chenicus rex

Public media is essential to American life — without public radio, the reactionaries among us will hold a monopoly on the airwaves.

this (^^) is the best-put I have heard this. 

people bitch about npr having “bias” —-

no person is without bias and as such, every story from any journalist has some implicit bias, natürlich, and on a more macro-scale, nothing is obviously 100% without bias in any written work, or repertoire of works amongst people.  the story has a relationship to it’s author;journalism is not a table of data.  this notion of stressing over the 100% objective coverage in a way is to discount consumer intelligence, and distracts from the issue at hand.  all organisations have a bias, it comes from their background, is inescapable, and not always a malicious thing.  npr has some kind of a bias, sure. 

BUT. the difference with npr to other things on the radio is that it is not reactionary.  its aim is not to be in some way inflammatory, it is not being sensationalist to be sensationalist.  The aim of public radio is to lift people up by providing broad access to news, events and knowledge (in some rural areas, that they might not otherwise be able to have).  other news outlets, and specifically the other bands on the radio dial, are designed to be inflammatory and to push a message via sensationalism—using strong emotions to distract from things that are not grounded in fact.  npr is not going to push anyone toward believing something by calling people names or making them lash out in groundless fear.  npr is not pushing anything on anyone—in fact, love it to death, but i have to say, if you’ve ever listened to an episode of the Diane Rehm Show, npr can be incredibly dull.  that’s its reputation, fine. so be it, let it have it.  it’s benign, it’s intelligent and thoughtful, and sometimes you need something good to listen to when you’re driving through Iowa.  But even if you disagree with npr, CUTTING FEDERAL FUNDING WILL NOT affect the DEFICIT in any significant way. at all.  cruise missiles cost $1million/apiece.  Know where I learned that?  All Things Considered.  Cutting federal funding will not kill npr, but it will kill the stable platform that makes npr so valuable, and will hurt mostly AVERAGE PEOPLE whose small, in many cases rural, local member stations will not be able to broadcast important news and enriching content to them via FM.  Not everyone canafford to purchase access to enriching content, and information, that is why our government has provided free libraries since its birth, and although we live in an “information age” there is far from equal access thereto.  so that’s why we have libraries, and pbs, and npr.  let’s think about who will really be hurt, here. (poor, rural Americans)

that is all I have to say about this, i refuse to argue with anyone about it, but this really aggravates me, because once you realise that the “American Dream” is so far from equally available to all people, you think about things differently.  people deserve free access to information to enrich their lives and better themselves.