If you’ve listened to National Public Radio (NPR) in the past few years, what you’ve heard is basically a progressive, left-wing radio station, not a station that represents American diveristy of opinions and viewpoints. Several of my friends have canceled their subscriptions, even though they’re Democrats and consider themselves on the Left.
But NPR is also publicly funded to some extent. Although it claims that it gets less than 1% of its funding from the government (i.e., from taxpayers like you and me), The Hill notes that “NPR may receive little direct federal funding, but a good deal of its budget comprises federal funds that flow to it indirectly by federal law.”
Regardless, NPR is suppose to be a radio station that all Americans can listen to with profit, not a megaphone for progressive Leftism. Yet, according to this new article in the Free Press by Uri Berliner, the senior editor of NPR’s business desk (and still with the station!), NPR has not only tilted increasingly leftward, with a changing demographic, but has become more “white” as elitist listeners tune in while blacks (and conservatives) don’t listen much. Further, it has bought into stories that were later found dubious or even debunked, yet has never corrected itself. Right now subscriptions are falling, the local branches are laying off workers, and NPR’s future seems uncertain.
Click to read: I’ll summarize it briefly and give a few quotes. Note at the bottom that NPR has officially responded, and I’m unsure whether Berliner has a future at the institution.
First, the changing demographic of listeners:
For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
Berliner then goes into three stories in which NPR took positions that ultimately seemed dubious or even indefensible; but in no case did it ever correct itself (three points below are my take):
1.) NPR glommed onto the idea that Trump colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election. No evidence supporting that came out, and NPR quietly dropped the story without any corrections.
2.) NPR poo-pooed the “Hunter Biden laptop story,” barely covering it at all because it didn’t believe the notion that Hunter Biden would use his dad’s name to advance himself. It turned out that, of course, he did. NPR never corrected itself.
3.) NPR bought big-time into the “wild virus wet-market” theory for the origin of COVID, dismissing the idea that the virus came from a leak in a lab in Wuhan, China. As time progressed, the lab-leak theory became more credible, and now, though we still don’t know for sure, the lab-leak seems more credible than the wet market. NPR, however, utterly rejected the lab-leak theory and hasn’t corrected its earlier insistence.
According to Berliner, after the death of George Floyd the station adopted a form of Critical Race Theory, even accusing itself of complicity in racism. Of course if any station is lily-white, it would be this station with its elitist and progressive listeners carrying NPR tote bags and driving Volvos. But it’s startling how quickly the issue of race came to dominate every aspect of NPR:
And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”
He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.
Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.
These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.
They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).
And I read this next bit with utter dismay. Along with the absence of viewpoint diversity in its programs, something that the station simply ignores when it comes up, they’ve bought into gender activism to the point where they can’t use the term “biological sex”! Oy! And of course in the Hamas/Israel war, the station is tilting towards Palestine, because that’s what progressives want to hear: Israel is the white colonialist oppressor. I myself have noticed this even on my short drives around Chicago. Bolding below is mine:
The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.
More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.
The inevitable result is that people are tuning out and listening instead to the many podcasts on tap:
These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.
Berliner offers a solution, which is to return to “traditional” journalism, but in the engaging way it used to. They need to broadcast more diverse viewpoints, perhaps even debates. Since NPR has a new CEO, businesswoman Katherine Maher, only 40, it might change course. I can’t tell enough about her to guess if she’ll change the direction of NPR’s broadcasting.
You may well ask yourself, as I did, “Why on earth does Berliner stay at such a dysfunctional station?” Well, maybe he’s hoping that Maher will effect a big change. But judging from his own narrative, buttressed with emails, names, and evidence, his tenure at NPR now seems to be one big tsuris. And he doesn’t explain why, given this large kvetch, he’s still with the organization.
Sadly, some liberals are dismissing this piece; after all, it’s in the “conservative” Free Press. As one reader wrote me:
A response to it from a friend, a fellow academic:“This guy sounds like a disgruntled MAGA Republican boohoo.”Liberalism is doomed!
*********
Now NPR has pushed back, and it’s not much of a response:
NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner’s assessment.
“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” she wrote. “We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world.”
She added, “None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole.”
A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network’s chief content officer, would have no further comment.
But there are also heated denials from NPR employees rejecting Berliner’s claims. Read the piece to see them. Still, the best way to judge whether NPR is doing what it should do is simply to listen. And, thank Ceiling Cat, you no longer have to listen to the uber-woke and deeply spiritual Krista Tippett, who was let go. As I always said about her, she was so moved by her own profundity that she often came close to tears. Just sayin’.
I’d written about bias at NPR a week or so ago — but (unlike Berliner), I think (and have always thought) that tax dollars should not be spent supporting a radio station. I think that now — when I disagree with much of the bias in NPR’s reporting — but I also thought that when I was more sympathetic to NPR’s reporting bias. Why should someone who dislikes the station have to help pay for it?
https://carolinacurmudgeon.substack.com/p/npr-hates-israel-and-has-never-met
I agree – NPR should be defunded because it is politically biased. I am not against funding a public tv or radio station. But such an organization should not be politically biased.
>> Why should someone who dislikes the station have to help pay for it?
And I have no children so why should I pay for schools?
And I don’t like war so why should I pay for a military?
It’s because we live in a society and not some Ayn Rand fantasy land.
Berliner’s article is being widely reported. Chris Cuomo featured Berliner on his NewsNation show last night. I got sick of the crap on NPR a few years ago, stopped listening, and never missed it.
One of the most egregious techniques they used on NPR that caused me to lose trust had to do with their interviews. Very often, when broadcasting an interview, the interviewer would play one sentence of the interviewee and then the interviewer would interject several sentences of his own. The result was that an interview comprised a few snippets of the interviewee and sentence after sentence of “interpretation.” It got to the point that I couldn’t trust a word that was said.
NPR is dead to me.
Here’s Kevin Drum’s take:
https://jabberwocking.com/the-peculiar-tale-of-nprs-decline-and-fall/
I was an NPR donor for many years but I haven’t listened since I moved home to England 6 years ago. I have no context to know whether or not it is now woke (I can totally believe it is) but I had the same reaction as Drum re: the three examples that Jerry quotes above. I think that Berliner gets all three wrong.
– Mueller did not say that there was no collusion.
– At the time, the Hunter Biden laptop story seemed wild.
– NPR’s position on lab leak theory is probably correct.
Maybe they could’ve both-sided the stories a bit more — but they didn’t get them obviously wrong.
Since you didn’t listen to NPR, how can you know their coverage of these items? We still don’t know the origin of SARS, and yes, at the time the Hunter Biden laptop story seemed correct. But the author’s point is that NPR took a definitive stance on these items and held to it even after the evidence in their favor weakened.
I was reacting to Berliner’s summary of the items rather than NPR’s coverage.
Drum’s point is that these were odd choices to use as examples (I agree with him). I also agree with you (and Drum) that NPR could have presented a more balanced view of each (again, I’m relying on Berliner’s testimony) but they were not obviously wrong.
I agree that Berliner got the first two of those things wrong in his article, but as far as his main points I agree with him. Like so many news organizations these days NPR changed from reporting news to making news.
I also agreed with the thrust of Berliner’s argument.
Do you think that, had the laptop been from a member of Trump’s family, that NPR would have thought “this is wild, so we won’t run it”?
Re the lab leak. The NPR position was not “on balance, it is more likely natural than a lab leak” (which would be a fair assessment), their position was “lab leak theory is racist pseudoscience and we’ll do everything we can to demonise the idea” (which is just wrong). So, no, NPR were not correct on that, they got it obviously wrong.
+1
Here’s NPR saying that the Mueller report did not find collusion but did (possibly) find obstruction.
“Mueller Report Doesn’t Find Russian Collusion, But Can’t ‘Exonerate’ On Obstruction.”
“Updated at 6:56 p.m. ET
=================
Special counsel Robert Mueller **did not find evidence** that President Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election, according to a summary of findings submitted to Congress by Attorney General William Barr.
“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” Barr wrote in a letter to leaders of the House and Senate judiciary committees on Sunday afternoon.
That was despite “multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign,” he wrote.
However, Mueller’s investigation did not take a position on whether Trump obstructed justice by trying to frustrate the ongoing investigation.”
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/24/706318191/trump-white-house-hasnt-seen-or-been-briefed-on-mueller-investigation-report
Accents are mine, and of course the article quotes Barr’s interpretation. Also:
“Barr wrote that Mueller interviewed about 500 witnesses, made requests to 13 foreign governments for evidence and obtained more than 230 orders for communications records.
He also said that Mueller hasn’t recommended indictments against anyone else and that there are no sealed indictments that have yet to be made public.
The news about no more charges was part of the announcement on Friday when Mueller notified the leaders of the Justice Department that he had completed his work, which began in May 2017.”
At “some point” we (specifically Americans) need to accept the reality that there was no evidence or insufficient evidence of collusion to press charges. Our antipathy toward Trump has tainted our consumption of reality/news.
Ironic. Me thinks. NPR reporting on Trump and the absence of collusion. 🙂
As I’m sure you know, Barr’s summary of the report was criticized by Mueller, a Federal judge and members of the Republican Party for distorting the contents of the report.
AP
==
Mueller complained to Barr in a private letter and phone call that he had not adequately captured the seriousness of his report’s conclusions. Mueller stressed in his report, and in later public statements, that he did not exonerate the president and that it was not an option to charge Trump because of longstanding Justice Department policy that sitting presidents cannot be indicted.
…
Those inconsistencies, Walton wrote, “cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary.”
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-politics-russia-reggie-walton-fe8eee387b53888c478a24021fc101aa
Wikipedia
==
On March 5, 2020, Reggie Walton, a senior judge of the D.C. district court, sharply criticized Barr’s characterizations of the Mueller Report as “distorted” and “misleading” and called “into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility and, in turn, the department’s” representations to the Court.
…
In May 2021, D.C. district court judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered the release of the OLC memo supporting the Barr letter, criticizing Barr’s characterizations of the Mueller report as “disingenuous” and ruling that deliberative process privilege did not apply because “[t]he review of the document reveals that the Attorney General was not then engaged in making a decision about whether the President should be charged with obstruction of justice; the fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barr_letter
Noted and appreciated. I have no doubt there was bias in Barr’s characterization.
There was (also) no recommendation for charges, citing insufficient evidence of/for collusion. On “obstruction” we agree. Obstruction is not collusion, specifically, it’s not collusion with “the Russians”. Not exonerating, does not imply (either explicitly or implicitly) that there was collusion.
Both these are facts.
I’m no lawyer but when the ABA writes, “Mueller finds no collusion with Russia, leaves obstruction question open,” I say Muller does say there was no collusion.
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2019/03/mueller-concludes-investigation/
The ABA article goes on, “Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation did not find sufficient evidence that President Donald Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the United States’ 2016 election and did not take a clear position on whether Trump obstructed justice.”
Given this, how do you claim that “Mueller did not say that there was no collusion.” Maybe I’m reading the wrong source?
Are you talking about the ABA’s description of Barr’s summary? As I said above, Mueller did say that Barr’s summary was inaccurate.
Perhaps you were reading the wrong source.
Yeah, I was a sustaining member, too, then halted my donations a couple of years ago. For me, the breaking point was the endless institutional obsession with race. For example, during the early days of the pandemic, every time there was a new milestone in number of American deaths (e.g., 100,000), NPR would report the new number while inevitably mentioning that black people were dying at a higher rate than white people. They did NOT usually mention at the same time that old people were dying disproportionately to young people, even though that effect was an order of magnitude higher. Nor did they ever mention (that I heard) that race was not an *independent* risk factor, but simply a marker for other covariant factors, such as poverty, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.
If you’re a listener, try this experiment: Every time you hear a guest on an NPR program who you can identify as black from his or her speech patterns, pay attention to whether the host (1) explicitly identifies the guest as black, and (2) asks questions that they would not ask a similarly situated white guest. For example (I’m making up an example, but it’s par for the course), a geologist to talk about a recent earthquake, if black, will also be asked about how hard it is to be black in the field of geology, or how earthquakes disproportionately affect black people. It happens nearly every time, in my experience. It’s embarrassing–as if every black guest must have their race made to be an issue, even when there’s no reason that it should be. It’s condescending tokenism of the worst kind.
As another experiment, pay attention to how slavishly NPR reports on any “first” by a black person, no matter how obscure.
I was a regular donor to KQED while in east bay SF, but a few years ago started to tally up the national NPR reporting that did NOT have a racial angle. It was nearly non-existent. The most anodyne of topics would be put through a racial lens. Our donations ended.
It infuriates me that NPR leadership didn’t understand the gem it had in its hands, given to where advocacy entities like FOX and MSNBC have fallen. I depended on NPR. The country needed them. And they let us down.
I like other readers stopped listening a few years ago. I got tired of being told, in very subtle ways, what to think. No taxpayer money should go to NPR.
On Krista Tippett… I always found her woo pretty harmless (I didn’t listen to her very often.)
I haven’t noticed as big a shift in PBS.
I listened to almost nothing but All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, Fresh Air, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and local programming for many years. I began to notice a few years ago a shift to reporting stories from a certain ideological point of view rather than in a fair objective manner. The only exception I found was Marketplace. The real interesting thing was that I then began to listen to Marketplace with the anticipation of hearing bias, kind of like waiting for the other shoe to drop; OK, so the Dow was up (or down) – how does that negatively affect the indigenous non-binary houseless migrant POC differently-abled neurodiverse community (because every news story negatively affects all disadvantaged groups)? Thankfully Kai Ryssdal never got to that point, but I gave up on NPR as a whole including that show as a result of the other biased reporting.
There’s a reason for that: Marketplace is not an NPR show. It’s played on many of the same stations that also play NPR shows, but Marketplace is not produced or distributed by NPR. It is produced and distributed by American Public Media, which is an entirely different organization.
And I’ve also commented on NPR’s response to Berliner’s essay:
https://carolinacurmudgeon.substack.com/p/bias-at-npr-ii
+1.
Nice work.
Thanks Robert. I do remember that Marketplace is APM now that you mention it. I appreciate the reminder.
I listened to NPR on many of my Volvo driving days, a phase that had to end when my second 240—the last model year of its kind—died at the age of 28.
Truth be told, I largely abandoned NPR a few years before that. Perhaps it is some personal flaw in me, but I tired of the merry-go-round of in vogue, progressive programming: Trump, Trans, Pick Your Gender, Me Too, Racist, Climate Change, Trump, Trans . . .
I also recall hearing stories where the facts seemed deliberately slanted—or obscured or ignored—to conform to a preferred narrative. We already get that out of many of our politicians. That we now see it routinely from reporters, academics, journals, and others sources that should be trustworthy is greatly dismaying. More dismaying are the educated consumers of that news and information who either haven’t yet caught on or who like that bubble.
Gallup Polling: Media Confidence in U.S. Matches 2016 Record Low. Oct 2023
https://news.gallup.com/poll/512861/media-confidence-matches-2016-record-low.aspx
Extract:
The 32% of Americans who say they trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way ties Gallup’s lowest historical reading, previously recorded in 2016. Although trust in media currently matches the historical low, it was statistically similar in 2021 (36%) and 2022 (34%).
Another 29% of U.S. adults have “not very much” trust, while a record-high 39% register “none at all.” This nearly four in 10 Americans who completely lack confidence in the media is the highest on record by one percentage point. It is 12 points higher than the 2016 reading, which came amid sharp criticism of the media from then-presidential candidate Donald Trump — making the current assessment of the media the grimmest in Gallup’s history. In 2016, U.S. adults were most likely to say they had “not very much” trust (41%).
Although partisans remain sharply divided in their views of the media, Democrats’ trust fell significantly this year.
Gallup Polling: Nurses Retain Top Ethics Rating in U.S., but Below 2020 High. Jan 2023
https://news.gallup.com/poll/467804/nurses-retain-top-ethics-rating-below-2020-high.aspx
Extract:
Share of respondents who rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in this profession as “very high” or “high”:
Nurses 79%
Medical doctors 62%
Accountants 41%
Bankers 26%
Real estate agents 24%
Journalists 23%
Lawyers 22%
Car salespeople 10%
Members of Congress 9%
Telemarketers 6%
No, the lab leak, for which there is no evidence, is not more probable than the source being the Wuhan wet market. Ask a virologist.
Thanks E. Siegel.
Can you supply a few credible sources? Genuinely curious. From what I read, the lab leak appears an ~equally viable “origins story” for SARS-CoV-2 as of today.
US department of energy:
“Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a
Recently Scott Alexander, who can generally be trusted to have a sensible take, wrote this lengthy piece summarising an extensive debate on the topic.
He seems, overall, persuaded that the zoonosis is more likely than the lab leak, but that one cannot just dismiss the latter out of hand.
+1 Thanks Coel.
Marked for reading.
If you want to listen to a podcast on the subject this is an excellent conversation with virologists. The text at the link below gives a good summary if you don;t listen:
https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-with-worobey-andersen-holmes-the-lab-leak
Sorry, this is bs. There is no conclusive evidence one way or the other. I tire of scientists who should know better and repeat this nonsense.
Here is peer reviewed evidence pointing towards the market and an excellent newspaper article to go along with it.
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abp8715
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-08/covid-lab-leak-energy-department-fbi
Of course in the old creationist fashion, any research pointing towards a natural origin is being discounted while at the same time, no evidence for a lab leak other than “isn’t it curious that blabla” is being presented. It’s ridiculous and pathetic, and quite honestly anyone who believes in a covid lab leak makes me more than suspicious of any opinion they voice on other topics.
The article is two years old now and there is more evidence that has come out. There is no dispositive evidence either way, as I said.
As for your last paragraph, that’s simply rude, and I’m sorry that you have to discount anyone who thinks a lab leak might be credible. I myself don’t trust anyone who says, “You said ‘x”, and X is 100% certain to me, so I won’t trust you on anything else.” That’s simply ridiculous.
It’s also bad to declare discovery (in this case zoonotic origin) at whatever high confidence level on the basis of hints and circumstantial evidence! Do people do this in their day jobs?
It’s also bad to declare discovery (in this case zoonotic origin) at whatever high confidence level on the basis of hints and circumstantial evidence! Do people do this in their day jobs?
Have they found infections prior to Dec 19 in archived blood samples? Is there a convincing path of acquisition for the Furin cleavage site? How is the rare codon usage explained?
The sequence of the virus and the absence of sub clinical infections are the main factors pointing to the lab. A lab that just happens to be there.
In order:
No
No, but 12-15 BP insertions don’t seem to be uncommon.
Not sure what you mean here, are you talking about the previously undreamt of (even by computers) Furin cleavage sequence found in CoVID 19?
Not sure what you mean by “sequence of the virus”?
Why are subclinical infections important? Has their absence been documented? How are these the main indicators of a lab origin?
Virus labs are placed near their subjects for the same reasons oceanography labs are near oceans. Convenient access.
(Or are oceanography labs causing Tsunamis?)
I am open to the idea of a lab origin but you need to do better (evidence WIV was selling lab animals to the market – for a made up example).
Dec 11 is the first confirmed case but it was not from archived blood samples. So still a hard “no” just now a hard “no” with added context.
When a progressive says there is “no evidence,” you can be sure there is.
WEIT reader Darrell Ernst mentioned this article below the line of yesterday’s Hili. I’d love to see a similar insider’s view of the goings on inside the BBC.
+1 Me too.
NPR’s Left-Right-Center features Sarah Isgur who served as a spokesperson under Trump’s DOJ. She’s brilliant, funny, articulate and moderate; her voice on NPR, however, may be as rare as a dodo’s.
NPR actually suggested that the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell (protesting Israel) may be the ultimate expression of “non-violent-resistance”. Shudder.
I don’t listen to NPR.
Another victim of woke. Sad, but hey, we have the Free Press. The FP nailed the top spot for subscriptions on Substack yesterday. 🙂
I used to listen to NPR during the good old days, with Susan Stamberg, Bob Edwards, and the rest of the original crew. For years now I’ve noted the drift into wokeness. Another change I’ve noticed – the newer, younger, crew seems to project an unnatural enthusiasm for the most mundane material and drops as many “street” terms as they think they can get away with. Many stories are short and punchy with little content. Obviously this is a reaction to a changing demographic. I rarely listen anymore.
Sound like NPR has become like the Huffington Post.
What’s a Huffington Post?
😏
I am a little sick of the “Free Press”.
Trump sure as hell colluded with the Russians in 2016.
They ran an article celebrating the high school football coach who prayed at the 50 yard line as some sort of free speech hero.
They sure platform a lot of misinformation.
They are just as overtly biased as Fox News.
There is no evidence of Trump colluding with Russia – certainly not in the manner amplified by MSM, and, specifically by personalities like Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. The Steele Dossier has been roundly discredited. There are good reasons not to vote for Trump, colluding with Russia is not one of them. The Russians did interfere with the 2016 election via social media, bots and influencers, that is a distinct issue from collusion.
Quote:
“That Crossfire Hurricane investigation would later be handed over to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in March 2019 concluded there was no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
In his new 306-page report, Durham concluded that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement did not possess any “actual evidence” of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia prior to launching Crossfire Hurricane.”
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-special-counsel-faults-fbis-handling-2016-trump-russia-probe-2023-05-15/
Saying “Russia, if you’re listening, find her emails” is ugly politicking, but, it’s not collusion.
Re: the football coach:
I re-read the article about the football coach who prayed at the 50 yard line,(https://www.thefp.com/p/praying-coach-joe-kennedy-comeback). It does take a form of principled courage to persist through years of court cases to prove a point. In the case of Joe Kennedy that point does intersect with the 1st amendment and free speech.
From the FP:
“Finally, on June 27, 2022, in an opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the high court said “the Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates” the kind of discrimination shown by the Bremerton School District.”
It’s possible that the FP (occasionally) misses the point, I try to read the FP’s articles objectively and have found no instances of misinformation, a wee bit of bias perhaps, but nothing that takes away -definitively- from objectivity; I’m curious about the instances you encountered. Can you elaborate on them?
Thanks.
Funny. Some of the regular commenters to FP stories say the Free Press is the Rehabilitation Agency of the Democratic Party working tirelessly to make them electable again.
Partisans do what partisans do. That’s one “both-sides-ism” that never runs out of shelf life.
+1
Maybe I am a little warped, but I find myself remaining angry for years after hearing what I consider to be blatantly biased reporting on ATC. The voices are insufferable too. I live in Maryland and find it more relaxing to listen to the DC and Baltimore classical stations.
The voices! Yes! SNL nailed it with the “Schweaty Balls” skit. At that time I was still a loyal NPR listener and contributor, and it made me laugh because I picked up on the voices immediately. Friends who didn’t listen to NPR laughed because of the Schweaty Balls double entendre, but I thought it was extra funny because of the typical NPR vocal styling.
I wonder if SNL satirized them like this today if loyal listeners would laugh, or if they would write complaints in to NBC about it.
Strike that, I can’t see SNL even attempting to satirize anything on the left these days.
+1
Yes. The Voices! 🙂
News-Porn.
Late here, but I had read the piece with much interest and agreement.
The bits described, about Trump or George Floyd barely registered with me for some reason, maybe since they did not really differ from CNN. Rather, there were less important pieces that would make me apoplectic. Like …
> A movie review piece where the 3 commenters would cluck their tongues (annoying over the radio, I can tell you!) and sigh in completely faux pain over how this movie or that movie was soooo problematical that they could not enjoy it. Brendon Frasers’ big comeback move (The Whale) just could not possibly be endorsed because *siiiiigh* why didn’t they get an obese gay actor to play the part?
> Another piece from one of their more frequent online voices about how cancel culture is a complete myth because it only attacks famous people who cannot be cancelled. The other voice in the piece (isn’t a discussion supposed to have an element of debate?) was completely passive, with leading, pre-agreed-upon soft-ball questions with no challenge. Well sister, I can print out about a 1000 pages of documented cases of where little ordinary people who did not do anything wrong but were attacked and traumatized to hell and back by Twitter mobs, for dreadlocks or wearing ethnic clothing, or reading a book in public. A quick check (journalism, you know) would find that for you.
What is worse? Having a narrower and less diverse voice or poorer and poorer investigative journalism? And of course they reply by denying both.
Denying that there is anything wrong is to be expected. The perpetrators of course don’t (and won’t) see the problem and the hemorrhaging. But those pieces and many others would never have happened 15, 20 years ago.
Whereas the BBC has managed to lose the respect of the whole world
Two recent examples of media bias here in Australia, both of which are from essentially private companies (rather than a taxpayer funded, in part at least, NPR equivalent). One left and one right.
First, the Guardian. In Australia and if you’re not a citizen you are liable to get yourself deported if you commit a crime, as is currently happening to Mohammed Coker. He left Sierra Leone at age 5 and came to Australia as a teenager. The Guardian eventually admits, after mucho hand wringing, that he was convicted of grevious bodily harm. They put in his very brief interpretation of events (in which he hilariously says he’s not sure if he stabbed someone).
What they entirely leave out is that his gang instigated a fight with another gang and then he, in his twenties, stabbed a 13 year old in the chest.
The right wing example: Penny Wong, our foreign affairs MP, just made some pretty ludicrous statement about recognising a Palestinian state. The Telegraph quotes her *almost* verbatim, and I completely disagree with her, but they do leave out the bit in which she insists Hamas cannot be part of that state. Which I think is quite important.
My point is due to bias in general. How does legacy media not see this sort of behaviour as incredibly undermining? Do they not care? Do they think their base will continue to buy whatever? Because numbers seem to suggest to me that they won’t.
Or do the readers not actually care? You might still think Mohammad shouldn’t be deported, but surely you’d like to know the whole picture?
And, like me, I thoroughly dislike Penny Wong’s politics and think her recent horseshit about Palestine is lamentable, but I think that Hamas bit is quite important.
I’ve cancelled plenty of subscriptions, right and left, purely because of bias.
Huzzah for Bari Weiss and the Free Press!
I have missed NPR since they fired Bob Edwards. Over the years since then they simply stopped providing news and provided more and more propaganda and for ten years have just not been worth listening to. However it’s not just NPR – it’s the local affiliates too where programming is just not a patch on what it used to be. Where are the replacements for Karl Haas or Hazen Schumacher (only the old will remember these)? But it isn’t, sadly, only public broadcasting in the USA that has slid downwards in a handbasket; this is a western phenomenon witness the declines of CBC, BBC, ABC, Deutsche Welle, France24, AP, UPI, NYT and many, many more. I’m so old I can remember when these agencies were worth reading or listening to but, alas, no more.
The very phenomenon of public radio in the US (as distinct from elsewhere) was stimulated by earlier non-commercial broadcast outlets—notably those of the Pacifica Foundation, the KRAB nebula, and other community stations. For a time, NPR’s psychology was somewhat influenced by its non-comm predecessors. Time and entropy take their toll, and the era of Car Talk, Garrison Keilor, and (in a few NPR stations south of the border) Stuart Mclean is over. [Incidentally, wasn’t there a rumor that Keilor and McLean were actually the same individual—which is why the two of them were never seen anywhere at the same time?]
The change for me was when NPR unceremoniously fired Bob Edwards. It felt like a stab in the back delivered at midnight when no one was looking.
Bob recently died and now we hear that NPR is struggling mightily. Coincidence?, me thinks not; I call it just rewards.