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Archive for the ‘NPR’ Category

Kids who use social media score lower on reading and memory tests, a study shows

Posted in Education, NPR, Topics Of Interest on October 15, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Juliana Belo Gutierrez/iStockphoto/Getty Images

By Rhitu Chatterjee | NPR

Preteens using increasing amounts of social media perform poorer in reading, vocabulary and memory tests in early adolescence compared with those who use no or little social media.

That’s according to a new study that suggests a link between social media use and poorer cognition in teens. The findings are published in JAMA.

“This is a really exciting study,” says psychologist Mitch Prinstein at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

“It confirms a lot of what we have been hearing about from schools all across the country, which is that kids are just having a really hard time focusing on being able to learn as well as they used to, because of the ways in which social media has changed their ability to process information, perhaps.”

While most previous research has focused on the impact of social media use on kids’ mental health, “it’s critical to understand how social media use during school hours specifically affects learning, especially as so many schools are considering phone bans right now,” says study author and pediatrician Jason Nagata of the University of California, San Francisco.

A look at reading and memory 

To understand that, Nagata and his colleagues used data from one of the largest ongoing studies on adolescents, called the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Scientists have been following thousands of preteens as they go through adolescence to understand the development of their brains.

The ongoing study has been surveying kids about their social media use every year and giving them a range of tests for learning and memory every other year. Nagata and his colleagues used data on over 6,000 children, ages 9 to 10, as scientists followed them through early adolescence.

They classified the kids into three groups based on their evolving patterns of social media use. The biggest group, consisting of about 58% of the kids, used little or no social media over the next few years. The second-largest group, about 37% of kids, started out with low-level use of social media, but by the time they turned 13, they were spending about an hour each day on social media.

The remaining 6% of kids — called the “high increasing social media group” — were spending about three or more hours a day by age 13.

Read more here.

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Poll: Taxes No. 1 Issue For Over Half Of Illinois Voters, Nearly Half Would Move

Posted in Barrington Education Association, Commodius Maximus, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Ethics, Fat Bastard, Illinois Policy Institute, NPR, Politics, Pritzker’s Rules of Order, Property Taxes, Springfield, Taxes, Unions, What the Ficke (Bradford)? on May 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »

More than half of Illinois voters said high taxes were the No. 1 concern for the state, according to an Illinois Policy Institute poll. Of those polled, nearly half said they would also move out of the state if given the chance.

By Patrick Andriesen | Illinois Policy Institute

More than half of Illinois voters polled said high taxes were the No. 1 issue facing the state in April 2025, according to a survey conducted for the Illinois Policy Institute.

High taxes were the top issue impacting the state for 54% of the voters – an increase of 2 percentage points from January – according to the poll of 550 registered Illinois voters conducted April 10-13 for the institute by M3 Strategies.

The economy came in second place, being ranked as a top issue by 33% of the voters. The economy was tied for the No. 3 issue in the January poll.

Voters were unhappy with their home state: 49.5% said they would move out of Illinois if given the opportunity, a slight increase from January. Only 40% said they would rather stay in Illinois. The remaining 10.5% said they were unsure.

Past surveys have shown high taxes were the No. 1 reason most Illinoisans considered leaving the state. Polling from NPR Illinois and the University of Illinois found 61% of Illinoisans thought about moving out of state in 2019, and the No. 1 reason was taxes.

Similar surveys conducted by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute in 2016 and Echelon Insights in 2023 also found high taxes were the single biggest reason Illinoisans wanted to leave.

Read more here.

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Democrat Madness Triggered by Sunlight of Common Sense

Posted in Dinky, John Kass, NPR, Politics, Taxes on February 9, 2025| Leave a Comment »

By John Kass | johnkassnews.com

Why is the hard anti-American left so angry at Elon Musk? They’ve been unmasked. He and his warriors at DOGE have found them out.

For years, they’ve been getting paid with your money, a billion dollars a week of American tax dollars, and laughing at you as the United States faces a fiscal deficit and as you’ve pinched your pennies hoping to survive the Democrat Party’s 20 percent inflation, as their leftist allies were living large . That’s why Democrats are so angry. They’ve been discovered. We see the hate and madness in their eyes directed at us for seeing the other side of their facd.

Now they’re screaming like scalded cats in a sack, because Musk and President Donald Trump have cut off their gravy train.

I didn’t approve their spending spree. American taxpayers didn’t vote on the U.S. Agency for International Development spending millions on snacks for terrorist cells of al Qaeda. Or $75 million on diversity scams in foreign nations. What about $17 million for “equity” in Vietnam? Or $8 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists to avoid “binary-gender” language? Or shoveling millions and millions of dollars at left-wing American media organizations without telling subscribers or taxpayers?

And so on.

And $2 million for sex changes in Guatemala and $47,000 to underwrite production of a transgender opera in Columbia? What of $16 million in condoms for the Taliban? Or $30 million to study AIDS among transvestite prostitutes in South Africa?

All this is only a small fraction of federal spending that you pay for. Just wait until Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency move onto other federal departments. Because they’re inviting further detailed line-by-line scrutiny of the federal budget.

Nothing illustrates political madness quite like the Democrats screaming in rage, frothing at the mouth, after the corrupt spending schemes of the two worst presidents in American history–Joe Biden and Barack Obama—were discovered and made public. Joe is a drooling meat puppet now, but are Obama and his schemes under every moist rock? It appears so.

Kass’ column continues here.

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NPR: Our Federal Tax Dollars for Marxist News, Partisan Censorship and Pan Flutes?

Posted in Deception, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Elections, Ethics, John Kass, Look For The Union Label, News Media, NPR, OP/Ed, Politics, Taxes, Wirepoints on April 21, 2024| Leave a Comment »

By John Kass | JohnKassNews.com

As a life-long, big city newsman so focused on work that my musical choices involved only news radio jingles, I no longer enjoy listening to news on the radio. Why?

Because it’s mostly biased corporate leftist crap, and I keep fretting about whether Alexander Soros has purchased this local news station or that one and bent its newsroom to his daddy’s will as if they were the once-thriving Cambodian middle class.

Meanwhile cable TV news is so full of snickering liberal rage, and pouty left-wing news presenters with epic hair, that I can’t stand it.

But I’ve come up with a positive alternative:

National People’s Radio.

Que the Pan flutes and the bird sounds from the Amazon rain forest. Yes, the time has come.

And, added plus, “free” public television with programming set up by a corporate board of prominent American conservatives including the scholar Victor Davis Hanson, radio broadcaster Dan Proft, Tom Bevan co-founder of Real Clear Politics and University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Charles Lipson.

For example, we’d have President Joe Biden, accompanied by those Pan Flutes playing the theme of Cmdr. McBragg, telling the story of Joe’s heroic Uncle Ambrose being devoured by cannibals in New Guinea. Whether it happened or not. You can’t make omelets without breaking a few eggs, right Walter Duranty?

And lengthy panel discussions on “It’s the Economy Stupid” about how much things cost at the store, what they cost now and how great things were BJ (Before Joe) and droll comedies from Britain on the humorous antics of liberal chumbolones, and sad dramas from Britain about sad middle-class depressives.

We’ll have sports too, from 24-hour fly fishing to 24-hour soccer that often ends 0-0, and city apartment terriers killing alley rats.

We’ll call that one about the rat-killer “Prince of the City” along with a kid’s cartoon show on the heroic “Prince” protecting a multi-racial family from cartoon rats.

To fund it all, we’ll invoke a complicated hidden federal tax scheme replete with complicated grants and call it just a bunch of “grants” that are all much too intricate for Americans to bother about in Congress. So I hope you’ll never get to the bottom of it and the money keeps flowing in to support my elitist fly-fishing documentaries and scoreless soccer.

Wait a minute. You don’t think Americans should pay for red-blooded rat hunting sports and right-wing comedies on the death of the citizen and fly-fishing stories with corporate “sponsorships” to entertain a tiny fraction of the population?

Buzz off, fascist.

Read more here.

Related: “NPR Scandal Should Kill Taxpayer-Funded Broadcasting,” “National Public Radio’s Debacle and the ‘Vibe Shift’”

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NPR Scandal Should Kill Taxpayer-Funded Broadcasting

Posted in Deception, Ethics, News Media, NPR, Organizations, Politics, RealClear Politics, Taxes, Unions, Wirepoints on April 20, 2024| Leave a Comment »

By Charles Lipson* | RealClear Politics

“I don’t want any yes-men around me,” said Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood producer famed for his movies and malapropisms. “I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.” The brass at National Public Radio must have heard Sam, but they add a slight amendment. We want only “yes-men” (they/them) and will boot anyone who dares to dissent.

Lest there be any doubt, NPR just proved it by suspending, without pay, the staffer who exposed the pervasive problems there. He dared to write publicly that that National Public Radio was uniformly ideological, deeply committed to its strident left-wing views, and determined to exclude any alternatives. For saying that out loud, they cut off Uri Berliner’s paycheck for five days. It’s their way of saying, “Thank you for your feedback.” Q.E.D.

Berliner, disgusted by NPR’s response, resigned Wednesday with a fiery statement: “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged.” Who could?

There are really two problems here, not one, and they go well beyond one journalist’s resignation. The first is political bias, which is a problem at all “elite” networks and newspapers, where “hard news” is heavily slanted. The second is that some of these outlets, notably NPR, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) and their local affiliates, receive taxpayer funding.

Let’s take political bias first. It was once a cardinal rule of journalism that partisan or ideological viewpoints should be confined to editorials and opinion columns. The goal was to keep editorial views out of hard-news reporting, as much as possible. To do it, the editorial staff constantly fought with the business team, who wanted coverage to favor their advertisers.

Those days are long gone and so is even the ideal of unbiased coverage. We have returned to an earlier era when American newspapers were closely affiliated with political parties and local political machines and covered the news to favor them. Today’s newsrooms have revived that stance. They are as ideologically driven as a gender-studies class at Smith College. If you depart from that ideology, you are out, like Bari Weiss at the New York Times.

Because newsrooms now have so few dissenting voices, reporters and editors live inside the bubble and hardly notice their surroundings. If they do, they are determined to preserve that insularity.

The fragmentation of today’s media landscape encourages these strong, partisan stances. Newspapers, magazines, cable networks, and podcasts know the market is finely sliced. They have strong incentives to choose a narrow slice for themselves and appeal to it by confirming their audience’s bias, not challenging it. That’s as true for right-wing talk radio as it is for left-wing public radio.

Read more here.

*Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.

Related: “National Public Radio’s Debacle and the ‘Vibe Shift’”

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National Public Radio’s Debacle and the ‘Vibe Shift’

Posted in Conflict of interest, Deception, Elections, Ethics, New Normal?, News Media, NPR, OP/Ed, Politics, Topics Of Interest, Wirepoints on April 19, 2024| Leave a Comment »

By Mark Glennon | Founder of Wirepoints

If you haven’t read it, you’ve missed what every journalist in America has probably read: a brutal column on how National Public Radio (NPR) lost America’s trust, written last week by a 25-year NPR veteran, Uri Berliner.

It may be shaping up as a game-changer, but not because it exposed anything new.  It didn’t, but this time, most every national news outlet in America reported on Berliner’s column and, more surprisingly, didn’t deny much of it.

Berliner’s column seems to be cranking the spotlight on mainstream media up to full blast. NPR may be among the very worst, but much of what Berliner wrote applies to much of the traditional news media. Hopefully, all media will get the message – in Illinois, too.

NPR, as Berliner describes, is hostile to viewpoint diversity, staffed entirely by leftists and woke to the point of silliness. NPR, he says, embraced a knee-jerk, activist, scolding posture, representing the “distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”

Most importantly, Berliner describes how NPR willfully distorted the news. It peddled the Russia collusion hoax, rejected any coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop and its evidence of Biden family corruption, and censored criticism of establishment views on Covid.

That’s what most Americans already know, which is part of Berliner’s point. NPR’s audience has consequently shrunk to a niche on the far left, he explained. For NPR, Berliner says, that’s “devastating both for its journalism and its business model.” [Emphasis added.]

People are consuming less news, worsening the financial plight of traditional news media, though the downturn has hit most newer, online sights as well.

Read more here.

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