Washington Examiner: "Three reasons drivers aren't rushing to trade in their gas guzzlers for EVs"

just realize that this opinion reflects the Examiner’s bias to the right and that it is mostly opinion, not actual news. That’s fine, if what you want to read is opinion that confirms a pre-set bias and not read actual news.

The Examiner has been described as and is widely regarded as conservative.[22] When Anschutz started it in its daily newspaper format, he envisioned creating a competitor to The Washington Post with a conservative editorial line. According to Politico : “When it came to the editorial page, Anschutz’s instructions were explicit—he ‘wanted nothing but conservative columns and conservative op-ed writers,’ said one former employee.”[4]

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Heh, is there any media today that is not skewed left or right?

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Many media outlets have degrees of leaning left or right. But the main distinction, to me, is calling opinion outlets “news”. There is nothing wrong with saying “this is an opinion outlet, not news”. Kind of like the Op-Ed section in a newspaper (remember those?!?) – you know that this is someone expressing their opinion, not so much news or facts. So you can take their opinion as that – it gives you food for thought, but there’s no illusion that the person is a news reporter. Outlets that do that are misleading their audience.

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I would still like to know of a totally unbiased media source. Not being facetious, I would really like to find one. Not found one yet.

Not since David Brinkley.

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The minute they use the term “commentater” would be a flag. Commentater: a person who comments on events.

Andy Rooney was a Commentater. I think Walter Cornkite was a reliable NEWSMAN. He may not have been perfect ,but I think you could believe what he said.

I sue the raw news feed I grabbe d directly off the satellit being fed to the network. I have it on video tape and someday will post it. A camera set up facing the entrence as people entered an Alaska supermarket. “How is it out there?” they were asked. Almost without a fault the answer was “Yeah it is pretty bad, but last year was worse”. The one guy comes in and says “Horrible. Worst I have ever seen”. That was the new snippet that night on the network. The only problem is that guy had just moved from the lower 48 to Alaska and this WAS the worst HE had ever seen.

This was either ABC or CBS as I didn’t have access to NBCs feeds on C-Band.

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Biased or not, this Washington Examiner article is wildly inaccurate.

The three bullets in the BEV-blasting piece were:

  1. High purchase price and expensive to repair - FACT: My 2022 XC-40 Recharge BEV purchase price was $60K less $7.5K tax rebate = $52,500. The same model w/a gas engine was $50K. My total maintenance cost for the last 21 months was ZERO $. I drove 10,000 mi at a cost of .045 cents a mile for a total fuel cost of $450, an ICE XC40 city driving gets 23 mpg and would have cost $1,740 and oil changes another $75. My first scheduled service isn’t due for another 3 1/2 months where they will check the brakes and windshield wipers.
  2. Lack of charging stations - FACT: I’ve never needed to charge my XC40 anywhere but my home charger.
  3. Limited driving range FACT: People with BEVs overwhelmingly use them for daily around-town trips. To suggest that a 250-300 mi range is not sufficient is suggesting that commuter airlines should be using 787s instead of 20-50 passenger commuter planes. And plugging you car in when you get home takes maybe 30 seconds.

It’s a dumb article, as of August of this year global new EV sales were up 45% over Aug 2022 and 18% of new-car sales were plug-in EVs and 13% were BEVs.

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I doubt there is an unbiased media source. Maybe the AP or Reuters might come close.
Some people I know use that as an excuse to not listen to news at all.

My point was: It’s important for consumers to know what bias the media source has, and for the media source to distinguish what is news vs what is opinion. There are too many media personas who pass off their opinions as facts or as news.

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Sadly true…

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I do like NPR for news stories. Yes, it leans left in terms of the topics it covers, but you don’t hear radical opinions being passed off as “news”.

NPR (National Public Radio) - Bias and Credibility - Media Bias/Fact Check (mediabiasfactcheck.com)

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No offense, H200h, but do you believe in the free market? Clark Howard certainly does.

No offense PropofolMask, but why do you ask?

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Other than AP/Reuters, there isn’t much that I’m aware of. BBC is still unbiased. Al Jazeera US “print” (tv/streaming is completely different company/unit so no idea on them) is much less biased than you might expect (but still more biased than they used to be and I would not trust them to be unbiased on Qatar).

My usual tactic is to try reading things from BBC/AP/Reuters plus a few other sources that fall a little on each side of the bias line (and avoid any heavily biased sources).

I agree that the article is definitely biased and inaccurate. However, your points 2-3 are why some (a lot of?) people are not getting BEVs. They want one vehicle that can handle their driving needs. A BEV can definitely handle a long-distance trip but the extra time required to charge (and to plan out where charging stations are) does have a significant impact. Unless my driving habits change (and I drive way less than I used to), I will likely not get a BEV until either they have 1000 mile range or charging is <20 minutes (so roughly twice as fast as Tesla supercharger) with charging stations more prevalent than they currently are.

People/Business leaders talk a good game about the “free market”, but they sure need their subsidies, bail-outs, tax breaks, and tax-cuts !

Seriously, how “free market” is that?

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I really liked the old “Al Jazeera America” from 10+ years ago. They were excellent, and also covered World News, which many American outlets do poorly.

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A major recipient of govermental largess is the fossil-fuel industry, the IMF estimates it at a $5.4 trillion annual subsidy worldwide. In the United States, it’s $646 billion – every single year.

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I would still like to know of a totally unbiased media source. Not being facetious, I would really like to find one. Not found one yet.

Ad Fontes media attempts to rate media sources on a 2-dimensional graph, the horizontal axis being the left-right bias of the reporting and the vertical axis being the amount of news value and reliability of the reporting. This is presented in their Interactive Media Bias Chart.

You can filter the graph to as close to 0.0 as desired. With this filter you can see that their assessment of Straight Arrow News (never heard of them, BTW) has a bias of -0.06 and News Nation has a bias of +0.22. Their model examines a limited number of articles and can likely be criticized for that. Still, it’s a start and at a high level helps filter the more biased sources from the less biased. As a calibration, sources on the overall graph range from -42 to +42.

Make sure to differentiate between bias and whether you agree with the outlook of the reporting.

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60% of US households have two or more cars. 8% do not own a car, and the remaining 32% have one car. There’s 233,000,000 licensed drivers driving approx. 200,000,000 cars in the country. So logically we can assume that 140 million drivers from multiple-car households are driving as average Americans most of the time.

The average US driver makes an average of 2.57 driving trips , spending 61.3 minutes behind the wheel, and driving 32.7 miles each day in 2021.

That’s 14% of the range of the average BEV that goes that 32.7 miles for much less than one/half the fuel cost and no tailpipe emissions.

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