NPRrrrr,
Because We’re Smarter than You!
That’s what I hear from them.
That’s what I hear from them.
There's no denying their noxiousness.
But credit where it is due.
They were far better — actually enjoyable — thirty or forty years ago. They were liberal, but tried to be intellectually honest (usually) and for the most part kept their politics to themselves.
In my opinion, they went off the deep end in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration tried to cut their funding.
At that point, they became totally political. They pulled out all the stops, and basically took it as their existential mission to boost any Democrat and pound any Republican into the dust. For a while, in the late 1980s, they pretty much gave over all their airtime to this goal.
This illustrates the problem of "public broadcasting." They can at an instant turn their programming over to politics. They don't have to answer to advertisers, or to a corporate board, or to stockholders.
And it doesn't matter what's in their charter. I'm sure the charter of NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service includes all kinds of language that prohibits them from getting involved in politics. It's all unenforceable, just as the laws against politics in the church setting are unenforceable against black churches.