It’s refreshing to hear an NPR insider admit that veering to the left and smothering right-leaning beliefs and narratives has destroyed trust in the taxpayer-supported state media entity. The problem is, however, that NPR Senior Editor Uri Berliner doesn’t go nearly far enough in his critical breakdown of the network’s implosion. Indeed, it was only when the Pravda outlet had quantified the lost listeners and trust that Berliner felt he could finally bark at the moon about it.
Berliner’s 3,500 and change word essay for The Free Press, which was founded by New York Times wrong thinker Bari Weiss (she of Senator Tom Cotton op-ed fame), charges that the NPR journalistic crowd went south when Trump was elected. Wrong. The outlet, fronted by hosts who sound like they could use a good enema and a shot of tequila, had gone south waaay before this. News folk saw this decades ago when even the likes of Rush Limbaugh would lampoon not the wrongthink or the rightthink, but the dumbthink of stories from NPR.
Before he died, Limbaugh noted the new “EIB” listeners who’d thrown over NPR for his show every day. Rush broadcast a segment on NPR announcing it wouldn’t “waste time” on the Hunter Biden laptop story. In 2020, during the fiery but peaceful Summer of Love, Limbaugh said that a Seattle NPR weatherman was fired for noting that the Emerald City was turning into a dystopian hellhole, which I can personally attest is an accurate depiction. In 2015, NPR called Limbaugh a racist, which is pretty stupid if you know anything about the guy. In 2013, Limbaugh laughed at NPR’s shock that the government didn’t stop when it wasn’t funded on time. Then there’s the in-the-tank 2010 Obamacare idiocy. There’s also James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas outing of NPR in 2011 — or, as Limbaugh put it, “NPR executive got caught being an ignorant, arrogant liberal.” Do you remember when Juan Williams lost his job in 2010 for not being leftist enough? We do. On and on it goes.
Rush Limbaugh was onto these guys before anyone else. Andrew Breitbart formulated his Democrat Media Complex theories as a delivery driver in Hollywood while listening to Rush Limbaugh lampoon the likes of NPR. So, no, Uri, NPR has been in the tank for the left for decades, and the only one who doesn’t understand that is NPR. Sorry, but there you are. Hope I helped a little.
Still, that doesn’t make Berliner wrong about some of his observations about where his mothership went wrong:
Believing without question Rep. Adam Schiff’s lies about Russian collusion
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff…The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
[…]Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
And, of course, he lied.
The Mueller Report didn’t exist
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of [Russia] collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming…It’s bad to blow a big story.What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection.
If it bled Trump, it led
During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.
COVID coverage sided with anyone but Trump
The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory.
Hunter Biden’s laptop is a “distraction,” right, guys?
The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched.
He shall be St. George of Floyd
Floyd’s murder [drug overdose and agitation] captured on video, changed both the conversation and the daily operations at NPR.
Hey, everybody! Let’s be racist for equity’s sake!
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.
Transgenderism is perfectly normal and should be vaunted
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.North Star diversity
Israel is bad, Hamas is good
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.
I’ll tell you what: Dude’s got brass ones. He’s going to work at NPR tomorrow. I have much respect for him.
But he never should have needed brass ones to be fair about telling the sides of a story—even if you hate the people involved. And you shouldn’t have to, media people.
— i/o (@eyeslasho) April 9, 2024
I look back at only days ago when NBC’s “journalists” —one of them a former Democrat staffer whose wife made bank from the Bernie Sanders campaign (although he never revealed that while interviewing him on “Meet the Press” — yeah, I’m talking about you Chuck Todd)— lamented about moderate Ronna McDaniel being invited to be a talking head after leaving the helm of the Republican National Committee. These frauds, who hang on every word said by Karine Jean-Pierre while tossing to former Biden White House press agent Jen Psaki on her own show, said they just couldn’t tell if Ronna would speak on behalf of the GOP or tell the truth. Get outta here.
Absolutely. They believe their own tribe, don’t allow any other tribes to speak, and then double check their work by smelling their own farts.
🚨 Smug Alert pic.twitter.com/YWsVTqzNzR
— Victoria Taft, The Adult in the Room, FITF Squad (@VictoriaTaft) April 9, 2024
Back in the day, when I was a reporter for a San Diego news station, we used to mock a guy at the competition who rushed to the scene of the even smallest brush fire to make it sound like the biggest story EVER. Craig (who knows who he is) had what is basically a Mad Libs story he’d fill in at every scene. Our daytime editor Kevin (who knows who he is) created Craig’s fill-in-the-blank fire report for appropriate newsroom mockery. Craig never disappointed.
It turns out that those well-paid NPR prima donnas had the same thing, according to Uri:
There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.
Assembly line. Yeah, we know. We’ve known for decades.
Uri issued a PSA that no one should take his complaints to mean that NPR should be defunded by the federal government. But let’s face it: It’s been obvious for a long time that NPR is nothing more than State Run Media during a Democratic administration and Opposition Media during a Republican administration. If we already know what they’ll say, then what good are they?
Let NPR go. They already sell ads. They’ll do fine without us. Read Uri’s essay for yourself. He deserves that atta boy.
One parting shot. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said on Fox News Tuesday night, “The truth is that Elvis is more alive than journalism is today.”
Maybe other news outlets will see themselves in Uri’s story and seek to change, though we have our doubts. After Uri’s story hit the web, NPR sent out a howler denying it all.
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