Even though Fox News (and CNN) is large (relatively speaking in cable news world) does a lot of their own reporting, they do not shape and reflect the prevailing thought. They shape and reflect partisan thought, tailored to their audience, and to convince viewers to adopt the views they are pushing.
Just for information sake, where does NPR fall in your opinion?
I, for one, consider it no better than Fox.
Well, they're not even in the same league as Fox News.
NPR is a lot of things, from "Fresh Air" to "This American Life" to "Car Talk" to Hidden Brain." I'm partial to "Jazz Night in America." But you're probably referring to "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered," the two flagship programs, and the two most listened to radio shows in America.
As an entity, NPR doesn't have an agenda the way Fox News does.
In terms of story assignments and sensibility, NPR has always been more liberal than conservative, butt it’s not as if it has an overt political agenda. If you walked through an NPR newsroom and took a poll on political affiliation, you would find that like most newsrooms, there are a lot more Democrats on staff then Republicans, a lot more pro-choice folks then pro-lifers, etc., as journalists in general tend to skew liberal, and it's probably fair to say NPR is more liberal than most newsrooms simply because of the type of journalist it attacks (a journalist rich in the ideals of journalism).
Ultimately, human nature being what it is, journalists naturally approach a story with bias to which they need, and must consciously apply, objectivity as a discipline to test their bias against the evidence so as to produce journalism that is as close to the truth as is humanly possible, without a robotic retelling of the facts. That gets accomplished by using the
objectivity method rather than the journalist themselves being devoid of interest and objectivity. NPR as a whole, two flagship programs, are some of the best using objectivity as a method to produce what is objectively the most assiduously even-handed presentations anywhere in the American media.
Everyone has a subconscious, baseline bias. All you have to do is look at reality and then interpret it to see that. But the idea that the same subconscious, baseline bias (whatever that bias may be) has somehow been morphed in the notion that all news media works primarily to manipulate obvious truth for dishonest and partisan means, and that the entire journalistic enterprise is completely with out a shred of integrity, all just paid shills who pray on the ignorant masses on behalf of their corporate and ideological masters is just ridiculous. It's just as ridiculous as stating there is no media bias at all. If you have a strong political bias, and we see it more with conservatives than liberals, although it is true for most everybody, any reporting that doesn't meet your your biased approval and agenda is considered biased in and of itself, even if it isn't biased at all. For example, people who get the bulk of their news from Fox News, and do not trust any other news source for truth and accuracy, will view all other sources as being liberally biased.
Yes, NPR is left of center, but it's not morally or practically equivalent to Fox's (or MSNBC's, or increasingly, and now blatantly, CNN's) willful doublespeak and blatant lensing of fact through ideology. They may not have aggressively ideological content, but they do reflect a liberal
sensibility. They're careful, reasoned, polite, cosmopolitan, serious with the occasional touch of whimsy, have guests who can string together multiple sentences together without humiliating themselves, in short, everything liberals either are or imagine themselves to be. And everyone at NPR seems so nice, so how could you not trust them? So liberals do, and most of them listen, which is why NPR is consistently listed atop the Most Trusted News Source lists. And because it's trusted by liberals, it'll be a cold day in Hell before conservatives will trust it.
If all your news conforms to your interpretation of reality, and everything that happens in the world can be explained by your specific viewpoint and understanding, then either you snort with haughty derision at Einstein's meager intellect and have a Nobel Prize coming, or something has gone horribly wrong in how you consume information.
One of the keys is to recognize what is news and what is personal opinion or political commentary. Reporters interviewing reporters is pure political commentary, usually for the purpose of furthering the narrative they want to tell, of furthering the ideology they want to push. So you can dismiss that straight-up as political BS rather than being informed. The shows with pundits and panelists, same thing. It's all BS. But formal news reports, too, have some of these signs of bias. Things like reporters ending a story with a quote from a Republican, then adding to the end of the report by saying something to the effect of "but it's unclear if those words will translate into actions" or "even though the data is still unclear on the effect of blah blah blah." That's pure designed to craft the opinion of the listener (or the reader in print media, where such interjections are even more subtle). Again, Fox is especially egregious and overt with this sort of thing, but this bias is a fact of life for any reporting beyond the simplest reporting of figures. The trick is to recognize it and dismiss it for what it is.
So bottom line, NPR is indeed biased, but they don't do agendized news to further the liberal agenda. And they're better than most at even-handed presentations (dare I say fair and balanced) than most.