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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   26477 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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NPR is in the news lately. First because they have a new CEO, who tweets like a parody of white liberal women. OK those were "in the past" but they were only 4-8 years ago... has she matured at all since then? So far no sign of that.

Secondly was this essay by Uri Berliner, their longtime senior business editor, creator of the popular "Planet Money" podcast, and one of the very few white males/not-super-liberals still in a position of authority at NPR. I really recommend this essay. He lays it out how, sure, NPR was always left-leaning, but it had intelligence and integrity. It's changed.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

...

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.

He was suspended for writing that essay (edited- he has since been made to resign: https://archive.is/YR3LB). NPR claims it's not about the content, they just don't allow their workers to write for outside publications without permission. Benjamin Mullin has the story in the New York Times

(edited to remove something wrong)

For my own part, I grew up listening to NPR and I used to love it. The voices, the production value, the journalism, all of it was high-quality. It really stood out in the world of FM radio, where everything else is staticky, ad-filled garbage, and tends to play the same basic pop-classic rock-rap top 40 garbage over and over. In the world before podcasts and sattelite Radio, NPR was the only halfway intellectual content on the radio. Now it just feels like a podcast from some random student activists who have been triggered by Trump to the point that they're on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. I seriously can't stand listening to it anymore, it's just amazing how deranged and annoying it's become.

If you want more examples, Peter Boghossian has a series of podcasts about it: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYNjnJFU-62s5cNuqeB-D-7QPymF6myk_. I'm guessing that most of this won't be very shocking to the people here. But still, it's nice to feel like "I'm not alone. there really are a lot of other people who used to like NPR and now hate it."

NPR very clearly has a mission of political advocacy. The angle on literally every single story is “how does it affect people of color/women/minorities”. Frequently, resulting in bizarre, inappropriate, or completely uninformative segments.

This is the segment when I turned off marketplace for good - which advocates for “prioritizing black women” via the “black women best” framework. In the whole segment, no policy position or course of action is actually advanced - at all. Very little evidence is offered to suggest that prioritizing black women will actually benefit everyone (trickle up) or that any interventions would be cost effective. The guest even goes as far as to suggest nothing at all will work:

The system of, like, systemic racism and just embedded discrimination in our economy is, it is multifacited, it is, like, self-reinforcing. I imagine that if somehow we could break it down it would, like, re-create itself. It’s so many things at once.

…with the only proscription being:

Jones: It really does have to be a true conversation about power. I think it’s a lot of people who are holding positions of power really just like being willing to share that, being willing to share that.

The segment is so off putting that I come away taking the position opposite than it advanced even though I agree it’s not great that black women have a higher unemployment rate.

https://www.marketplace.org/2020/09/01/why-centering-black-women-in-the-economy-could-benefit-everyone/

My turning point was in 2017 when they had a guest on that was advocating that parents put their privileged kids in the worst schools possible to help out the poor black kids. She was supposedly doing that herself, I wonder how it worked out? I think I even found the story. It was a "driveway moment" for me just because I was amazed at what this woman was saying out loud. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/509325266

Its easy to put your kid in a terrible school, its difficult to keep them there if you have the choice. Mommy forums back in 2020 were filled with anxieties about Covid affecting school choices and whether their precious darlings were going to be stuck in 'bad' schools. Liberal truisms about 'all kids are equal' tend to wither in the face of discipline realities in 'urban' schools.

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