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you_give_me_coupon t1_jdi9bba wrote

Reply to comment by headgasketidiot in A critique of Brave Little State's segment on Airbnbs by headgasketidiot

> Yeah, it was a really strange editorial choice.

I think it's entirely expected of VPR and NPR. :(

Thanks for your post, it's really good, and lays out a lot of the reasons I stopped donating to, and then stopped listening to, VPR and NPR. I'm sure /u/bravestatevt will read your post, but I don't expect anything will change, because the issues with their coverage are structural.

The whole post was good, but this part stood out:

>Let me reframe this, with the opening stories of the episode in mind. Our economic situation is such that middle class folks have turned to mining our communities to stay afloat. This isn't a story about how Airbnb is providing an important lifeline for people; it's one of decades of policy failure that has resulted in people desperate to hold on carving up their own communities, and the conflict that causes, which they reported on so nicely at the beginning.

This is something I saw over and over before I gave up on VPR/NPR. Big issues with real impact on regular people would usually get reported on (sometimes stories just wouldn't be covered, but that's another issue), but when the root causes were right there and obvious, the reporting would nonetheless be some dissembling mush about "nuance", or "complexity", usually with a heavy-handed implication that there was nothing to be done.

Why does this happen, when following threads back is straightforward and would make for engaging stories? I would bet anything that certain lines of inquiry are just banned at VPR, either implicitly or explicitly, depending on who or what would be implicated. If the thread leads back to our overall economic system, or failures of some (allied) political party over decades, or especially if they lead back to businesses owned by the oligarchs who fund VPR/NPR, then no one is going to pull on those threads. This happens a lot, because basically every major problem we face leads back to material economic conditions imposed on us by the oligarch class.

TLDR: NPR and its affiliates are beholden to the oligarch class who largely fund them. This affects their coverage in significant ways, leading to specific problems like you pointed out, among others. As long as NPR is funded by billionaire "foundations", it is going to work in the interest of those billionaires.

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headgasketidiot OP t1_jdib08w wrote

Yeah, I pasted this elsewhere in the thread, but an argument much like you're making is laid out in some detail here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/npr-is-not-your-friend

The whole thing is very Manufacturing Consent. I don't doubt the reporter's honestly; I just think that, as Chomsky famously said in that interview, the people who end up doing the reporting are the kinds of people who believe the kinds of things they do. When's the last time anyone at VPR gave an openly anticapitalist framing of an issue? I think On The Media is probably the only NPR show that dabbles in leftist thought. Meanwhile, there are like 10 different shows that are just neoliberal apologia (How I Built This is just capitalist great man propaganda. Science Friday has tons of uncritical coverage of corporate products, etc.).

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BeckyKleitz t1_jdj6kao wrote

Oh now see...I like Science Friday. I hate it that I've missed it again today. :(

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headgasketidiot OP t1_jdj7khe wrote

It's not a bad show per se. I like listening to the cool shit people are doing. I myself do R&D at private companies for a living, and I think some of the stuff I've made is pretty cool. But it does very uncritically report on the R&D of private companies while avoiding the greater context in which they're being made, and clearly views private companies in the market as the vessel through which technology progresses, and humanity with it.

I think they could do with a dose of critical theory every now and then, especially when they start talking about medical technologies. Those can get pretty hard to listen to.

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curiousguy292 t1_jdmqew0 wrote

I agree. There’s some truth to this. I feel like every story has to contain some sort of social justice component to be allowed to air. I remember recently counting 4 stories about the change in DEI officer in Burlington government! Wtf. VPR is totally out of touch with most Vermonters

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you_give_me_coupon t1_jdmzq0h wrote

For sure. Inserting race into every story, especially where it's irrelevant, and always in the most contentious and off-putting way possible, has got to be a top-down directive. It's too ubiquitous and serves the donor class's interests too well. My favorite recent NPR story was something like "in historic first, Boston elects Asian mayor, here's how that's bad for black people." Out of touch indeed.

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curiousguy292 t1_jdn2bul wrote

It’s too bad because it used to be the best source of information in Vermont. Now it just seems to pander to what must be a small segment of Vermont society. Maybe those are the donors?

One exception I have to mention is Erica Heilman. She does “Rumble Strip” and some reporting. She gets it. She did a series called “What class are you?” Where regular people talked about classism in Vermont. It wasn’t very flattering towards the typical VPR listener. It was the most true grit real programming I’ve heard in years.

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