not OP, but I watch Al Jazeera a lot, they're more fair than NPR, they at least invite the "other party" to the talkshow, no matter how ridiculous they sound (e.g. russian people supporting the war). NPR hasn't done that in years, they do a literal strawman: they quote what a republican said (or they replay a short part from a speech) and then the all democratic leaning attendees talk about the subject. It's laughable. I wouldn't just blindly trust Al Jazeera either, I would double check whatever they say, but at least I can learn about the world from a different perspective: they cover a lot from Africa, Asia, eastern Europe, which are places that Western Media usually ignores (unless it's something really big).
NPR is very high quality when it comes to art, science and other shows, but fails spectacularly when it's a political subject.
NPR has the opportunity to be a world class media group, like BBC and Al Jazeera, but they chose to waddle in mud together with the democratic party, estranging half of the US population - which could have been an easy win for them.
What you are saying is that NPR is left-wing, not "controlled by the government".
"controlled by the government" means: left-wing when the government is left-wing, right-wing when the government is right-wing. Was NPR right-wing when Trump was president?
If not, it is the proof that the label "government funded" is really really bad: it does not identify outlets that are biased by their funding, it just find an excuse to label as biased while not labeling as biased others than are as biased.
It does not mean NPR is not biased, but if you want to add a label to warn of a potential bias, you need to do it properly, and label ALL outlets that are similarly biased and identify properly the reason they are.
Funnily, NPR could also drop the 4% of revenue from government funding and continue to publish the same stories with exactly the same bias, and people who are arguing that NPR is biased should therefore argue then that NPR is not biased anymore.
I wasn't arguing that it's controlled by the government. It's somewhat controlled by the democratic party, which is 50% of the time in charge of the government.
I was mainly expanding on the fact that NPR chose to not represent 50% of the US population, and also miss having a chance of being a world class service, like the BBC or Al Jazeera.
I 100% agree that NPR is biased by left-wing ideology.
I don't really agree about "controlled by", that's like asking someone "who have you voted for" and after they said X, then saying "so you don't have any free will, you are just controlled by X". It's ridiculous: it's not because someone agrees with some party that the party controls them.
But being biased is not in itself a problem: every media is biased, only stupid people believe in neutrality. For example, giving 50-50 time to present each side's opinion is not unbiased: in a parallel universe where one side is, by chance, way bigger than the other (which is very easy to obtain as political trends are strongly based on charisma of few people), then, the 50-50 strategy leads to totally different coverage of the situation. The 50-50 strategy is not being neutral, it's being a sell-out that want to please everyone.
Another example is these situations where the journalist gives equal share to a person that says "it's currently raining" and a person that says "it's currently sunny" (and, please, avoid "it can be raining and sunny at the same time", obviously, my example corresponds to a situation where it is not the case).
At the end of the day, it's not a problem: you have left-wing media, you have right-wing media, as long as they are not lying and that you don't have a society too stupid to live in an echo chamber, then, citizen are given all the information they need to make their own opinion. And if they are living in their echo chamber, the problem is not the existence of biased media, but a society problem.
But in this discussion, the problem is that the label is not "this company is ideologically biased", but "this company is controlled by the government". You cannot blame me for talking about the subject in question. The question of NPR being left-wing is irrelevant, but pushing this in the discussion is in fact even a problem: like if intellectually dishonest labeling are ok because NPR is left-wing.
Trustworthy when it is about non-local affairs, hopelessly biased when it is about local affairs. But Al Jazeera doesn't really pretend to be unbiased. Sometimes I'm positively surprised by the quality of their reporting. But them being Qatar based the amount of local news that would affect me is nil. They definitely offer an interesting perspective on the world as seen from the Arabic perspective, meanwhile I'm well aware of the fact that their English language news isn't always a 1:1 with their coverage of the same subject in languages that I can not read unaided.
Sorry, but aljazeera is on the level of RT. That you think otherwise just shows that you are more willing to ignore a biais when it is in your favor.
It has always been known in the arabic world that AJ is a complete puppet of the Qatari royal family (and even staffed by members of the royal family) and it can't be a coincidence that AJ's coverage is almost always a mirror image of qatari foreign policy talking points/positions. It is the equivalent of Saudi Arabia's Al Arabiya, just with more international presence.
The point is that Al Jazeera exhibits a lot of bias on international issues that are relevant to the Qataris, not just local news. This includes US foreign policy, environmental things, and global economic policy. They are basically RT (think about how RT covered george floyd), but generally allied with the west.
