I used to look forward to listen to NPR

Sorry for leaving you hanging on this thoughtful post. I’ve had one of those weeks, culminating in me flying up north for my brothers funeral. I just wanted to say that I appreciate your posting here.

 

So sorry to hear it Rade.
Hope you and your family are doing alright.

 

NPR suspending the journalist says it all. NPR is far left now. He stated the obvious. The CEO is ridiculously far left.

 

Berliner would be taken more seriously if he came out as a black trans woman.

 

Rick Perlstein, arguably the preeminent historian of the modern American Right in four volumes, takes the other side of the “public media is biased” argument, addressing PBS real time platforming and posthumous whitewashing of William F. Buckley in last night’s misleading documentary

The kind of anti-liberal hate we now hear every day was ushered into the public sphere by the way Buckley rendered it palatable to the kind of people who watch, and produce shows for, PBS. At the same time, taking Buckley’s part of conservatism and depicting it as conservatism’s origin—another myth scholars have debunked—just serves to make it harder to understand how the actual movement, especially those parts that would want nothing to do with PBS, came about.

“General Franco is an authentic national hero,” he wrote in 1957. National Review’s longtime foreign affairs guru James Burnham eulogized him in 1976 as “our century’s most successful ruler.” Buckley assigned one of his brothers—not the senator—to pen one of the magazine’s two fulsome obituaries. He called Franco “a Spaniard out of the heroic annals of the nation, a giant. He will be truly mourned by Spain because with all his heart and might and soul, he loved his country, and in the vast context of Spanish history, did well by it.”

Why do American elites seem to so desperately need this narrative of a respectable right wing that Trump and January 6th have usurped? In the case of the Public Broadcasting Service, maybe because it turns their own complicity aside. They’ve invested a great deal in promoting this interpretation: When I did a newspaper interview about the show, not one but two publicists sat in. Publicists were also surely involved in curating the chat accompanying the show on YouTube—crafted, it certainly seems, with young and impressionable viewers in mind. One prompt: “You can read about how Buckley’s upper-class lifestyle was a formative aesthetic for conservative influencers.” It links to a nifty visual essay on preppy fashion.

 

This is the problem of any media that devotes themselves to an imagined idea of balance or fairness in this moment. Its the same reason why the NYT should fire Ross Douthat and hire a Qanon guy if they want an accurate read on what drives conservative thinking.

 

Looks like Berliner has resigned. I hope he finds the support to force change at NOR. Seems as though the CEO is a problem and probably needs to go.

 

Lets congratulate the new dean of media studies at the Bari Weiss university

 

That is clever, an I think far more likely to occur than most of us appreciate.

Conservatives live on the presumption that their ideas are unpopular because they are being suppressed, when in reality their "ideas" are not more popular because they are just dumb - they fail the marketplace of ideas.

 

I’ve been defending Berliner here, more or less, but he clearly broke an NPR rule and caused a lot of problems for the company in the process. Punishment is deserved, regardless of the validity of his argument.

 

What's the rationale here? That you can't be CEO of a media company if you have personal political beliefs? If NPR had refused to hire a top conservative candidate as CEO because of his politics, how many of the folks complaining about Mayer would be having a meltdown?

 

More employers suppressing free speech

 

What NPR rule did he break specifically? Also, it's interesting other journalists haven't come to his defense like they have in other instances of journalists calling out issues at a company. Look at the NYT's when their journalists blew up when the NYT's posted an Op-ed from Tom Cotton. Did those journalists break a rule and not be punished?

 

Pete Rose was canceled before we had a word for it

 

How can the head of public broadcasting be against the 1st Amendment? Can’t fix stupid.

 

This is truly one of the most salient and fascinating of our current political issues, Tampa. Unfortunately, we lack a criterion for truth. When liberals think conservative ideas are just dumb, but conservatives also think liberal ideas are just dumb, how should we evaluate the validity of their respective claims? If NPR supports a liberal viewpoint and is also full of liberal journalists, we cannot tell if this support stems from objectivity or bias. As philosopher of science Helen Longino noted, “the greater the number of different points of view included in a given community, the more likely it is that the communities’ scientific practice will be objective.” I don’t think this means that NPR reporting is untrustworthy, even if their employees are quite liberal-minded, but I do think we need to take her point on achieving objectivity.

 

He wrote for another news outlet without securing NPR’s permission. That clearly breaks NPR’s rule. I don’t recall how the Cotton affair went down, but if NYT has a similar rule and those employees expressed their criticism via writing an article for another media outlet, then yes they also likely broke the rule.

Anyway, I think I would have done the same thing that NPR did. You simply can’t let one of your employees break that rule so brazenly without a response, and five days of suspension doesn’t seem outlandish.

 

I think this misses the point of the entire debate. This isnt about editorial bias at NPR. This debate is about what some people (centrist types, and conservative culture warriors who dont give a shit about public anything) think people who listen to NPR (i.e. liberals) need to hear, and the differences of opinion among some senior NPR staff and the people who do the actual day to day work of reporting and creating content. To me it sort of brings back something I remember from grad school where a professor had us watch a movie with a good liberal message, and we ripped it to shreds and mocked it mercilessly in a sort of glib way, but were ready to discuss it more seriously if need be. Certainly that was some youthful arrogance on our part, and we were ready to discuss it seriously, but the professor literally walked out of the class without saying anything and didnt come back. But ultimately it was a goddamn movie, one that I still see as kind of lame and outdated. The moral of the story is there seem to be people that think the "kids" should revere and like the things they like or think need talking about, and expect their rank in the hierarchy to have them get their way on that. Of course this same drama plays out every day, but the media is always concerned about policing the boundaries of inter-liberal debate. You certainly see this with things like Gaza, where the left view is growing louder and louder, and its the older generation that is hanging on to the old orthodoxies. I'm sure these things exist on the right, but it isnt really a story because no one in the center or in right-wing media is really interested in admonishing the right for being too right-wing. You can always find any number of liberals interested in left-bashing, like it wins points or something. Proves their bonafides to be in charge somehow. Its part of the cold-war liberal mentality. Whatever the kids and activists are into, well its probably communism and no good.