Wednesday, June 24, 2009

National Public Radio

I got into the habit some years ago of listening to "Morning Edition" on National Public Radio (NPR) for twenty to twenty-five minutes every work day (i.e., while shaving, showering, and grooming in the mornings). NPR's news coverage gets a bit of a bad rap from a lot of conservatives for having a liberal bias. Some of that bad rap is justified in my opinion, but "Morning Edition" is diligent about presenting both sides of a lot of issues, anyway. On the other hand, a bland style of delivery (which NPR can afford, due to its being heavily subsidized by the federal government) isn't quite the same thing as complete objectivity. And, as many have pointed out, a news organization can be just as biased in terms of the stories it chooses to cover (or ignore) as it is in how it presents those stories. But I have to say that the one thing that drives me to distraction when listening to "Morning Edition" is NPR's utterly uncritical acceptance of the notion that increasing levels of human-generated carbon dioxide are warming the Earth and rapidly rendering it uninhabitable -- when, in the last ten years, CO2 emissions have continued to rise but global temperatures have not followed suit. In that light, one would think that a news organization without an agenda would at least start to ask questions around the margins of the accepted dogma!