After we founded the Center for Investigative Reporting in 1977, many people came to visit us at our headquarters in Oakland, particularly reporters from other media organizations.
During the early years, two of those visitors were reporters from NPR in Washington, D.C., who told me about a novel idea to broadcast the news 24 hours-a-day.
One of the two, JoAnne Wallace, eventually implemented that vision at KQED, the NPR affiliate in Northern California.
From time to time, CIR worked with NPR and/or KQED reporters on stories; we also appeared on the air, usually as guests discussing a recent story or its impacts.
Later, in the mid-1990s, I worked for two years at KQED, and saw first-hand the high quality journalism practiced there. It was my first time as a radio news executive, and I also served for a time as Executive Vice President for the company.
Many years later, in 2013, I returned to KQED to help the company build an online news service to complement its large and successful radio and television news services. I also helped produce the station's weekly TV news show as well as various radio reports.
I was thinking back about all of this today as I was considering the question of how to advise people about which news services they can trust in this time of political divisiveness.
One answer is you can trust NPR and on KQED. The journalists who work both places hold to the highest journalistic standards and provide the most accurate reports possible.
Certain partisans charge that there is a liberal bias at NPR; others say there is a conservative bias. I've seen evidence of neither.
Both NPR and KQED are non-profits that depend on donations from the public to carry on their work. This is important because it avoids the dependence on advertising revenue that is the case at most private sector media companies.
With diverse revenue streams, centered around small donations from people like you and me, public media institutions are among our best options for sorting out the signal from the noise out there.
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Here are a few of today's signals:
* Trump Funnels Record Subsidies to Farmers Ahead of Election Day (NYT)
* LeBron James’s legacy off the court may ultimately mean more than what he did on it (WashPo)
* In Former Taliban Stronghold, Defiant Women Hit the Gym -- A women’s health club in Kandahar challenges conservative Afghan traditions that vilify exercise for women. (NYT)
* Roughly three-quarters of voters want to see Congress pass new coronavirus relief, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds. (HuffPost)
* California Republican Party Admits It Placed Misleading Ballot Boxes Around State (NYT)
* Melania Trump is having a hard time distancing herself from the president (WashPo)
* Facebook will ban ads discouraging people from getting vaccines (Reuters)
* Democrats in Trump Country Are Not Shy Anymore About Liking Biden (NYT)
* IMF envisions a sharp 4.4% drop in global growth for 2020 (AP)
* Florida Sees Signals of a Climate-Driven Housing Crisis (NYT)
* Is This Still Soccer? -- In Massachusetts, rules changes brought on by the pandemic — no contact, no tackles, no headers, no throw-ins — are forcing soccer players and coaches to adapt to a very different game. (NYT)
* Great Barrier Reef has lost half of its corals since 1995 (BBC)
* Sheriff spoke in defense of accused domestic terrorists (CNN). More insanity in Michigan... (DW)
* Biden is favored to win the election -- We simulate the election 40,000 times to see who wins most often. The sample of 100 outcomes below gives you a good idea of the range of scenarios our model thinks is possible. Biden 87%, Trump 13%. (538)
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-- Robert Evans. (2002). 'The Kid Stays in the Picture' [Documentary]. Highway Films.
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