Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaishiro | Hacker News Reader

What in the world are you on about? They published an interview with an author who had - admittedly - controversial takes looting. You make it sound like they were telling people to go smash windows.

It's telling that you chose not to link the actual piece: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...

View on HN

The “admission” was not part of the original publication. They added both that note and changed the title well after the fact.

https://archive.is/2020.08.27-191914/https://www.npr.org/sec...

The mere fact that they platformed such an extreme, insane viewpoint is the issue. If you can find a similarly sympathetic platforming of a far right nutter by NPR, maybe I’ll take you seriously. Show me one NPR story about the J6 riots that contorts this far to justify and I’ll concede the point entirely.

I listened to NPR for over 20 years and the bias became gag worthy toward the end.

If the best you can do is that they occasionally interview left leaning authors with out-there views, I don’t know what to tell you.

The core programming, things like The Sound of Ideas, Marketplace, Morning Edition, the hourly news updates, etc hardly have “gag worthy” bias.

Regarding platforming a J6 insurrectionist: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/21/g-s1-29188/new-npr-series-a-g...

bad media literacy. they even included a trigger warning for readers like that:

> This story was updated on Sept. 1, 2020. The original version of this story, which is an interview with an author who holds strong political views and ideas, did not provide readers enough context for them to fully assess some of the controversial opinions discussed.

The "admission" is irrelevant and was plainly included to appease readers like yourself. Did you actually read the piece? It's unmistakably an interview - not an article, and certainly not an editorial. It's difficult to understand how anyone could read it and arrive at such a distorted conclusion.

Right — they’re lending credibility that leftwing extremism is a valid viewpoint, but you’re unable to name a similar example of rightwing extremism they’ve hosted.

That’s classic bias.

Your assertion that I am "unable to name a similar example" is as baseless as it is puzzling, given that no such request was made. Regardless, it took me roughly eight seconds to find an interview with a Christian fundamentalist expressing an equally "extreme" viewpoint.

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/31/nx-s1-5077780/extremely-ameri...

Giving an interview isn't "lending credit" to. By that logic, the best media would be one that repeatedly tries to hide the truth, because showing the truth must be giving credence to it. This is a kind of doublespeak - freedom is censorship.

Part of whole, unbiased programming is giving interviews to people on the edges, to extremists. If you don't do that, you're intentionally augmenting the story. People do this with the right all the time. They'll purposefully ignore the extremists, which in turn creates an image that such groups are completely rational. For example, news did this constantly with covid denialists like Qanon. They seem just like skeptics of the government... when you ignore the jewish space lasers and 5G covid vaccine. And then that backfired when Qanon attempted a coup. Um, oops!

Surely if you are concerned about platforming you'd be concerned about the literal actual self-described fascists and white supremacists platformed by various now mainstream right wing news outlets, right?

The replies to this comment are untruthful. The journalist was clearly sympathetic to the author's ideology, which NPR later tried to conceal. As the diff from original to latest shows:[1]

  "hand-wringing about looting" -> "condemnation of looting"
  "bemoaned the property damage" -> "denounced the property damage"
  "Korean small-business owner murdering 15-year-old Latasha Harlins" -> "Korean small-business owner [killing] 15-year-old Latasha Harlins"

IMO, you've been downvoted to cover up the journalist's bias and, arguably, the bias of NPR's audience.

[1] https://www.diffchecker.com/CJz1Bn51/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com