I think it is amusing that people try to peg each news outlet as "left" or "right" as if they are an 18-year-old who votes whilst standing on a seesaw.
First, political views are not one-dimensional and so the "left"/"right" and far-extreme-ultra game is just "are they on my side or are they considered bonkers by my brethren?" games.
I believe that it's far better to consider news outlets as a product of their sponsors vs. their intended audience. By and large, they are all corporations trying to maximize revenue by attracting and maintaining a large audience for their materials, thereby paying their sponsors and advertisers the revenue they need.
So, they will produce stories that engage the audience. Whether that is enraging us, stoking controversy, appealing to us with smooth words: doesn't matter. There's no such thing as bad engagement. The corollary is that they don't want to lose audience members so any slide into supporting unpopular causes or candidates or ideologies is nipped in the bud.
Folks also can't seem to accept that editorial opinions or ideologies can shift, especially for example, if a news outlet supports "whoever/whatever is currently in power this year" or as a contrarian, opposes them, and riles up the opposition parties.
Wikipedia's relentless blacklisting and deprecation of "unreliable sources" is a great public experiment in this regard. If you really want a nice left-leaning anodyne view of the world, go with Wikipedia and "blacklist" or stop paying attention to any source they don't like.
Only people on the right think NPR is on the left. NPR is the most middle of the road you can get. Just because they report facts that contradict the administration doesn't make them left leaning.
Right, so it is broadly seen as more on the left than the right. Or, to be glib: only a radical leftist would think NPR doesn't lean left is far more correct than your initial assertion.
Have you heard the phrase "reality has a left wing bias"? People perceive highly factual information as left wing.
For example, if I told you yesterday the President made a statement, and then repeated the second half of that statement, which is a sign of dementia, you'd probably accuse me of being far left, even though that information is just simply factual.
That plus the fact that if you dig into the reports, the two that said "barely left" even admit that they only chose that because their rating system doesn't allow for "center".
I’m curious about how you would objectively define “woke”. I’d also be curious about how NPR scores on those measures relative to other comparable media.
EDIT: And if you didn't mean it in that way, and were serious, consider looking at e.g. Ground News' rating of NPR: https://ground.news/interest/npr. They (and others) clearly show NPR to have (slight) left bias. This means you are almost certainly going to see woke perspectives there from time to time, and more often than other less-biased or right-biased sources.
I know hard core leftists love to bash NPR/PBS, but as a non-leftist, non-centrist, non-right wing person, I definitely find NPR to have a left wing bias. Not as left wing as Democracy Now, etc - but definitely left leaning.
I think it's important not to tie identity to any part of the spectrum (e.g. "I'm center left").
I have opinions on issues, and they can vary across the spectrum. On some issues (e.g. healthcare) I'm far to the left (well, in the US - would just be considered "normal" left in other countries). On things like immigration I'm either center or right (everyone seems to have their own idea of what "center" means). On gun control I'm both left and right - I'd like to outlaw them, but am opposed to some gun control initiatives.
On several social issues I can be far to the left on some and far to the right on others.
In an election, I voted both for a Green Party candidate and a Republican candidate (different offices, of course).
What I see is people who identify on the spectrum may have strong opinions on some issues (e.g. left), and then they adopt the leftist viewpoint on other issues - in order to be consistent. In my experience, these people are also more likely to follow "leaders" than be opinionated.
I don't know that one needs to identify with part of the political spectrum for it to be an accurate description. It sounds like you're broadly left leaning, but that assessment of you doesn't need to do anything to how you view yourself. I'm likewise very left leaning on just about everything, but don't really consider it to be part of my identity
I would agree with your assessment. It's just that if I go and say "It's OK to deport undocumented people who came as children"[1], people will have a hard time calling me a leftist.
But since it's not my identity, things can change.
When I was younger, my views were more consistent with the right. At some point, after learning a lot of realities, a lot of those views moved to the left. Since it was never part of my identity, it was easier to shift. No internal strife, crisis, etc.
[1] My views on this topic are more nuanced than this, but I phrase it this way to illustrate the dichotomy one can have in politics that people fail to comprehend.
It's not a clear divide between right and left, and NYT, the Atlantic, and NPR stans right wing voices constantly, have constantly used their editorialization to promote right wing ideals, and have gone out of their way to center right wing voices to give the appearance of being centrist to the right, which has had a direct impact in their perception as not really left wing by any of the left.
Now the center right is supporting concentration camps like "alligator alcatraz" so the overton window has shifted a lot in the last ten years.
2025. He’s right, Tim Cook is a coward and no better than the rest of the oligarchs who kissed the ring and played the game.
But Anil also falls into this trap of believing the myth of Jobs over who he actually was. Steve Jobs was a Silicon Valley capitalist who took parts the hippie counterculture ethos and baked it into an image that sold well to consumers. He was not some revolutionary, he just successfully used the language of revolution to sell a better product than his competitors.
I know it's fashionable to blame capitalism for everything which is wrong with the world but it's the people and governments who don't care about the pollution and think that's it's fine to throw garbage on the ground or in the river instead of disposing it properly. The Soviet Union did a fair amount of damage to the environment, despite not being a capitalist country.
As long as we're using natural gas, there be a surplus of cheap ethane and we'll indirectly subsidize plastic, since making plastic out of the ethane puts that waste product to use (by creating plastic waste instead).
it wasn't that long ago that most daily use goods were sold in reusable glass bottles, jars, paper bags. Clothes, shoes, appliances, furniture was durable, lasting multiple years, sometimes even passed on between generations. Then, late stage capitalism decided to optimize the hell out of everything, told us that glass is too heavy for economic distribution of goods, paper not hygienic enough and that we need internet enabled toasters. We now end up drowning in plastics, forced to replace cars, heavy appliances every 2 years but most of all are seeking weird solutions and feel good stories to solve this, well in line with the principle of the orphan crushing machine.
I am very happy that the many glass shards and the inevitable cuts have been replaced by essentially zero plastic trash in streets/forests/seas in my country and all other civilized countries.
The problem is not Europe (outside of gypsy camps and illegal immigrant camps). It is mostly some parts of Asia (and it would likely also be some parts of Africa if they could afford as much plastic).
Google had a town hall a few years ago. The Pixel Watch (4?) had just launched and supposedly fixed a bunch of bugs like apparently you could not reliably record a run with the previous generation without that app crashing and losing the workout. Someone in the audience asked about this, and the PM who responded was wearing an Apple Watch. Apparently everyone on that team at the meeting was wearing Apple Watches or a dumb watch
>China has not known freedom for some time, but citizens of the United States have a long experience of it.
One of those American beliefs presented without evidence because it’s just so obviously true, but what the fuck does this even mean? Exactly how are Americans more free?
It's not just an American belief. USA has no MSS equivalent for starters. They don't have a Great Firewall. One can make their own independent party in the US (winning is a different story, tho). And so on.
And that's just in recent times, the PRC had it worse then.
But you are cheery picking a few things while ignoring others.
In the US, you are free to buy a gun and walk around with it. In the EU you can't But if you ask a person from the EU, they will think that this "freedom to bear arms" does more harm than good in their eyes.
So who has more freedom here? The person who walks around with the gun or the person who can walk the streets with the freedom of knowing that guns are not allowed here.
Freedom is a sliding scale not a binary thing. Should you be free to marry your first cousin or children? Some freedom absolutist will tel you that governments shouldn't be able to tell you who you can marry but we can all agree that some freedoms need to be curtailed for the good of society.
Now you can argue that China is less free when it comes to political matters and that would be fine except the problem in this case is that the author simply expressed a very broad opinion which makes it impossible to falsify.
