BBC versus NPR

[Arkady]

This morning I listened to NPR news followed by the BBC World Service, and the contrast was dramatic. I don't just mean the contrasting range of stories (the BBC covers stories from around the globe, where almost the entirety of NPR's coverage is local to the US). Even when covering the same stories, there was a huge difference in tone and content.

NPR was what I've come to expect. There was the soporific delivery of Robert Siegel laying out the talking points of each party about the latest Trump outrage (the sharing of highly classified information with Russia). He paraphrased Democrats speaking vaguely about "grave concerns" and then he summarized a few mutually contradictory rebuttals by the Republicans. Then, I kid you not, they handed over the mic to an evangelical Christian commentator, Peter Wehner, who'd worked in the last three Republican White Houses, to provide his thoughts. He used the time for a mealy-mouthed paean to both-siderism -- essentially saying both sides needed to improve their conduct and embrace higher truths, and then he lay the ultimate blame for our current state on academics, with the idea that post-modernism in universities had infected politics with a contempt for the idea of knowable facts.

It was bizarre, yet at the same time entirely typical of NPR's approach to covering Trump's outrages. Their most frequent guests are moderate conservatives who offer up soft and indirect criticisms of the behavior of Trump, while carefully balancing it with suggestions that Democrats are equally guilty, if not actually worse. I suppose NPR imagines that this reliance on limp-wristed center-right critiques of Trumpism will insulate them from charges of liberal bias and thereby defend their CPB funding.

Then the BBC came on, and it was like stepping out into the fresh air and sunlight after a week in a moldy basement. Rather than trafficking in false equivalences and polite self-negating center-right objections to Trumpism, they laid out the facts in a bracing and informative way. When it came time to analyze why it mattered that Trump shared the highly classified information, they got the insights of people with decades of service in the intelligence community, who explained the way such sharing could compromise the operations, and even the lives, of people in the clandestine service. And they also emphasized how this flies in the face of the ordinary rules of engagement, where countries are not supposed to pass along intelligence they get from other nations without the permission of those source countries. The BBC's experts focused specifically on how this could undermine future cooperation with our allies, since they will be reluctant to let us know things if their own security could be compromised when Trump mishandles the information. And they also focused on how this puts intelligence officers in an impossible situation, where they either risk their team's operations and lives by sharing with a deeply incompetent president, or they keep information from the president and thereby betray their oaths of office. If an NPR guest frankly admitted that Trump was "deeply incompetent" that way, the producers would strike him from their booking list to make sure such a flat truth wouldn't accidentally slip into future broadcasts.

The funding of the BBC isn't being jeopardized by the Republicans, the way NPR's funding is, so they can present the news in a way that works to inform listeners, even if it steps on some political toes. You come away from a BBC broadcast with a much clearer understanding of what is happening in the world and the stakes of those events. You come away from an NPR broadcast half asleep and merely informed about what talking points each party is working on a particular day.

 

[as seen on tv]

"Their (NPRs) most frequent guests are moderate conservatives"

I listen to NPR every morning on the drive to work. You are a hilarious liar, as anyone with 2 working brain cells would also conclude.

NPR is poor because it has zero budget or independence. It waits for government news releases, then interviews other reporters for "analysis". it has no foreign bureau.

for that matter, the BBC doesn't have an independent take on the "trump leaks' either. the sole source for this is the WaPo. Their original source is anonymous. So whatever the BBC says in heresay of an anonymous leaker.

if that's your gold standard for news, no wonder you so often appear uninformed and biased in your posts.

try reading a variety of sources in the first person: WaPo, NYT, WSJ, Economist, Associated Press, etc.

anything broadcast on radio is dumbed down for people who don't have the time or inclination to read, between pumping gas, stopping off at starbucks, and leaving their toddler belted into the back seat to suffocate in a hot car.

 

[marvin martian]

This morning I listened to NPR news followed by the BBC World Service, and the contrast was dramatic. I don't just mean the contrasting range of stories (the BBC covers stories from around the globe, where almost the entirety of NPR's coverage is local to the US). Even when covering the same stories, there was a huge difference in tone and content.

NPR was what I've come to expect. There was the soporific delivery of Robert Siegel laying out the talking points of each party about the latest Trump outrage (the sharing of highly classified information with Russia). He paraphrased Democrats speaking vaguely about "grave concerns" and then he summarized a few mutually contradictory rebuttals by the Republicans. Then, I kid you not, they handed over the mic to an evangelical Christian commentator, Peter Wehner, who'd worked in the last three Republican White Houses, to provide his thoughts. He used the time for a mealy-mouthed paean to both-siderism -- essentially saying both sides needed to improve their conduct and embrace higher truths, and then he lay the ultimate blame for our current state on academics, with the idea that post-modernism in universities had infected politics with a contempt for the idea of knowable facts.

It was bizarre, yet at the same time entirely typical of NPR's approach to covering Trump's outrages. Their most frequent guests are moderate conservatives who offer up soft and indirect criticisms of the behavior of Trump, while carefully balancing it with suggestions that Democrats are equally guilty, if not actually worse. I suppose NPR imagines that this reliance on limp-wristed center-right critiques of Trumpism will insulate them from charges of liberal bias and thereby defend their CPB funding.

Then the BBC came on, and it was like stepping out into the fresh air and sunlight after a week in a moldy basement. Rather than trafficking in false equivalences and polite self-negating center-right objections to Trumpism, they laid out the facts in a bracing and informative way. When it came time to analyze why it mattered that Trump shared the highly classified information, they got the insights of people with decades of service in the intelligence community, who explained the way such sharing could compromise the operations, and even the lives, of people in the clandestine service. And they also emphasized how this flies in the face of the ordinary rules of engagement, where countries are not supposed to pass along intelligence they get from other nations without the permission of those source countries. The BBC's experts focused specifically on how this could undermine future cooperation with our allies, since they will be reluctant to let us know things if their own security could be compromised when Trump mishandles the information. And they also focused on how this puts intelligence officers in an impossible situation, where they either risk their team's operations and lives by sharing with a deeply incompetent president, or they keep information from the president and thereby betray their oaths of office. If an NPR guest frankly admitted that Trump was "deeply incompetent" that way, the producers would strike him from their booking list to make sure such a flat truth wouldn't accidentally slip into future broadcasts.

The funding of the BBC isn't being jeopardized by the Republicans, the way NPR's funding is, so they can present the news in a way that works to inform listeners, even if it steps on some political toes. You come away from a BBC broadcast with a much clearer understanding of what is happening in the world and the stakes of those events. You come away from an NPR broadcast half asleep and merely informed about what talking points each party is working on a particular day.

I'm sure it looks that way from your perspective on the radical, anti-American left.

 

[Arkady]

I'm sure it looks that way from your perspective on the radical, anti-American left.

I'm neither radical nor anti-American. If I were, I'd probably be a Trump apologist, like you.

 

[Arkady]

"]

I listen to NPR every morning on the drive to work.

Good. Then you can confirm with the group what I said about the guest this morning -- the evangelical Christian political hack who blamed our current situation on post-modernism in the academy.

NPR is poor because it has zero budget or independence. It waits for government news releases, then interviews other reporters for "analysis". it has no foreign bureau.

Certainly the way public broadcasting in this country is radically under-funded, relative to the BBC or the public broadcasters in places like Germany and Italy, factors into NPR's cut-rate approach. But that wasn't the problem this morning. It was their choice of presentation and guests -- it was their insistence on sleep-walking through yet another "both sides do it" genuflection to the conventional wisdom. There are outlets that have very small budgets that do a much better job, and I suspect a large part of the reason NPR is so toothless is because they're very conscious about the threat to their paychecks if they aren't seen as partisans for the halfway point between the two major US parties (wherever that halfway point happens to lie at a given moment).

for that matter, the BBC doesn't have an independent take on the "trump leaks' either.

What they provided wasn't an independent take on what was leaked by Trump, but rather independent analysis, from long-time intelligence agents, of the implications of a president leaking in that manner -- the way it would discourage our allies from sharing key information with us, the way it would make even our own intelligence community concerned about sharing information with the president, and the way that it could wind up compromising operations and agents in the field.

So whatever the BBC says in heresay of an anonymous leaker.

You really didn't try thinking this through, did you? Again, the point isn't that the BBC had an independent source about what was said. What they had was independent expert analysis about the implications of such leaks.

try reading a variety of sources in the first person: WaPo, NYT, WSJ, Economist, Associated Press, etc.

I do. That's why you'll find I'm pretty much always so much better informed than you. When you make a practice of stepping outside the right-wing media bubble, you'll find you develop a better understanding of the world, too.

 

[trapdoor]

This morning I listened to NPR news followed by the BBC World Service, and the contrast was dramatic. I don't just mean the contrasting range of stories (the BBC covers stories from around the globe, where almost the entirety of NPR's coverage is local to the US). Even when covering the same stories, there was a huge difference in tone and content.

NPR was what I've come to expect. There was the soporific delivery of Robert Siegel laying out the talking points of each party about the latest Trump outrage (the sharing of highly classified information with Russia). He paraphrased Democrats speaking vaguely about "grave concerns" and then he summarized a few mutually contradictory rebuttals by the Republicans. Then, I kid you not, they handed over the mic to an evangelical Christian commentator, Peter Wehner, who'd worked in the last three Republican White Houses, to provide his thoughts. He used the time for a mealy-mouthed paean to both-siderism -- essentially saying both sides needed to improve their conduct and embrace higher truths, and then he lay the ultimate blame for our current state on academics, with the idea that post-modernism in universities had infected politics with a contempt for the idea of knowable facts.

It was bizarre, yet at the same time entirely typical of NPR's approach to covering Trump's outrages. Their most frequent guests are moderate conservatives who offer up soft and indirect criticisms of the behavior of Trump, while carefully balancing it with suggestions that Democrats are equally guilty, if not actually worse. I suppose NPR imagines that this reliance on limp-wristed center-right critiques of Trumpism will insulate them from charges of liberal bias and thereby defend their CPB funding.

Then the BBC came on, and it was like stepping out into the fresh air and sunlight after a week in a moldy basement. Rather than trafficking in false equivalences and polite self-negating center-right objections to Trumpism, they laid out the facts in a bracing and informative way. When it came time to analyze why it mattered that Trump shared the highly classified information, they got the insights of people with decades of service in the intelligence community, who explained the way such sharing could compromise the operations, and even the lives, of people in the clandestine service. And they also emphasized how this flies in the face of the ordinary rules of engagement, where countries are not supposed to pass along intelligence they get from other nations without the permission of those source countries. The BBC's experts focused specifically on how this could undermine future cooperation with our allies, since they will be reluctant to let us know things if their own security could be compromised when Trump mishandles the information. And they also focused on how this puts intelligence officers in an impossible situation, where they either risk their team's operations and lives by sharing with a deeply incompetent president, or they keep information from the president and thereby betray their oaths of office. If an NPR guest frankly admitted that Trump was "deeply incompetent" that way, the producers would strike him from their booking list to make sure such a flat truth wouldn't accidentally slip into future broadcasts.

The funding of the BBC isn't being jeopardized by the Republicans, the way NPR's funding is, so they can present the news in a way that works to inform listeners, even if it steps on some political toes. You come away from a BBC broadcast with a much clearer understanding of what is happening in the world and the stakes of those events. You come away from an NPR broadcast half asleep and merely informed about what talking points each party is working on a particular day.

I don't know where you live, but the NPR where I am has a political range that runs from A to B. You have a choice of left, or far left. BBC is fine, and has been fine for 100 years. The funding for BBC isn't jeopardized because it mostly avoids taking a side in British politics. NPR has been a bastion for Democratic Party policy and liberal takes on various issues for most of the last 50 years.

 

[Arkady]

I don't know where you live, but the NPR where I am has a political range that runs from A to B.

I listen to WBUR, and it runs from A to A, where A is defined as the half-way point between the official stances are of the Democrats and Republicans at a given moment on any given topic, regardless of where those stances lie. For example, if Democrats took the view that Trump was our 30th best president, and Republicans took the view that he was the very best, NPR would gravitate towards the idea he was somewhere in 15th to 16th place. It's a pathetic false equivalency prejudice.

 

[trapdoor]

I listen to WBUR, and it runs from A to A, where A is defined as the half-way point between the official stances are of the Democrats and Republicans at a given moment on any given topic, regardless of where those stances lie. For example, if Democrats took the view that Trump was our 30th best president, and Republicans took the view that he was the very best, NPR would gravitate towards the idea he was somewhere in 15th to 16th place. It's a pathetic false equivalency prejudice.

Maybe they feel they have to in opposition to the general viewpoint in Taxachusetts or something. Everywhere I've ever lived (including the east coast in Washington D.C.) NPR had a notably liberal slant.

 

[Arkady]

Maybe they feel they have to in opposition to the general viewpoint in Taxachusetts or something. Everywhere I've ever lived (including the east coast in Washington D.C.) NPR had a notably liberal slant.

I wonder whether it only looks slanted to you because of your own conservative slant and the conservative context of the US media world. When I lived in Texas, I visited a house where things seemed to roll up-hill. In fact, the entire house was at enough of a slant, that a slight down-hill slope appeared up-hill in context. I think it's that way with a lot of conservatives. They become so used to the context of the right-wing media landscape in the US, where nearly every outlet is either aggressively right-wing (e.g. Fox News) or aggressively consumerist and capitalistic (e.g., most other for-profit, big-corporation-owned outlets), that the relatively small conservative bias of an outlet like NPR looks liberal by comparison. When you instead compare NPR to an outside reference point, like the BBC (or the various Italian and German outlets I favor), things look much different, the same way as if you looked out the window of that anti-gravity house at the trees, it would destroy the illusion that things are rolling up-hill:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Locatio...42979-Wonder_World_Park-San_Marcos_Texas.html

 

[marvin martian]

I listen to WBUR, and it runs from A to A, where A is defined as the half-way point between the official stances are of the Democrats and Republicans at a given moment on any given topic, regardless of where those stances lie. For example, if Democrats took the view that Trump was our 30th best president, and Republicans took the view that he was the very best, NPR would gravitate towards the idea he was somewhere in 15th to 16th place. It's a pathetic false equivalency prejudice.

So, turn it off.

 

[Drumcollie]

This morning I listened to NPR news followed by the BBC World Service, and the contrast was dramatic. I don't just mean the contrasting range of stories (the BBC covers stories from around the globe, where almost the entirety of NPR's coverage is local to the US). Even when covering the same stories, there was a huge difference in tone and content.

NPR was what I've come to expect. There was the soporific delivery of Robert Siegel laying out the talking points of each party about the latest Trump outrage (the sharing of highly classified information with Russia). He paraphrased Democrats speaking vaguely about "grave concerns" and then he summarized a few mutually contradictory rebuttals by the Republicans. Then, I kid you not, they handed over the mic to an evangelical Christian commentator, Peter Wehner, who'd worked in the last three Republican White Houses, to provide his thoughts. He used the time for a mealy-mouthed paean to both-siderism -- essentially saying both sides needed to improve their conduct and embrace higher truths, and then he lay the ultimate blame for our current state on academics, with the idea that post-modernism in universities had infected politics with a contempt for the idea of knowable facts.

It was bizarre, yet at the same time entirely typical of NPR's approach to covering Trump's outrages. Their most frequent guests are moderate conservatives who offer up soft and indirect criticisms of the behavior of Trump, while carefully balancing it with suggestions that Democrats are equally guilty, if not actually worse. I suppose NPR imagines that this reliance on limp-wristed center-right critiques of Trumpism will insulate them from charges of liberal bias and thereby defend their CPB funding.

Then the BBC came on, and it was like stepping out into the fresh air and sunlight after a week in a moldy basement. Rather than trafficking in false equivalences and polite self-negating center-right objections to Trumpism, they laid out the facts in a bracing and informative way. When it came time to analyze why it mattered that Trump shared the highly classified information, they got the insights of people with decades of service in the intelligence community, who explained the way such sharing could compromise the operations, and even the lives, of people in the clandestine service. And they also emphasized how this flies in the face of the ordinary rules of engagement, where countries are not supposed to pass along intelligence they get from other nations without the permission of those source countries. The BBC's experts focused specifically on how this could undermine future cooperation with our allies, since they will be reluctant to let us know things if their own security could be compromised when Trump mishandles the information. And they also focused on how this puts intelligence officers in an impossible situation, where they either risk their team's operations and lives by sharing with a deeply incompetent president, or they keep information from the president and thereby betray their oaths of office. If an NPR guest frankly admitted that Trump was "deeply incompetent" that way, the producers would strike him from their booking list to make sure such a flat truth wouldn't accidentally slip into future broadcasts.

The funding of the BBC isn't being jeopardized by the Republicans, the way NPR's funding is, so they can present the news in a way that works to inform listeners, even if it steps on some political toes. You come away from a BBC broadcast with a much clearer understanding of what is happening in the world and the stakes of those events. You come away from an NPR broadcast half asleep and merely informed about what talking points each party is working on a particular day.

Whisper talk...no one needs to fund it.

versus

BBC talk

 

[Arkady]

So, turn it off.

I don't listen much, but sometimes I want to change up my drive-time routine with some news. NPR may be awful, but it still beats other domestic options on the radio.

 

[marvin martian]

I don't listen much, but sometimes I want to change up my drive-time routine with some news. NPR may be awful, but it still beats other domestic options on the radio.

I just assumed you listened to the sounds of babies in pain, or the Holocaust Denier's weekly or something like that.

 

[Arkady]

I just assumed you listened to the sounds of babies in pain, or the Holocaust Denier's weekly or something like that.

No. Holocaust denial is for anti-Semites like you. Tell us again about how Jon Stewart is really Jon Leibowitz.

 

[marvin martian]

No. Holocaust denial is for anti-Semites like you. Tell us again about how Jon Stewart is really Jon Leibowitz.

Are you saying he isn't? Poor guy had to change his name so Jew-haters like you would listen to his show.

 

[Arkady]

Are you saying he isn't?

No. I'm saying that anti-Semites like you have long been drawn to highlighting the Jewish given names of Jewish public figures you dislike, in the hopes of turning people against them. Your form of Jew hating has a deep and despicable history.

 

[marvin martian]

No. I'm saying that anti-Semites like you have long been drawn to highlighting the Jewish given names of Jewish public figures you dislike, in the hopes of turning people against them. Your form of Jew hating has a deep and despicable history.

I've no interest in turning anyone against Leibowitz. I'm merely pointing out the poor man had to change his name to get Jew-haters like you to watch his show. You're a fan of Jon "Stewart", right?

 

[Arkady]

I've no interest in turning anyone against Leibowitz.

Sure you don't. You Jew-haters have been using that same tactic for many decades. You could pick up KKK propaganda from the middle of the 20th century and find similar attacks on Hollywood liberals using their Jewish given names to stir up fellow Jew-haters against them.

 

[marvin martian]

Sure you don't. You Jew-haters have been using that same tactic for many decades. You could pick up KKK propaganda from the middle of the 20th century and find similar attacks on Hollywood liberals using their Jewish given names to stir up fellow Jew-haters against them.

Quit dodging. Leibowitz wouldn't have a career if he hadn't changed his name, because of people like you.

 

[trapdoor]

I wonder whether it only looks slanted to you because of your own conservative slant and the conservative context of the US media world. When I lived in Texas, I visited a house where things seemed to roll up-hill. In fact, the entire house was at enough of a slant, that a slight down-hill slope appeared up-hill in context. I think it's that way with a lot of conservatives. They become so used to the context of the right-wing media landscape in the US, where nearly every outlet is either aggressively right-wing (e.g. Fox News) or aggressively consumerist and capitalistic (e.g., most other for-profit, big-corporation-owned outlets), that the relatively small conservative bias of an outlet like NPR looks liberal by comparison. When you instead compare NPR to an outside reference point, like the BBC (or the various Italian and German outlets I favor), things look much different, the same way as if you looked out the window of that anti-gravity house at the trees, it would destroy the illusion that things are rolling up-hill:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Locatio...42979-Wonder_World_Park-San_Marcos_Texas.html

No. It's not a matter of me seeing the media inaccuractely. I work in media relations and understanding the media and what it's doing is key to the job. Further, there is, outside of Fox News, no "right-wing media landscape" in the United States. More than 70 percent of all journalists poll as liberals and bring a liberal perspective to their coverage -- this is part of the ABCs of my profession. If you compare NPR to them, you find much lower coverage of conservative content and fewer conservatives interviewed, etc. I defy you to find a single conservative interviewed by prominent NPR interview host Terry Gross in the past decade.

BBC is its own thing. People think it's "independent" because it's not US, but really it's an arm of the British government and it tends to reflect the views of that government -- currently its commentators are in an obvious state of disruption because they are personally anti-Brexit, and the government is firmly pro-Brexit.