Liberal bias at NPR?

Steve Inskeep, a long-time reporter for National Public Radio, recently published a piece decrying the claims of bias at NPR. He bases his argument in part on the fact that some conservatives listen to NPR.

But it is a non sequitur to posit that "if some conservatives listen to NPR, then NPR is not biased." To begin with, NPR is multifaceted. In addition to “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” which tend to be straight news (except when addressing issues such as “social justice” or public unions), there are many others (“The Takeaway,” “The Diane Rehm Show”) which often resound with liberal viewpoints.

According to the IRS, there were approximately 140 million individual tax returns filed in 2010. These taxpayers run the political spectrum from ultra liberal to right wing. There can be no excuse for not addressing this wide demographic while NPR is, even in part, publicly funded.

The sound of one hand clapping is discordant unless it aligns with your political frame of reference. That’s why liberals don’t complain about NPR bias. No one is exhorting NPR to make every word uttered on air politically neutral. But is it too much to ask that interviewees and panels be selected as to present a balanced spectrum of views?

In search of balance

There has been much brouhaha lately concerning taxpayer funding of the public broadcasting system, National Public Radio in particular. There are those on the right who feel that NPR offers programming biased to the left. Those on the left, of course, feel that NPR is right down the middle because they find it resonant with their beliefs.

Some weeks ago, NPR ran a self-referential segment which explored whether this bias existed. The conclusion, not surprisingly, was “absolutely not!” But perhaps a more independent analysis might show otherwise.

Listening to NPR programming on Sunday, March 6, the following random items were noted:

• Representative Peter King (R-NY) is anti-Muslim. There was no debate, no alternative point of view.
• The federal deficit was caused by tax cuts for wealthy “fat cats” and two unfunded wars. There was no debate, no alternative point of view
• Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin is anti-union. There was no debate, no alternative point of view.

If the “P” in NPR is to stand for “Public”, then they must recognize that there exist other points of view. Is it possible that Rep. King abhors extremist jihadists but is pro-Muslim? Can it be that the federal deficit has increased enormously by social spending? Perhaps Gov. Walker is pro-taxpayer more than anti-union?

Your personal point of view may differ, but NPR cannot ignore that a range of valid opinions exist in the public marketplace of ideas. To force feed us their views without debate is not acceptable if they expect to receive public funding. Unless, perchance, the “P” stands for “Progressive”.

From mainframes to orchids

Sitting in a condo in Vail, Colorado. Suddenly my iPhone chimes with a Facebook notification alert. My cousin Maria, from eight time zones away has posted "La mia orchidea sta fiorendo ... non ci posso credere!!!!"

I was struck suddenly by the sheer wonder of it.

In 1968, having joined the Marine Corps and they having denied several naive requests to be posted to Vietnam, I was sent to Computer Sciences School in Quantico Virginia. It was only a generation prior that "computer" was a time honored profession peopled by those who laboriously calculated logarithmic and trigonometric and ballistic and astronomical tables. Human computers performed tedious work and were prone to errors. Several computers would perform the same calculations which later would be compared and discrepancies resolved. Human computing was time consuming, imperfect, and very expensive.

Then everything changed. Driven by the computing demands of World War II, scientists created the first electromechanical computers. At first rudimentary and slow and consisting of clattering banks of relays, these machines were still many times faster than humans and, if programmed correctly, capable of delivering faultless results. In the 1950s truly electronic computers evolved, first with hot, glowing vacuum tubes and then with silent and swift transistors. The age of machine computing was well underway.

Later I was posted to the Marine's worldwide data processing center on the verge of the Kansas prairie. The machines were housed in cavernous, clean, air conditioned rooms and were kept comfortably cool and dry – more so than the human attendants who went home to suffer in the sultry Midwestern summer nights. Mainframe computers were huge and noisy and vibrated as data was searched and manipulated and written to hundreds of disk and tape devices. High speed printers whirred and whined and gushed out boxes of printed reports at the unbelievable rate of a thousand lines per minute. All this while consuming enough electricity to power a good sized village. These machines calculated and printed paychecks, maintained base and outpost inventories, and kept track of myriad facts and figures of a modern military force.

But while all of this progress was being made in computing, the real magic was just underway. On October 29, 1969, the Internet was born when two computers, one in Los Angeles and one in Palo Alto, California, first talked to each other. It was at that point, slowly, grudgingly, and very gradually, computers became less about calculating and more about tying people together.

In Vail, the iPhone in my hand has a million times the memory and processing capacity of those early mainframes. And much, much more importantly, it reaches out as if by magic through the air to tell me that my cousin Maria could hardly believe that her orchid was in the process of blooming.