undefined | Better HN

0 pointsguywithahat3y ago0 comments

I don't think Wikipedia and NPR have aged that well though, there are lots of topics where they're essentially (or literally) paid propaganda for their major donors and because they're a non-profit it's less clear what's what than if they had paid advertisements

0 comments

tootie3y ago

Idk what you're referring to but absolutely no human enterprise of any kind will be immune to corruption or ineptitude. It's 100% guaranteed to happen sometimes even in a communist Star Trek utopia. All we can ever do is remove or mitigate the incentives to serve purely selfish goals. Public media is substantially less corruptible than corporate media but there are no absolutes.

blep_3y ago

Do you have examples?

dredmorbius3y ago

Current Affairs recently ran "NPR Is Not Your Friend", which highlights some of the issues:

<https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/npr-is-not-your-frien...>

The upshot of that piece is that NPR itself remains part of the neoliberal ideological propaganda apparatus:

Like all press outlets, NPR has a particular point of view. Its bias is just as profound as the likes of MSNBC or Fox News. NPR’s ideological bias is toward what we might call the American bipartisan consensus.

My sense is that both NPR and Wikipedia have performed admirably, and far better than their commercial counterparts, but that there remain pitfalls with both any organisation and those which are based on nonprofit / NGO models, particularly in terms of sponsor / donor capture.

The NonProfit Quarterly's podcast Tiny Spark frequently discusses such issues. It seems to be on hiatus but its back-catalogue has numerous episodes dedicated to the topic:

<https://nonprofitquarterly.org/tiny-spark/>

One of the voices heard several times on that topic has been Rob Reich of Stanford (not to be confused with former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, at UC Berkeley), who's written and spoken on issues of philanthropy. Several articles are listed in his ... Wikipedia ... bio:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Reich#Articles>

I suspect that the OP had another take on this, which I find less credible.

tootie3y ago

That article has loads of assertions of personal opinions of the author and besides a glaring lack of evidence, didn't even bothering googling how the local public radio editorial policy isn't centralized. Consider that NPR does not have a radio broadcast at all. Affiliates do. Affiliates who can air any combination of content produced in house, by NPR or by other affiliates all catering to local markets. Local affiliates derive most of their funding from members but NPR is prohibited from soliciting which is why they also have corporate sponsors. The sponsors do not exert editorial control and don't even have access to affiliates who determine what goes to air.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

tootie3y ago

blep_3y ago

Do you have examples?

dredmorbius3y ago

Current Affairs recently ran "NPR Is Not Your Friend", which highlights some of the issues:

<https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/npr-is-not-your-frien...>

The upshot of that piece is that NPR itself remains part of the neoliberal ideological propaganda apparatus:

The NonProfit Quarterly's podcast Tiny Spark frequently discusses such issues. It seems to be on hiatus but its back-catalogue has numerous episodes dedicated to the topic:

<https://nonprofitquarterly.org/tiny-spark/>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Reich#Articles>

I suspect that the OP had another take on this, which I find less credible.

tootie3y ago

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse