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Comment by margalabargala | Hacker News Reader

What I've observed is similar to what you describe, but in my view the cause is different. NPR's reporting is much the same as it has always been; what's happened is there has been a huge shift to the far right the last decade, and reporting on where the right used to be now looks like left leaning bias.

The same is not true of the left. What's labeled "progressive" really isn't; the left has moved right too. 15 years ago, the US was on the verge of passing universal healthcare. That's not even on the radar today.

Media orcs have not all kept up with these changes. Something that was "left right and center in 2015, would look as though it was mostly leftist today, because the ground has moved.

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NPR is definitely not the same as it was in 2005-2010. I was a heavy listener and donated for many years. But, now most of the time I have to turn it off - too much virtue signaling over critical thinking.

Do you have an example?

I'm not saying you're doing this, but often when people say something is "virtue signalling" it's actually "critical thinking but with either base values or a conclusion I do not agree with"

Actually, it's exactly that: they completely omit the values or conclusions that they don't agree with or understand. I hear it every day. They dismiss half of the country as 'extremist', 'far-right', 'uneducated' - those are the actual words I heard used today to describe the types of people who make up over half of my neighborhood.

A couple of days ago, I heard a host and a reporter literally mock and make fun of RFK Jr. when they should have been trying to educate him and his supporters. Trust in institutions (including the news) has completely eroded, and instead of trying to build it back, they double down on what hasn't worked.

This is exactly a good example though, because they wouldn't have made fun of a right wing politician way back when- RFK jr is just that ridiculous. Linking vaccines to autism, stopping vaccine and cancer research which is going to cost millions of lives, and more.

You're asking the impossible, such a person can't be reasoned with, and will certainly not listen to education from NPR. Mocking is the correct response. To me, your example exactly underlies the point that NPR didn't get more extreme, but the news they cover did.

Take that thought process to the logical conclusion and you may see why people on the right are justified in being scared of you. I.e. what happens when most people are incapable of following your "reasonable" rules? Virtue Signaling leads to Pharisees which leads to Totalitarianism

> what happens when most people are incapable of following your "reasonable" rules?

The black death returns? I am only half joking. RFK jr believes in miasma theory of illness and thinks the germs theory is wrong. If all of us start to act like him, we will have millions of deaths. I vehemently dislike the "believe in science" ~crowd~ [e: I should say dogma], and on other issues I've said virtually the same thing as you've said in this comment.

But not here. If we truly can't agree that something as stupid as reviving the miasma theory of illness ought to be mocked, then we are lost.

You're assuming the left stays static. The left lost interest in economic issues after 1990 and shifted to cultural issues. The modern Democrats are not more right wing than they used to be unless you ignore all the issues they've taken up that wouldn't have been recognized by Bill Clinton era Democrats.

Totally disagree. The left has absolutely moved further right.

Firstly, the example above with healthcare.

Secondly, deregulating things like zoning are rather popular with the modern left, and generally free-market approaches to housing. Dems are less friendly to unions than they were, lip service aside.

I don't think there's much that wouldn't be recognizable to a Clinton dem. The identity politics around trans rights etc are the same civil rights the left has been supporting for a century. Abortion is the same debate we've been having since the 60s.

The left has either not changed stance, or moved right, on all issues.

We're in agreement. The mainstream left abandoned their economic agenda because their economic agenda was stupid and as the 20th century progressed that became ever clearer, until the steady collapse of the USSR in the 1980s finally made even the dimmest of voters lose their appetite for it.

So by 1990 the left lost interest in economics, and began the pivot to race/gender/sexual intersectionalism. They even explicitly rebranded themselves. Clinton's Third Way campaign was adopted with vigor by Tony Blair, who even renamed his party New Labour to emphasize the break with the past. And Third Way/New Labour leftism was not particularly committed to intersectionalism at that time, even though such tendencies did exist on the left since the 1950s. In fact intersectionalism was rejected by mainstream left wing parties - look at the treatment of Sister Souljah then vs what would happen now - but it kept ramping up and by 2012 that had turned into full blown culture war. The new left went all-in on things like "defund the police" that would have been mystifying to a typical 1950s leftist.

None of this means the left moved right, unless you only care about economics in which case it's true. They simply dropped one set of causes and picked up another, with exactly the same kinds of tactics and aggression that characterized their campaigns 100 years ago.

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