Needless to say, NPR has an enormous influence over the national conversation, particularly amongst its mostly liberal listeners. Its programming reaches approximately 57 million people every week, while its flagship drive time newscasts, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, are in the top 5 highest rated radio programs in the country, pulling in close to 15 million listeners per week. NPR’s reach has grown considerably since its founding. NPR’s shift in funding and ethos means the outlet has come to exhibit some of the worst pathologies found in the commercial mass media. It receives relatively little in government funding and is mostly paid for by corporations and a small percentage of its listeners who come from a very specific demographic: white, well-educated liberals. Today, NPR is a product stuffed with advertisements. Yet, like much other media, NPR has become a partisan news service with a sterile, professional tone that belies an underlying allegiance to a very narrow range of political viewpoints that are largely inoffensive to those in power. NPR, originating like PBS from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was originally envisioned as an ad-free public service to all Americans, standing as a supplement to privately owned commercial media and which would do the reporting that others did not. Well, you’re both kind of right, and both kind of wrong. NPR is an elitist liberal propaganda cult that serves as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, is openly hostile to any conservative voices, and ought to be defunded!” NPR (Neoliberal Propaganda Radio) is a bastion of establishment groupthink and orthodoxy that gives cover to imperialism and corporate capitalism.” By contrast, readers on the Right who find themselves consuming Current Affairs may have an equally disdainful but entirely different critique. Good and proper leftists who read Current Affairs may already realize this.
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