So you thought they were pretty good until Trump came along and then they did a hard left? Have you considered the possibility that they didn't change at all and that their reporting was on the money?
People that urgently want to believe the Hunter Biden laptop story was somehow relevant tend to be hardliner Trump supporters and I find it hard to see how if that is their perspective they could be convinced that Trump has been a disaster for US politics if they haven't come to that conclusion on their own by now.
Think about it: Republicans want to pull their funding. Why would that be? Because they are reporting the facts and that is inconvenient to them? Or for some non-partisan reason that I'm currently unaware of? There is this quote by Colbert: "Reality has a left wing bias" or something to that effect. NPR reporting leans 'left' only if you are far to the right of center. For the rest of the world - me included - it is still center or center right depending on the context.
They should not be receiving public funds if they are going to continue to produce ideologically inclined content. At this point, they are no different than a little neoliberal/progressive think tank. And an honest assessment of the content means that they lean heavily to the left.
I'm far from a Trump supporter - I don't consider myself to be a republican or a democrat. I like some policies from one side and some from the other, and I think in a lot of instances (like abortion) a compromise would be best instead of fully one way or the other.
I think Trump getting elected made a lot of people on the left that felt they had some "power" over elections feel like they somehow failed. Keep in mind how scared they were. This American Life did a show on how Trump could basically launch nukes whenever he wanted, for instance. We had years of "Russian collusion." Suddenly it became their mission to not only ensure it didn't happen again, but their opinion of republicans radically shifted.
If you can't tell that NPR is hard on the left then it's you who is off of the charts politically. The way they've treated the Trump administration vs the Biden administration is absolutely laughable.
This is all anecdotal, but this one hits home for me. As a longtime NPR supporter well before the 2016 election, I wholeheartedly agree with all your comments. There was a drastic change leading up to that 2016 mess. We shouldn't forget the comment section was shut down in 2015 as well. An abstraction layer was added to it as a solution, but it really seemed to take away from the site as there were a lot of great discussions and debates taking place.
I'm fairly anti-Trump myself, but he never lived in my head rent free - a spade is a spade. The bias can be heard within minutes of tuning in, which I still do every time I'm in the car. I treat it just like I do CNN or Fox, which is with a grain of salt.
All that being said, there is still a lot of really awesome content coming from them. This American Life is still one of my all time favorites.
> Polls have demonstrated that if the public had known the full extent of the laptop revelations they may have voted differently.
How the public reacts to news is precisely why you have to have some restraint as a news editor. Because if you don't have restraint you end up being James Comey.
> Polls have demonstrated that if the public had known the full extent of the laptop revelations (among them that Hunter calls Biden “Pedo Peter”) they may have voted differently.
“May have” is exactly what the complete absence of any evidence gives you, so this is basically saying “polls have provided no useful information to differentiate this counterfactual from any other counterfactual”.
People that urgently want to believe the Hunter Biden laptop story was somehow relevant tend to be hardliner Trump supporters and I find it hard to see how if that is their perspective they could be convinced that Trump has been a disaster for US politics if they haven't come to that conclusion on their own by now.
Think about it: Republicans want to pull their funding. Why would that be? Because they are reporting the facts and that is inconvenient to them? Or for some non-partisan reason that I'm currently unaware of? There is this quote by Colbert: "Reality has a left wing bias" or something to that effect. NPR reporting leans 'left' only if you are far to the right of center. For the rest of the world - me included - it is still center or center right depending on the context.