NPR is a good source for news, except when it isn’t
In today’s Up First newsletter by NPR there was a story about the IRS piloting a new program next year where taxpayers can file their returns online for free with the IRS. This is a good thing. But the first quote in the article is from some asshole at Intuit, which owns TurboTax:
“A direct-to-IRS e-file system is wholly redundant and is nothing more than a solution in search of a problem,” said Rick Heineman, a spokesman for Intuit, the company behind TurboTax. “That solution will unnecessarily cost taxpayers billions of dollars and especially harm the most vulnerable Americans.”
This article highlights two problems: (1) Intuit and the tax prep industry is gaslighting Americans into thinking free and easy tax filing is actually a bad thing and (2) NPR really is not your friend.
It’s truly the American way to complain about a problem that many other countries have shown how to solve and instead expect the free market to have our best interest in mind. The Free File Alliance, an industry group that includes Intuit and H&R Block, has the audacity to say that the IRS providing a free and easy return is “a tremendous and potentially harmful conflict of interest.”
Like healthcare, a government-run system would be cheaper and more efficient. The $14 billion spent on tax prep software each year would be reduced to a few hundred million more in government spending. That’s a significant savings for everyday Americans, who would no longer be lining the pockets of Intuit and H&R Block. Not to mention the time you would save by reviewing a form and giving it a thumps up if it looks right. If you really wanted to give Intuit your money and time, you could still do that—like some weirdo.
I wrote a first draft of this over lunch today, and then this afternoon I saw Cory Doctorow wrote a post about this topic on Pluralistic.net, including the same Rick Heineman quote and Upton Sinclair reference. I implore you to go read his analysis, as it is much better and more detailed than mine.
The second problem: NPR relies too heavily on “experts” from think tanks, PR departments, and government officials. They used to interview actual Americans instead of these charlatans, but as public funding was stripped away they relied more on corporate sponsorship, which in turn made them focus on cheaper and more status-quo-friendly coverage. They became less and less of a true public media, and more like the corporate media they are supposed to stand out from. They appear liberal, but they are only liberal within a certain established box of what is acceptable discourse. You do not see NPR interviewing Noam Chomsky anymore and you do not see them questioning American foreign policy aggression.
I still get a lot of my news from NPR. It is a good way to get an idea of what’s going on in the world and what “the conversation” is about this week, without resorting to even more corporate news outlets. But once you understand its weaknesses, you start seeing them everywhere in their reporting, like in this article. That makes you get to the real issue of manufacturing consent 1 : what are they not covering?
The problem with NPR is something I still struggle with. I’m trying to accomplish two things at once: pay less attention to the daily news and find a better source for critical discussion of long-term issues. That’s had me reaching to magazines, as they are naturally slower and more long form. I’ve been a subscriber to Jacobin for two years now, and have been reading more Current Affairs lately.
But some days I just want to turn it all off.