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.
I was an NPR listener back in the early 80s. I was a liberal and my work commute was long. I actually enjoyed them. Then something happened that turned me away from them.
One day, during my morning commute, they aired an article about some famous artistic person. He had succumbed to AIDS after a hard-fought battle. He was, they told me, a HERO. A few days later, they aired a story about another ‘artist’ who had suffered a similar fate. He, too, was a HERO.
Then another artist, and another and another. After a while it seemed to be “another day, another HERO”. Now, I felt sorry for these men and their loved ones. I really did. But even as a liberal I couldn’t see how getting shtupped in the kiester made a man a hero. It was too much. I stopped listening to NPR.
After that I listened to mucic and audio books. Then something interesting happened.
One day, as I was turning the dial, I heard a voice from a radio station coming in on the skip. It was a radio station in Sacramento . . .