On Tuesday, 25-year NPR veteran Uri Berliner dared to tell America what half the nation has long since known: National Public Radio has lost its way.
Writing for The Free Press, the offspring of New York Times apostate Bari Weiss, Berliner spells out in some detail NPR's catastrophic deviation from journalistic standards.
Although NPR had been veering left for decades, Berliner traces its abandonment of objective reporting to the emergence of Donald Trump. To his credit, he spells out one case after another where NPR went seriously wrong.
"Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting," he acknowledges. Worse, NPR, hitched "[its] wagon to Trump's most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff."
In fact, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff no fewer than 25 times on the Russia collusion story. This was bad enough, but when the Mueller report showed Schiff to be a charlatan, NPR quietly dropped the story without apology or explanation.
NPR's performance on the Hunter Biden laptop story was proactively awful. Berliner quotes the immortal words of NPR's managing editor: "We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions."
This bit of media malpractice was enough to turn the election, but again, no explanation, no apology.
NPR's coverage of COVID was even more disastrous. Berliner details the network's appalling efforts to debunk the lab-leak theory long after it had become accepted wisdom.
Although unmentioned, I suspect NPR championed the lockdown, masking and mandatory vaccinations in spite of all the evidence suggesting these solutions were not only un-American but also potentially lethal. There has been no reckoning here either.
In each of these cases, NPT execs chose "to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection." Adds Berliner, "When you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don't practice those standards yourself … that's what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media."
I would like to think that NPR listeners would read Berliner's piece and take it to heart, but that is unlikely to happen. The audiences of NPR, the New York Times, CNN and the rest have been so marinated in misinformation for so long that to accept the truth they will have to redefine themselves.
Leftists, in fact, have so much equity invested in their seemingly superior knowledge base that they risk the loss not just of face but also of self-esteem by acknowledging their own gullibility.
Berliner, himself, is a case in point. Those few NPR listeners brave enough to read his piece and the fewer still wise enough to believe it will likely seek the same refuge he does: Yes, much of what we have been told about Donald Trump is false, but we are intuitive enough to recognize the man's evil.
In fact, Berliner uses the word "unfortunate" to describe both NPR's abandonment of journalist principle and the emergence of what he calls "a belligerent, truth-impaired president."
In his article, however, Berliner shows no evidence of Trump's impairment, and he makes no mention of Biden's much more egregious dissembling. In Berliner's world, Trump's mendacity is a given. Journalists have reached this conclusion by comparing their facts to Trump's, but as Berliner shows, their facts are not facts at all.
In arguing against interest, Berliner gives added credibility to his case against NPR. Unfortunately, his knee-jerk hostility to Trump shows he himself has not escaped the gravitational pull of Planet NPR. And if he cannot, there's little hope for the lemmings in the NPR audience.
https://www.wnd.com/2024/04/can-npr-listeners-handle-truth/
On March 31, the National Organization for Women argued on social media that opposing males in women’s sports is “white supremacist patriarchy at work.” After receiving a torrent of justified criticism, the organization deleted its post on April 5.
The National Organization for Women is using tactics that are pervasive among white leftists. Founded by almost all white feminists in 1966, the white leaders of the organization since have used the concept of racial intersectionality to garner support for advocating clear sexism such as allowing males in women’s sports. It seems they believe that adding the racial element allows white liberals to castigate anyone who opposes their agenda as racist.
Politically blackfacing an issue, such as fairness in women’s sports, is actually what is racist. White liberal elites are using race to promote one of their pet projects that has nothing to do with race and is opposed by a majority of the black population. In a Pew Research Center survey, 68 percent of black respondents agreed with the statement that gender is determined by sex at birth. In the same survey, 61 percent of white respondents also agreed that gender is determined by sex at birth.
Setting aside the confusion in the deleted post of what “patriarchy” actually means, it is misleading to suggest that allowing men in women’s sports is somehow a black-supported issue and that opposing it is white supremacy. But that is the overplayed battle tactic of white liberals: anyone who disagrees is racist.
Potentially their gravest and most racist offense is when these white leftists, such as the ones leading the National Organization for Women or mandating the indoctrination of children in public schools, try to pontificate about what black people should believe and how they should vote. In 2020, for example, President Joe Biden infamously told voters, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
I wonder what Biden would say about the increasing number of black voters supporting Donald Trump for president in 2024. Some surveys estimate that Trump’s support among black voters in November could be double what it was in 2020. Would Biden dare now to claim those voters are not black?
https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/11/white-leftists-default-to-cries-of-racism-to-win-political-battles-even-when-minorities-are-opposed/
Someone might reasonably ask, “What difference does the JFK assassination make to those of us living today? The assassination took place more than 60 years ago. Everyone involved in it is now dead. Why not just forget it and move on?’
Those are reasonable questions, especially when they come from young people. Why should they care about who killed Kennedy?
The reason lies in the governmental structure under all of us have been born and raised — a national-security state form of governmental structure. As I have long maintained, the worst mistake the American people have ever made was to permit the federal government to be converted to a national-security state.
Our founding governmental system was a limited-government republic. Its powers were strictly limited by the Constitution and even more expressly restricted by the Bill of Rights. That governing structure worked very well for more than 150 years.
After World War II, the U.S. government was converted into a national-security state, which is a totally different type of governmental structure. The national-security branch of the government — i.e., the Pentagon, the vast military-industrial complex, the army of “defense” contractors, the CIA, and the NSA — wield omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers, including the power of assassination. There is no such thing as “limited government” under a national-security state.
Owing to the massive power of this branch of the government, the other branches inevitably deferred to the national-security branch. Thus, while the federal courts would declare an assassination program of the DEA unconstitutional, they would’t dare to declare an assassination program of the CIA unconstitutional.
Over time, the national-security branch of the government became so powerful that it is now, for all practical purposes, in total charge of the federal government, with the other three branches operating in deferential support. As Michael J. Glennon points out in his excellent book National Security and Double Government, the national-security branch permits the other three branches to have the veneer of being in control, but everyone within the federal government knows which branch is actually in control — the national-security branch.
President Kennedy decided to take on the national-security branch. The three years of the Kennedy administration were essentially a war between the executive branch and the national-security branch oner the future direction of the United States. See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne,
Kennedy ended up losing that war. The national-security branch fortified its omnipotence within the federal government by assassinating him. And they got away with it. It was a powerful message sent out to every public official and every future presidential candidate: Defer to us … or else.
Thus, the reason the Kennedy assassination still matters is not so that the people who orchestrated the assassination can be brought to justice. That was never going to happen anyway because the federal courts would never have permitted anyone to interfere with an assassination that was ostensibly based on protecting “national security.” The reason the Kennedy assassination still matters is that the all-powerful entity that orchestrated the assassination is still in existence … still covering it up … and still sending out that same message: Defer to us … or else.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/04/jacob-hornberger/why-the-jfk-assassination-still-matters/