Rev Left Radio being called "Misleading" is so fucking bonkers to me.
Breht is such a thoughtful and genuine guy. And the show has so many guests on with differing perspectives. Like, yeah ok, some of those guests might say things one disagrees with, are debated within a given field, or are otherwise occasionally incorrect. But the ethos of that show is about getting the listener to know how to think, and thoughtfully approach things, from a broad left perspective. It's not just feeding you normative claims and calling it a day.
Anyway, go listen to RevLeft, Breht is such a gift
Ad Fontes never analyzed or listened to the show. They noticed that it was "far-left" (it's in the name!). And far-left = biased = misleading/unfactual, by definition. It's that simple.
When you're a lib, NPR seems like the gospel truth and you feel very smug about listening to it. Before I had fully understood and rejected liberalism (voted for Stein in 2012 out of disgust with Obama, but still had a ways to go), I spent a good few years listening to Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me (their weekly news quiz) religiously. The concept of a news quiz is incredibly enticing to libs--my lib mom loves doing the NYT news quiz every week to test "how much she knows" (i.e. how much propaganda + useless trivia she's been fed), and I felt the same way about being able to answer questions in WWDTM. And as for the morning and afternoon news programs, they cover a wide variety of (uncontroversial) topics and are Fair and Balanced™ (i.e. they have center-right and far-right guests) which makes you feel worldly and broad-minded.
But as the 2016 presidential campaign dragged on I started to see just how ridiculous their coverage of Bernie was--outright mocking him and his supporters, pretty much, which seemed at odds with their supposedly neutral editorial position. I think the final straw for me was in the early days of the Trump Administration, when they brought on a cavalcade of cartoonishly evil goons from the Trump Administration to lie through their teeth, which the reporters would barely push back on (because that would be partisan!); I remember their "interview" (more of a press release) of Sebastian Gorka right after the Muslim travel ban being particularly shameful. But again, I was already on the path to the left. If you're a comfortable lib, the actual policies don't matter--the calm, authoritative voices of the NPR hosts and their unwavering civility in the face of pure evil soothes your mind, and instead of worrying your head about "issues" you just collect "facts" about the events of the week so you can stay "informed", although since you have no actual political goals there is seemingly no purpose to this other than appearing smart to other libs when you go to brunch.
Citations needed is where NPR News hour sits. It's centrist, even totally apolitical (just balls and strikes), and extremely fact based and unbiased. If you think it's left wing it's because you're a nazi shit head liar like everyone else in this fucked wasteland we call society and that's just an unbiased fact.
Literally in their latest episode they just dropped the phrase "our listeners are not Maoists who believe the American state should be destroyed" and I was like . They're angry, righteous nebulous leftists, which is fine given what they do.
The lie they're trying to tell doesn't even require it to be boomerang shaped, they could fill in the bottom center with trashy tabloid stuff and make it more believable, while still appealing to their audience's biases.
But they're so high on their own supply that they can't take that easy win, so they ranked Joe Rogan as less misleading than revleft.
They obviously came up with the boomerang shape before they started gathering a list of podcasts. They wouldn’t dare critique any establishment-affirming media no matter how trashy lest it taint the holy aura of the righteous center.
I'm a surprised that Virgil is still in the Bad Faith logo. I had to look it up and he's still in the logo on the official site as well. The last episode that Virgil was on was Episode 78 in June 2021. Brie just released episode 375 this week and Virgil is still in the cover. Why is she holding on to this?
Either he's getting residuals and there's a contract that's ambiguous about the branding in the case of his disappearing from public life, or she just can't be assed to change it.
ah yes, citations needed, the "hyper partisan" podcast that spends all of its run time telling you exactly how every awful policy in this country is bipartisan and democrats are bloodthirsty capitalist racist imperialist colonialist ghouls who you should under no circumstances pledge your fealty to.
bowtie dipshit bell curve fetishizing media pathologically incapable of decoupling partisanship from politics and imagining a world outside their narrow overton window despite it being literally 110% of what Citations Needed talks about during any given episode, which surely they listened to at least a few before plotting them on this graph, right????
I don’t think they listened to a single minute of any of the podcasts other than NPR, they just compiled a list of “radical left”, “center”, and “radical right” podcasts and arranged the “data” to fit the preconceived model, with the “extreme” podcasts being randomly assigned a pecking order on the Pinocchio chart descending down from the holy unquestionable Gospel of NPR
It's simple, start with the conclusion that the center (99% Hitler) is objectively correct and that "reliability" decreases as you move towards the evil 1984 totalitarian extremes and work backwards to shoehorn the data into your prebuilt model.
I gave Dumb Gay Podcast a listen. They blamed Iran for people not voting Biden and enthusiastically cheered on the US taking Taiwan. I think the person making this graph just looked at the title and assumed it was radical left.
Accuracy in media, in theory: "Both the extreme left and extreme right represent equal and oppositely biased perspective on the same facts, so they will naturally cancel out if you stay between them."
That theory, applied: "We must abolish the class system in order to prevent the frogs from turning gay."
As bbnh69420 said, he's mainly about basketball and sports in general. Whatever politics I've heard from him over the years runs closer to mainstream Dem. How they think he's anywhere close to being as leftist as Citations Needed is perplexing. Says a lot about whoever made this chart lol.