I’ve been listening to a lot of NPR over the last year, and I’ve been noticing a shift more and more to the right of politics.
The first thing I noticed was that a lot of stories on politics were being delivered as essentially straight press releases from the whitehouse, with almost no critical review. This seemed out of character for NPR.
And now it seems like every day I’m hearing single expert commentary from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. That just struck me as odd.
So off to teh Google.
Turns out I’m right. NPR has been sourcing far more rightwing “experts” than centrist or left wing.
And in case you’re doubting that the right wing has been winning the war of ideas for a while now, check out the linked study from FAIR, which counts think tank citations for the last 10 years pulling from the Nexis news database. In 2004 there were 15,285 right wing citations, and 4,984 left wing.
I’ve largely been getting my news from the BBC these days, and relying on factcheck.org for reasonable critical reporting, and I’ll be adding fair.org as well.
The state of news in this country is just terrible.
Check out the story about how the pentagon has been providing generals to news programs to provide favorable coverage of the Iraq war. Ahh coordinated propaganda machines. You may ask yourself why you haven’t seen this reported on the news. Here’s some coverage by Salon.