@mathlete, I think my original words may have been a bit too harsh and not fully expressed what I was trying to express. I take the good with the bad when I listen to these sources. I recognize the good.
I think it is fair to also recognize the bad. You note you have heard others express my view over and over again. Perhaps there is a reason for that. As you probably know, there are multiple former NYT ombudsmen (ombudspeople?) and NPR executives that have voiced the same concerns I have.
It's lazy to dismiss NPR and PBS outright. It's also lazy to just ignore a consistent stream of criticism from many educated people, including many former high-level employees of these very organizations.
I don't ignore the criticism of the outlets I consume. I just don't think the criticism is substantive enough to merit much change.
For what it's worth, I am also a very global capitalism friendly person. I also like The Economist and the WSJ. I used to subscribe to both. I stopped near the end of 2016, not because I thought they did bad work, but because my journalism time and money needed to go towards confronting a new and emerging risk. I hope to be able to return as a subscriber soon. We can leave it at that, lol.
Luckily, NPR produces a ton of good financial content too. Just last month, they did a radio piece on what happens when rent checks stop coming in. They interviewed a tenant and her landlord, both of whom were portrayed as excellent people. And they talked to academics about the implication for mortgage originators, collateralize loan holders, and the government.
It's not like they portrayed the tenant as a saint and the landlord as capitalist Satan. As a landlord myself, I can assure you that I'd be pretty turned off by an outlet that did that.
I know that NPR, PBS, the NYT and WaPo have blind spots. Where I disagree, is that they need to materially change to cover these blind spots. It's probably no surprise that I'm fairly democrat friendly. Well PBS just did a piece on the Biden sexual assault allegation where they interviewed 74 former staffers. I think PBS has me covered on this issue. I don't, for example, think they should start acting more like Fox News opinion shows, or Karl Rove's WSJ OpEd column to satisfy arbitrary standards of "fairness". In other words, I don't consider this to be a true blind spot. They are doing a better job on this issue than almost everyone else. The same goes for a lot of heavily politicized issues. The media I consume becomes a punching bag for "ignoring" these issues when it is convenient, but much of this criticism is made in bad faith. If a true blind spot emerges, I can just go to another news outlet.