Forgive me if this is a bit unfocused; I'm in late-night banter mode.

>Is NPR really liberal, or do conservatives just say that because it doesn't have an explicitly conservative spin?

I don't listen to NPR a ton since I haven't been in my car as much lately, though I almost always enjoy it when I do turn it on. I tend to tune in during nationally syndicated stuff so I can't speak towards the local broadcasts as much.

I think that NPR is particularly great at pulling stories out of the smallest little nooks and crannies of society, without feeling like they have to always fit it into a broader narrative or talk about the news items that everyone else is talking about. They generally have high journalistic rigor for the subjects that they cover, but they probably suffer from selection bias in terms of the mix of stories they pick. By this I mean that you get the sense that everyone on the network (including the donor base!) leans left and coastal, so they will gravitate towards people, events, and culture that fit in that worldview.

Never feels great to make assertions like that - arguing bias is hard to do and tends to reflect on how you see the world. A good example of this is [this NPR memo from 2010][0] about abortion language. What do you make of it? Did a desire for neutrality shift away from loaded terms into more descriptive and accurate ones? Did they make a conscious decision to move away from common and useful terms that fairly described the aims of each side? How would you interpret "It is acceptable to use the phrase 'anti-abortion', but do not use the term 'pro-abortion rights'."? Feel free to search the Web for plenty of people who will answer that for you in their own ways.

Anyways, have you ever heard the NPR folk talk about music? You certainly don't hear critiques like this[1] in the redder areas of the country. (I say this light-heartedly, please take it as such.)

>It feels like anything left of Fox News is commonly labeled as liberal media which seems a little off to me.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I think it's one of those self-reinforcing stereotypes too, so the more you look for it the more you'll see it.

Scott Alexander had a piece[2] that's somewhat relevant to this topic, as he examines how "...Republicans unilaterally seceded from...shared gatekeeper institutions, so that now we’re in the weird position of having two sets of institutions: one labeling itself 'neutral' and the other labeling itself 'conservative'."

I like the New York Times, but even one of their own public editors noted that "[a]cross the paper’s many departments...so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times."[3] I think that everyone, and thus every publication has biases. It was helpful for the Gray Lady to say so clearly.

All of that to say: You're right, there is a problem, but it didn't happen in a vacuum. A lot of the more popular news sites out there lean to the left, which isn't meant to be a slight against their quality otherwise. Would you argue that point?

I would say that if you stuck close to Reuters and the Christian Science Monitor, you'd get a pretty good cross-section of the news without getting beat over the head with opinionated commentary. (I might try this for a few days to test the theory.) And I'd put sites like the Wall Street Journal and Axios as closer to the center than the NYT and the Washington Post, so center-right and center-left journalism is out there. Something like Deseret News is probably a good example of my NPR critique in the opposite direction, as they have pretty solid journalistic chops but do it in the middle of Utah.

[0]: http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2010/03/npr_changes_ab...

[1]: http://www.npr.org/2013/03/18/174643299/justin-timberlakes-m...

[2]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative...

[3]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/success-and...