers and local TV news after Bush 2 loosened media ownership rules.
Next you're going to tell me the New York Times has a liberal bias, right? Save it.
Is there some written work online that represents your viewpoint on the NYT? I'd genuinely like to read it. I'm a centrist person who can absolutely see that Fox is on the right. But, I can also see that NPR and NYT are on the left. It's hard for me to understand how someone could with any seriousness disagree. But I'm interested in reading more about your viewpoint on this.
“The Left” does not mean to the left of you personally. It’s like how there’s only two types of drivers, insane speeders and insane slowpokes and that’s true no matter how fast you drive :p
The “left” in terms of voters is against the genocide in Gaza and for socialist policies and candidates like Mamdani. Plenty of polls and evidence supports this.
NYT undid their endorsement policy to specifically Not endorse mamdani and is very biased against Palestine. Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.
In terms of mainstream news sources, I consider the Guardian US to be a reasonable big tent news source for the center left.
NPR is centrist. They take no sides even if (imo) one is obviously correct.
NYT and WaPo is the ‘reasonable right’ (still report facts but with a right wing spin- see their billionaire owners).
Fox etc. are not news they are ‘entertainment’ and do not report facts and are a vile propaganda engine that must be destroyed
The NYT is not right. WaPo is perhaps a touch more right than the NYT but both are left-leaning and liberal. NPR is centrist but its editorials lean liberal.
You’ve cherry-picked a few stories where the NYT leaned more right, but on the whole the NYT, WaPo, and NPR certainly lean liberal or left of the general American public. The point of labels like right,left, liberal, conservative, etc. are relative valuations to the general American public. Just because the NYT leans less to the left on issues you are more to the left on does not make the NYT right-leaning.
Picking more: they pushed HARD the Claudine Gay story, putting it on the front page ten consecutive days. That story was a manufactured right wing operation to oust her. They also are still very anti-trans.
I am operating on: if they are to the right of mainstream democratic voters, those that won Mamdani the primary and overwhelmingly support Palestine, then they do not get to claim to be left wing.
Yes, the NYT leans liberal. You can have your own political scale and that’s fine.
But the value of pointing to things and saying they’re right or left or conservative or liberal is a relative valuation measured relative to the general American public. And relative to the general American public the NYT is liberal. Just because you are more liberal than the NYT doesn’t make the NYT conservative.
For the record, Uri story is not corroborated and doesn't seem to be in good faith.
https://steveinskeep.substack.com/p/how-my-npr-colleague-fai...
> When I asked Uri, he said he “couldn’t care less” that I am not a Democrat. He said the important thing was the “aggregate”—exactly what his 87-0 misrepresented by leaving out people like me. While it’s widely believed that most mainstream journalists are Democrats, I’ve had colleagues that I was pretty sure were conservative (I don’t ask), and I’ve learned just since Uri’s article that I am one of several NPR hosts of “no party” registration.
To a broader point, viewpoint diversity != unbias. If I staff half a newspaper with Stalinists that doesn't mean the reporting is going to become more factual or the coverage less biased. If it's become a Republican party position to attack mainstream media, we shouldn't expect them to even be applying for these jobs.
Just because conservatives hate kids and don't want to be teachers/educators/work at universities doesn't mean it's biased or bad.
It's like if you wanted a diversity of opinions designing a rocket so you decided to pull in flat earth's as well as new earth creationist. You're not getting a better rocket. Perhaps a better fireworks show, though.
right on! down with DEI!
Yeah, because hiring qualified female, black, and queer people is exactly the same as hiring someone who hates what the job and what it's trying to accomplish.
> because conservatives hate kids
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-trump-bump-the-republican-fer...
Every parent reading this knows full well how much time their kid has spent watching PBS Kids and playing the many pretty-decent games on the PBS Kids app.
All free.
Donate. Recurring is better.
Apologies for the following snark - it's tragic, so this is more of a reaction comment:
> I have found public broadcasting to be one of the least biased sources of headline news and information available
> kids programming is the absolute best
Fixed that for you:
> I USED TO FIND public broadcasting provided the least biased sources of headline news and information available
> kids programming WAS the absolute best
CPB is going away, NPR and PBS are not.
Yet.
> Nothing flashy or exciting, but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda.
That’s not true. It just matches your agenda which you feel is no agenda. Of course you are against getting rid of instruments of persuasion that agree with your world view.
In the end it’s better for you too. Government shouldn’t support media.
>Contrary to the conservative spin over the years, I have found public broadcasting to be one of the least biased sources
Can we break this down?
You open with a effectively derogatory accusation about conservatives making things up…which I have no opinion on.
That immediately shows your own likely liberal bias and then you say you saw no problem with the programming.
Isn’t that exactly the issue? That you saw no issue and everyone that disagrees is just wrong?
How do you know? How would you know if CBP’s biases weren’t just your own?
Do you know the arguments against the biases of CPB, NPR, PBS from the people that can make their most effective arguments against those orgs, or do you know the lines of the people that already agree with you?
Jon Stewart Mill’s On Liberty has a great part about this… [It is not enough to know the refutations from your own teachers, you must learn them from the people that present them in their truest form].
btw I suggest avoid quotes for intralexual pretension... esp if you don't know how to spell his name. I agree with thy side though
Your argument is just assuming the (1) previous poster has liberal bias, (2) CPB has liberal bias, (3) previous poster is unable to recognize their own or CPB’s liberal bias.
Maybe these are true, but I don’t see the basis for it here.
> the conservative spin over the years
And this is a liberal site; regardless of how the “intellectuals” like to talk about ACKSHUALLY it’s bla which ends up being San Francisco liberal with more steps.
I consider my estimation to be two points of evidence. Along with the user’s post history of course.
One does not need to hold liberal bias to identify conservative spin.
The national stuff was okay to good. The Children’s programming was in general good.
The local stuff though was quite questionable. For example they’d support different causes or efforts by referencing a single poorly supported research paper. Usually those research papers supported some narrative. It could be homelessness, drug treatments, etc., however there was little if any scrutiny of the paper the whole effort or narrative was based on.
They also had annoying presenters like Kai Ryssdahl. He was insufferable but hardly the only one.
Also, despite being a public system, individual comp is high relative to their listeners', I'd say[1]. I'd guess most listeners would not imagine their comp being as high as it is, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Public_Radio
[1] In addition, those at the top enjoy perks like being invited to elite events, and the perks of schmoozing for donations. Those are experiences that are alien to the average listener.
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PBS and NPR don't have regional programming. They're national. Local, member stations provide regional content. You'd be comparing WETA to OETA.
I'm looking at your WETA TV guide and it is completely standard material. We've got kids cartoons, Bob Ross, some selections from BBC and Bloomberg, and Ask This Old House (one of my favorites). OETA has almost identical programming.
Where's the programming where they bully people about race and sex? Are you talking about that couple that give the good financial advice? Or maybe those cooks on America's Test Kitchen? I never did trust that Wishbone dog...
> Where's the programming where they bully people about race and sex? Are you talking about that couple that give the good financial advice? Or maybe those cooks on America's Test Kitchen? I never did trust that Wishbone dog...
Oh yes that must have been it. I suppose I'll keep voting for defunding.
Can you define what you mean by "racial and sexual hectoring" and provide an example or three?
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I asked what you mean. You're wasting all our time to drop a phrase that's completely meaningless on its own without defining it.
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What's the point in dropping that in the middle of a thread if not to participate in the discussion? I abide the HN guideline that asks us to assume the best, so I assume your intent is to be part of a discussion and not just stir shit up and bolt when someone takes you seriously and asks you to expand on your point of view.
Say what you mean or go away.
You don't have the necessary background to participate in the discussion. I posted my thoughts sincerely but I'm not holding a tutoring session.
> You don't have the necessary background to participate in the discussion.
Neither do you.
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I don't want to be "that guy", but I often find myself as the "intolerable lib" in some situations and the "intolerable con" in others, so here we go:
There is a degree of quasi-political messaging in PBS children's shows. I can say this because I've watched more hours than I'd like of several of them, but I'd like to focus on on Molly Of Denali. It's a good children's show about an inuit girl who lives in Alaska and teaches children general good morals and specifics of inuit and Alaskan culture.
When I say it's political, I mean that it makes points without nuance on historical and current issues which range from widely accepted and important ideas (example: They didn't let Native Alaskan People vote in the past, so it's important to exercise the right to vote now), to what I would consider less widely agreed upon and important ideas, such as it being deeply upsetting and disrespectful for a "white" teacher to call a native child "T", because she had trouble pronouncing his native name. Another example is them introducing the importance of "land acknowledgements" in a children's show. A final example is the "clueless white" trope wherein the offensive rude white visitor has to be educated by the wise natives over and over and over.
I'm not trying to say that any of these examples are "right" or "wrong", but they do represent "politics" in the mind of wide sections of the population.
This said I like the show and of course we need to fund public broadcasting, I would just prefer if we did our best to keep the most controversial stuff for when the kids are a bit older to make it a smaller target for outrage (from the right or left).
The most jarring part, to me personally, is the drastic shift in tone and presentation for injustices with wildly different levels of impact. Perhaps rudely, I think to myself in the voice of the Inuit grandfather from the show "The white man took me from my family, did not allow me to speak my language, beat me and did not allow me to vote, and worst of all...... He did not let me smile in photos"
I don't mean any of this as racist or disrespectful and I hope this is a nuanced comment for consideration and not a kneeejerk reaction or evidence of my subconscious biases run wild.
Counterpoint, when these episodes were first aired, these weren't viewed as political issues. Only in response to these ideas have they become politicized.
And since PBS has backed away from making episodes like these.
I might be missing what you mean, but I tried to explain as best as I could how I would understand these things to be "related to "politics" ".
Offensiveness of difficultly in pronouncing native Alaskan name - I believe this would be grouped under the umbrella of something like "linguistic imperialism" by people of particular political bents, which is an issue that at least heavily relates to politics.
Land acknowledgements - As far as I can tell, these have always been politicized because they originated "with indigenous Australian political movements and the arts" at least according to Wikipedia. I don't know much about the subject
Rude clueless white trope - I think this is to some extent a "positive" inversion of the "noble savage" trope, which Wikipedia tells me was historically political.
None of these things are inherently political unless you interpret them to be.
They have several shows that depict interracial marriages, while some people might try to take this as a political statement, most of us would not see it that way.
In a similar vein, I don't see how pronouncing names correctly could be a political issue.
I agree with you in that the question of something being "political" is inherently related to the context, and that some things some people might find political (like the importance of voting from my original comment) are not "political enough" to be something which shouldn't be in a children's show.
I would also agree with you that pronouncing names generally is not (and largely probably should not be) a political topic, but that it necessarily is in this context because of it being included in a show about native Alaskans. If the teacher were inuit, or the student also white, or it was presented a simple misunderstanding along the lines of "can I call you T" "No please don't" "okay sorry I'll do my best" it would not be "political". Because it's in this show in this context and explicitly connected to previous abuses of native people being made to use "white names", my contention is that the creators of the show intend for it to be political .
> When I say it's political, I mean that it makes points without nuance on historical and current issues which range from widely accepted and important ideas [...] to what I would consider less widely agreed upon and important ideas
Another example of this: when Mr. Rogers invited an African American neighbor to share his pool. It certainly wasn't widely agreed upon at the time.
I understand and sympathize with the desire to directly equate every current social issue no matter how small with a social issue from the past as part of a larger "chain of social progress" because I think it originates with the desire to correct past injustices and treat everyone with respect and decency.
I disagree that this is a useful or accurate way to engage in discussion about an entirely different and specific subject in an entirely different context. The only way they are related is with this "chain of social progress" framework, and even within that framework, they are not the same issue.
I perceive it to be a dismissive approach which shuts down conversation, and I think it's clear when viewed plainly in the opposite direction: "If you have concerns with any of the political messaging in children's shows, you would not allow a person of a different race into your swimming pool", or in a slightly different way, "If you have concerns about this you are explicitly the "bad guy"".
> The only way they are related is with this "chain of social progress" framework, and even within that framework, they are not the same issue.
The way that they are related is that PBS childrens' shows deliberately address political content, and have done so for many years, and that is both important and good that they do so.
I agree with you generally, but the two points I want to make are that these shows are messaging politically (I know you agree with this, and I appreciate you saying so as many others in this thread do not agree), and that this political messaging is not inherently good in and of itself, and must be evaluated on a case by case basis, both for the "correctness" of the political messaging, and for potential concerns of alienating audiences when a specific case is included in a children's program.
> such as it being deeply upsetting and disrespectful for a "white" teacher to call a native child "T", because she had trouble pronouncing his native name.
Imagine not finding it disrespectful for your teacher to just completely ignore and disrespect your heritage and you're expected to just accept it and be totally OK with it.
IMO kids should be taught to be proud of their names. Apparently, that's a political stance.
I have many coworkers who I have trouble saying their names. I try as best as I can to say their names and be as respectful as possible. I wouldn't just go "I can't say your name, so you're just T now."
I agree that it's generally important to respect other people and other cultures, both ethically because it is a ethical thing to do, and practically because it helps us all "get along".
I find, if we strip this from the colonial context, or remove it from the racial context entirely (this is now a conversation between two Han Chinese people of the same social class, for example) there is some relationship between what I perceive to be an increasing focus on the critical importance of a child being called their exact name and no abbreviation, mispronunciation, standard nickname, or contextually assigned nickname, to be a symptom of an American hyper individualism and "rights culture".
As an aside I have been told by more than one person with a foreign name before even attempting their name that they would prefer I just call them an Americanized abbreviation of their name for convenience. Obviously I want to try to do what they would like, but if they were to insist on a name I struggled with, I would consider them to be a generally annoying person.
Wanting to be called your name and not liking having a person in a superior position arbitrarily rename you as an example of "American hyper individualism". Incredible.
It is literally someone over you stripping you of your own choice of identity.
Even if we removed the idea of teacher/student relationship from this, are you still fine with people just arbitrarily renaming you? That someone respects you so little they won't even respect your own choice in name, that's fine?
I'm absolutely fine with someone who has a name which could be difficult to pronounce in the local language choosing to go with another name. It is their choice. That's the big difference. They're choosing to go by that name in those contexts. It wasn't just arbitrarily chosen for them.
It's impossible to make self or mind small enough to be safe from regressives.
I appreciate the poetic response and think that the point I believe you're making: "people who are inclined to criticize anything which isn't exactly as they'd like it will never be pleased, so you can't spend all of your time trying to please them." is correct and useful generally.
Where I might disagree with you, if I understand you correctly, is in how applicable your comment is as a response to my mine. At the outset I attempted to communicate that some of the things that the most likely to be outraged people would take issue with (the importance of exercising the right to vote - especially if your ancestors didn't enjoy the right) are pretty universally accepted and even presenting it without nuance inside of a children's show is acceptable because it is done so with a positive focus (be involved in the democratic process).
If I misunderstood you I apologize.
>the importance of exercising the right to vote - especially if your ancestors didn't enjoy the right
So we shouldn't talk about the 19th Amendment[0] because it's no longer an issue because your mom, sister, wife and daughter are now allowed to vote? As such, we should actively stop talking about the fact that there was ~150 years of activism, protest and discussion before half the population was "allowed" to participate in the political life of the US?
Is that your contention? If not, claiming that we should ignore those same issues around the right of indigenous peoples to vote seems more than a little hypocritical.
Your thoughts on this would be appreciated. Thanks!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...