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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26917 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 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.

I hope the irony of dragging out her tweets from 5 years ago isn't lost on us.

On the one hand, that bridge was crossed and burned a long time ago, so I guess sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. OTOH, this makes a mockery of conservative opposition to cancel culture.

At least Rufo is earnest in his contempt for free expression, so I'll begrudgingly grant him that.

On the one hand, that bridge was crossed and burned a long time ago, so I guess sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Precisely. This is just an attempt by Rufo to (as Alinsky put it) “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” It won't work, probably, because NPR is not just OK with those tweets but finds them an absolute positive.

On the one hand, that bridge was crossed and burned a long time ago, so I guess sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. OTOH, this makes a mockery of conservative opposition to cancel culture.

Or was it a "I give the Devil the benefit of law" thing? If the expected benefits never come in, behavior naturally changes.

But I'll bite the bullet: yes, a lot of the conservative opposition to "cancel culture" is at least partly dishonest because sometimes the issue is merely that they think X tenet of the prevailing view is just wrong and no one should be punished for violating it. It's not that it's wrong for a company to fire someone for X take on gender they had three years ago on Twitter based on some appeal to fundamental rights (surely cons have weaker tools here than progressives), it's just bad that the company culture has polarized so much from what conservatives consider correct thinking. Cancel culture is bad both because it involves inquisitorial behavior and what that behavior is aimed at.

But then, a lot of progressive appeals to safety or whatever are also self-serving lies. Everyone is trying to appeal to some overriding principle because the common ground is shrinking.

But I'll bite the bullet: yes, a lot of the conservative opposition to "cancel culture" is at least partly dishonest because sometimes the issue is merely that they think X tenet of the prevailing view is just wrong and no one should be punished for violating it.

Oh, well you'll be happy to know Rufo is completely 100% honest that this is his view. Quoting directly

It's not the same thing, at all. And I do not recognize "cancel culture" as a valid, coherent concept. Every culture cancels—the point is who sets the terms, on which hierarchy of values. Do try to keep up.

I think it's stupid when people bring up one random no-context tweet or private joke and use it as an excuse to cancel someone. That's not really what this is though. It's a whole series of tweets, stretching across years, which perfectly match her entire career and worldview. This is who she is.

Also, there's no real pressure on her yet besides people on right-wing twitter dunking on her. She's still very much in charge. It's her underling who got fired because of one essay (admittedly an essay where he publicly broadsided the entire organization).

Doesn't everyone that brings up a tweet or private joke instead to say "this is who they are"?

OTOH, this makes a mockery of conservative opposition to cancel culture.

How long do you have to warn people "don't do this or the same tactics will be used against you when the tide turns" before it's ok to make good on the warning?

Yah, it's sauce for the gander and all that.

Free expression is fine. She's saying she will run her organizations according to those arguably illegal principles.

I wouldn't want to fire a guy for tweeting "There Might Be Niggers Here, He Thought to Himself etc."
But if the chairman of the national science foundation started posting "don't feel like giving any grants to niggers this year lmao" there should be questions asked about whether he's violating the law.

At least this is the distinction being used to justify his tactics among liberal types. After the New York Times went after middle school girls for singing along to rap lyrics I'm personally happy to make them eat their own shit for eternity.

Breaking news: Uri Berliner has since resigned. I have to assume that "resigned" here is the usual thing where bigshots are allowed to resign to save face and avoid the public spectacle of being fired that any normal employee would face.

One thing I should add, which I didn't know earlier: some of this is being driven by this guy: Christopher Rufo. He was apparently important in proving that former Harvard president Claudine Gay plagiarized her PHD thesis and getting her fired/resigned, and recently has been posting a lot of Katherine Maher's most ridiculous tweets to make people realize what kind of person she is. He's been getting signal boosted by Elon Musk. This gave some of his tweets, as he put it, "10 million views, compared to NPR which gets 8 million listeners per week." So it's not like this stuff just randomly came up, there seems to be an organized conservative effort now to headhunt these woke progressive leaders.

Breaking news: Uri Berliner has since resigned. I have to assume that "resigned" here is the usual thing where bigshots are allowed to resign to save face and avoid the public spectacle of being fired that any normal employee would face.

I sincerely hope this leads to a wave of resignations within NPR, with everyone saying “Ich bin ein Berliner” as their parting words.

I sincerely hope this leads to a wave of resignations within NPR, with everyone saying “Ich bin ein Berliner” as their parting words.

I think this is the wrong end of things. Berliner was the last jelly donut to leave, not the start.

Alas, a Dunkin’ lover can dream

So it's not like this stuff just randomly came up, there seems to be an organized conservative effort now to headhunt these woke progressive leaders.

One big change that's happened since 2022 is that conservatives have an eye of Sauron now too.

Damn if this is the first you're hearing of Christopher Rufo, this forum is really not doing its job. He's been easily one of the top 10 most active live players in the Culture War for the last several years.

Rufo is a talking head in the right leaning intellectual spheres, not exactly the ground most mid2010s-style refugees would find themselves inhabiting. Most forays into the 'other' side would lead to the usual shitposters on 4chan or Bodybuilding or the spiciest being Kiwifarms. No one actually goes to the Front or the spicier discords/telegrams/forums (not shared due to foulness). The reality also is that the intellectual CW right often has its successes claimed or attributed to boosters like Musk or Rogan simply for name visibility. Few people seem to know or care about Rufo or Loury or even Mcworther Sowell and Fryer. Which is a tragedy, but also totally expected since most of us have lives and aren't terminally online outrage bait biting retards.

To be honest I don't really understand what you are trying to say here.

Eh, my rambling was quite the soup of stupid, so I apologize for that.

To be extremely simple, Rufo simply does not have visibility. Any victories he gets are attributed to other actors (if any), and the reasons for that are varied.

Uh, Rufo is quite well known among at least the activist bases on both sides.

I don't know who Rufo is, and I'm deep, as it were, in the shit.

Something new you learn every day.

If John Oliver is doing segments on you, you're in the mainstream even if you're not quite a household name.

Tbh i just joined this forum recently. Ive been deliberately avoiding culture war stuff most of the past few years.

If it helps, Rufo is probably the singular winningest fighter against the progressive side of the culture war in quite a while. He's mostly working with DeSantis in Florida and the online front at the moment. I can only hope he gets a spot of power in a future GOP presidential admin where he can go after progressives nation-wide with some real teeth.

Rufo actually seems to possess brain cells still, unlike the weird degradation of Peterson and the embarrassing emotiveness of Alex Jones, Glenn Beck and other frothing conspiracists. I did harbour hope that DeSantis wouldn't pussy out and Rufo would be a czar with teeth, but DeSantis turned out to be the spineless Rubioesque shrinking violet I feared him to be, and Rufo does not seem to have kissed the o-ring of Trump so far to get a spot in any circus cabinet there.

Rufo actually seems to possess brain cells still, unlike the weird degradation of Peterson and the embarrassing emotiveness of Alex Jones, Glenn Beck and other frothing conspiracists.

The problem with a lot of the former type isn't intelligence. It's a weird sort of...effeteness? Peterson might actually be better than most here, since his messianic tendencies make him disagreeable

But you see it a lot with the "IDW" - everyone in it is likely smarter than average - where they basically seem to see the dirty work of politics to be beneath them. Instead, they just want to...talk. Uncharitably, because it'd require them to truly break with their original tribe (who they disagree with on a pivotal but small set of issues). Charitably, they've been burned and it isn't really their thing.

The IDW are largely asocial introverts like most academics who recuse themselves from transitioning to administration. Socially competent introverts still prefer to avoid dealing with people, and they thus have ceded the communicative tasks to their more socially extroverted fellow travellers... who for the IDW are largely insane blowhards.

NPR is too far left? That's certainly a take.

I have the impression of NPR as their spin being similar to NYT: representing the most milquetoast "centrist" corporate Dem position possible, with token discussions of "diversity" or minority rights while completely eliding any structural issues or suggestions for real leftist/progressive reform. Often so blatantly that it feels like the editor deleted the paragraph discussing them and immediately hit publish.

  • -29

You actual experience of NPR varies a great deal by the specific member station you listen to. Here in Appalachia its just the standard news programs, classical music, and bluegrass/old time country music. There is a cooking show on the weekends. I've lived in blue cities though, and driven through even more of them; its basically completely different station in those areas and imo deserves the criticism it gets.

token discussions of "diversity" or minority rights while completely eliding any structural issues or suggestions for real leftist/progressive reform

There's nothing "token" about it, that's their central framing for basically every single story. It's relentless. I do agree that they elide any real structural issues or serious suggestions for reform, but that's because it's all so stupid that they don't think to ask those questions.

I do agree that they elite any real structural issues or serious suggestions for reform, but that's because it's all so stupid that they don't think to ask those questions.

My working assumption has always been that not having to have those difficult discussions about class/real structural issues is one of the big reasons for the focus on privilege and identity issues. If you're looking at reality, a redneck from Appalachia whose local economy got destroyed by outsourcing and now has a massive fentanyl problem is actually substantially less privileged (in the actual sense of the word) than a pretty young girl going to an elite university. Focusing on the fact that the redneck is a white male allows people to ignore their own actual privilege, and while I'm not going to claim that that's the entire reason for those beliefs, I think that use gave it a lot of staying power.

It also allows them to continue harboring their intense classism and hatred of people like white appalachians and poor southerners. I agree there are some criticisms you can make of those groups -- some of those very hard-hitting -- but the criticisms made by elites are often far more gutteral and contemptuous than grounded and sympathetic. I would not be surprised to hear some references to "scum of the universe".

The real thing that distinguishes this to me, though, is how it contrasts powerfully with the attitude towards other poor groups; I can't tell you how many middle class+ white people I know will talk endlessly and with great care about being respectful towards AAVE speakers, and then in the next breath make fun of backcountry white dialects that are similar in many respects. It's not the kindness or politeness that grates me, but how selective it is. I dislike the sort of smorgasbord contempt you get from some of our more... elitist posters, but I can at least respect the consistency.

Poor white people are the only people you get to be prejudiced against nowadays, and people are eager to use them to fulfill their innate desire to look down on and insult people they see as lower than them. Compare the valence of the phrases "white trash" and "black trash."

I don't think it's that they're stupid, it's that talking concretely about reforms invites infighting. Everyone in those orgs can agree racism is bad / the problem, but they've learned that talking about specific mitigations is a recipe for drama.

During the Trump admin, I had a job with a really long 1-hour commute and I would keep NPR on. I played a game "is it possible for me to do my commute without NPR doing a story on Russiagate heavily insinuating that Trump colluded with Russia", and there were only 2 or 3 days where that happened. That is my anecdote, remembering how Russiagate took all the oxygen out of political news for a solid 2 years.

What a take, indeed. What exactly would NPR have to do to qualify as 'too left' in your book? Softly recommending guillotines for the rich in the coming socialist revolution? I bet even that wouldn't count!

Look, we get it. There's about a dozen principled leftists that are keeping laser-focused on 'real issues' who don't truck with facile wokeness. They never count for shit, and the ones who do show up are seemingly always Squad-type woke/socialist hybrids, but they have my sympathies. However, wokeness is a thing absolutely concentrated on the Left, and I don't think you get to cleave yourself from it so cleanly just because you too don't like their company.

I honestly cannot even fathom being unable to see NPR's shift in the past 8 years. Someone has to have a bare minimum of observational skills and long-term memory, and then it should just be patently obvious.

Thank god Uri brought some actual statistics to bear. Otherwise, this sort of gaslighting would perhaps have some effect because even after being constantly deployed in far less obvious cases.

I listened to NPR almost every day in the car. I fucking donated! It's now an intolerable shitshow of constant white-guilt signaling shoehorned into every single story. It went from being a bit too dry about too-boring topics to matching the hysteria level of MSNBC with maybe a half-step richer language.

Nothing is left there; it's just another empty mouthpiece I'm being forced to pay for.

I honestly cannot even fathom being unable to see NPR's shift in the past 8 years. Someone has to have a bare minimum of observational skills and long-term memory, and then it should just be patently obvious.

I've never had a car commute, so I haven't listened to NPR on radio regularly since I was a child. My exposure to their current slant is mainly by reading articles and occasionally listening to podcasts. So I don't know what their day-to-day news coverage is like for the most part, which makes it harder for me to notice a change. But my interpretation of their bias is from articles of theirs I've read in the past few months.

If you’re consuming articles and not shows it might be hard to see the difference. Their articles tend to differ little from what you’d see coming from one of the wire services.

"Looting as praxis to demolish late stage capitalism" is centrist now?

I am beyond frustrated at dealing with "nothing is ever leftist" deflections. It never seems to matter how far an institution falls into embracing leftist dogma, you will always be told "that land acknowledgement where they called you a settler colonist of Turtle Island whose whiteness is violence isn't real leftism according to this week's redefinition."

NPR has objectively moved so far to the left that its current editorial positions would look like cringe parody to its 2014 listeners. It doesn't matter that whatever progressives you hang out with have gone even more mask-off re. "settler children get the bullet too" (see Ian Golash and the hezbollah-flag waving demos); a fringe demographic of online leftists is not allowed to dictate where the center is.

I have the impression of NPR as their spin being similar to NYT: representing the most milquetoast "centrist" corporate Dem position possible,

This was true, but even then, NPR would be "too far to the left" since it is selling itself as a politically neutral, government funded non-profit and so ostensibly would be taking a position at the American political center, not the Democratic party center.

But even to the extent your critique was true, it is a stale critique.

The entire 'corporate Dem' position has moved sharply to the left in the past ten years (that is, it has moved left of where the American center was in 2010), and these political positions have enormous real world impacts. It's not just cheap signaling. For instance, the massive inflow of migrants we see are all downstream of NPR et al spending years denouncing necessary border enforcement as being inhumane in some way. We also see stats like how percent of white men among TV writers has declined from around 60% to 35% in the past 10 years. That is a major change with major impact for the media environment we all live in. There were many policy changes around police stops and bail reform and public order enforcement, etc, all downstream of NPR/NY Times media coverage on police shootings, and those policy changes have had massive real world impact. I could go on and on.

For better or worse, DEI identity slop is now considered left wing, and NPR has oodles of that, regardless of whatever other establishment propaganda it peddles.

The DEI stuff is built around internet fads, upper-middle-class pretensions/narcissism, and establishment imperatives. The terms left and right are malleable and relative, so it's both left-wing and not-left-wing. In any case, it's very convenient for the knowledge worker class and the giant institutions they serve, as it not only leaves their deeper structures and economic advantages uncontested (while merely arguing for superficial alterations), it also argues for increased power to be given to these people and institutions, as their credentials, HR departments, teams of lawyers and such are put forward as the necessary cures for 'systemic' bigotry or whatever.

What 'true' leftists, which exist only as fully as true rightists, lament is that there aren't strong working-class involvements in this new left, and indeed it lacks much revolutionary spark at all. It's not about solving or changing modern society so much as it's about keeping things in place and expanding the purvue of some of its most powerful factions. I think it deserves to be treated as a process of its own, best understood as a unique development that began around the 1960's, rather than something that matches patterns as broad as 'leftism'. Although, I can see the propagandistic appeal of accusing them of being false leftists, given that the term left enjoys positive valence with many of the people who would benefit from more working class, economically focused initiatives, such that it's a way of signaling to them that they are missing out. It's a matter of brand manipulation rather than objective understanding.

What 'true' leftists, which exist only as fully as true rightists, lament is that there aren't strong working-class involvements in this new left,

I'll grant you that there's like, 3 trotskyists and a tanky who lament the lack of working class involvement in the modern left. But the mainstream of the modern left has no love lost with the people who stand up to work. Uncharitably, it's a class interest movement for people who believe that possessing a college degree entitles them to baaskaap over the less enlightened masses, more charitably it still doesn't want any contributions from people who sweep floors or turn wrenches because leftism really believes in the value of the institutional academy, including the parts that were pulled out of someone's ass to declare himself an expert in it, and doesn't think that it's possible to have an informed opinion about anything at all without thorough knowledge of rape culture in dog parks.

It sounds like you're talking about "social justice" progressives, i.e. the group RedRegard is contrasting with "true leftists" (sarcasm quotes his).

The left does not want working class involvement, they want working class buy-in. The presence of the working class as adherents serves to launder the appeal of DEI paeans, hence the lumping of 'class economics' as a reason to support DEI on the surface. NPR like NYT serves as a sanity washing machine, packaging untenable ideas with somewhat reasonable or appealing ones and textdrowning readers in softly persuasive language to slowly edge the overton window one article at a time.

It's not about solving or changing modern society so much as it's about keeping things in place and expanding the purvue of some of its most powerful factions.

In other words, progressivism is a highly right wing (conservative) movement. The meta-level of statements like DR3 is that the correct model for progressives is the one they claim owns the world, and given their attitudes towards things like development of resources and blocking any meaningful reform of any kind that doesn't come from their own tribe (as in, things conservatives do to hold onto their privilege past its expiration date), well.

The dominant left wing (progressive) movement today is what's commonly called "the alt-right". The leftist goal in the 1900s was equalizing the playing field between men and women because women are objectively the more oppressed/discriminated against gender in an industrial economy. The leftist goal in the 2000s is doing the same thing, as men are objectively the more oppressed/discriminated against gender in a service economy.

As for why the woke don't realize it... difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it, and that describes half the nation for various reasons. As for why the alt-right don't realize it... well, that's mostly to do with co-ordination and the fact their enemy [falsely] describes themselves as being on the side of progress (which is effective at confusing the moderates/liberals/the people who are doing most of the work).

"The competency crisis" is calling out a problem created by conservative privilege. It is a leftist meme.

...Are you Hlynka?

DEI identity slop is now considered left wing

When wasn’t it?

It’s fine if you want to distinguish between the parts of the culture war that do and don’t directly relate to material issues, like overthrowing the capitalistic system we’ve all come to know and love, but don’t pretend there isn’t a correlation there that’s been left-coded for decades, and that NPR has moved down that path significantly in the last decade.

I appreciate you for being here.

I think your take on this is remarkable in 2024, long after “nice polite Republicans” was what NPR could be accused of.

It’s interesting to consider what NPR would have to do such that you would not accuse them of being centrist as opposed to actually progressive.

Is there a relatively prominent media source they could model themselves on?

I'd say ProPublica, The Atlantic, and The Economist are all mainstream left-leaning news sources I expect to do a better job of analysis than NPR. With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP which I expect to be relatively trustworthy on the facts (of course with some bias on which facts they report and precisely how they present them), but analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.

I do note that Economist and Atlantic have more authors pushing back against DEI slop, usually couching their counterarguments in some hard numbers before going 'this is not how we help (insert chosen minority)'. Still ostensibly on Team DEI, but less wedded to the distasteful tactics normally employed.

You expect ProPublica to do a good job of analysis? They're the ones that broke my faith in in-depth journalism with this article. I'd recommend reading it yourself to see if you can find their trick.

Spoilers: The tool works perfectly. 25% of "risk 1" and 80% of "Risk 10" offenders go on to reoffend, regardless of race. They then calculated "Of the [Race] criminals, X% of the [non-|re-]offenders were labelled [high|low] risk" to obscure that fact. I went into it more here, on the old site.

They certainly know how to tell a compelling story, but that's all it is: a story.

I used to read The Atlantic fairly regularly, but that was a while back and so I don’t know how they are in recent years. I know they have some quite left and still some not-so-left writers.

I’m quite surprised you list The Economist here, since they are typically considered fairly neoliberal in their stances, and so not leftist friendly. The fairly recent not-pro-trans article they had rocked the world of a lot of /r/neoliberal.

https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/v5d0hp/executive_editor_of_the_economist_on_eliminating/

https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/uo2ghw/the_economists_record_on_trans_issues_setting_the/

Like I agree that a lot of NPR analysis is pretty shallow, even if you stripped out any overt political valence, but I guess I don’t quite understand your complaint and/or your particular progressive stances on any given issue.

(For context, I used to be an Obama-loving left neoliberal and now I’m a ~Romney-loving right neoliberal, but I’ve always been annoyed with progressives.)

With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP; analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.

Technically, Reuters does have an opinion section, Breakingviews.

I have never heard of Nice Polite Republicans til today; that's a fun bacronym. My favorite is Neutered Pacifica Radio.

I had to look up Ray Kroc because there was something I was guessing that has a good culture war angle not discussed. Foundations and donations over the long term seem to always end up in the left camp.

Ray Kroc my intuition was telling me he would not be a leftist. To no one’s surprise a small business owners political philosophy is described in Wikipedia as

“A lifelong Republican, Kroc believed firmly in self-reliance and staunchly opposed government welfare and the New Deal. Kroc donated $255,000 to Richard Nixon's reelection campaign in 1972”

I guess it was actually his widowed wife’s estate that donated $200 million to NPR, but still seems there is a conservative can create a foundation and 30 years after their death the money ends up supporting everything they were opposed to.

I wonder how much of NGOs being left dominated is driven by the fact that women outlive men. And therefore when wealthy couples die and leave a decent chunk to an NGO, it is generally the woman who is the last to die.

Also to be frank I'd expect interspousal transfers to skew male -> female in terms of who created the funds. For every Mackenzie Scott there's hardly a counterbalancing force of... I don't know, Travis Kelce deciding to donate future Taylor Swift's money to the NRA.

Definitely possible. I would say maybe 33% from this hypothesis. And the rest is liberals just take more of these positions and slowly move the foundation into their taste.

People seem to be indicating that NPR was closer to the middle back when she died and left them money. And the change in NPR occurred 10-15 years later.

Probably a good job hunting search for clearly right people to look into these sort of jobs. If an old dude is like 80 and you are mid-career 40 there are likely a lot of opportunities in being the head of the foundation with clear right side traits.

I also want to point out Bezos seems to be going the opposite way with his wife. Old wife spending on leftist causes. I don’t know Lauren Sanchez current politics but they just bought a huge house in Palm Beach. Rich Latin women in Southern Florida screams conservative. Her friends will be. I feel confident predicting the Bezos will be solid GOP donors within about 10 years.

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/

Planet Money is still (mostly) worth listening to, or at least they confine the woke talking points to the episodes that telegraph it in the title so you can skip them right from the start.

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.

random side note... is it weird that all three figures in this drama so far are Jewish?

I don't think Maher and Mullin are Jewish, or at least I wasn't able to find anything indicating they are on short notice. Their names aren't very Jewish, anyway.

Maher as a name is Irish; Bill Maher came to mind as a Jewish Maher, but his last name is obviously his father’s, who was an Irish-American Catholic. The New York Times says Katherine met her (Indian New Zealander) husband at “a friend’s Seder”, which could be mild evidence in favor, but then it’s clear she had no Jewish elements to her wedding (while her husband’s Hindu contribution is mentioned) and she was married by a friend who got a marriage license, which again tilts against. Katherine is also a relatively uncommon Jewish name; not to the extent of something like Christina or Christian, but it’s unusual.

Ok, i guess i was wrong. I was also thinking of bill maher, but i guess thats his irish father's name.

Going by surnames they're Irish-Americans.

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.

Not having read this essay, one thing that really stands out to me about the headline and the URL is how it frames NPR as the active party that "lost America's trust." This is in stark contrast to 99% of the recent mainstream narrative about people coming to view journalists and journalism outlets with mistrust and even disdain, which is more along the lines of, "Why do these dumb ignorant fucks not trust what we publish, when we're doing everything right? Clearly they must be getting manipulated by disinformation merchants who just know so well how to appeal to their tiny little minds." Back when journalists being less trusted by the public was becoming an issue during the Trump administration, I recall thinking that this should be a time for introspection for journalists, for them to question why they - literal professional writers and speakers - were just so bad at communicating that they were losing out not just to a politician but a politician of the dishonesty level of Trump. Such introspection has been rare indeed, and it's both nice to see it here and unsurprising that this guy was penalized for performing it.

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.

I used to listen to NPR a ton as a kid in my parents' car and also in my young adulthood which was 10+ years ago now. The rare times I drive these days, I still put on NPR, but I honestly can't stand it either, and I'm not sure if it's because I changed or because NPR changed. On Reddit's /r/stupidpol (subreddit for leftists who consider identity politics to be stupid), I read someone say they play a game whenever putting on NPR to see how many minutes it is before there's some mention of a racial or sex/gender-related angle to whatever story they're covering, and they almost never go past 5 minutes; ever since starting to play the game myself, I actually rarely go past 1 minute these days. Could just be coincidence given, again, I rarely listen to any radio anymore these days, but I suspect it's not.

At least, the few times I tune into Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, it's still mostly enjoyable. The kind of self-satisfied smug "obviously the mainstream progressive Democrat narrative is the correct one" attitude can be kind of annoying, but it honestly doesn't seem any worse than when I was a kid - I've just become more aware of the biases I used to have - and I still find Paula Poundstone hilarious.

I read someone say they play a game whenever putting on NPR to see how many minutes it is before there's some mention of a racial or sex/gender-related angle to whatever story they're covering, and they almost never go past 5 minutes; ever since starting to play the game myself, I actually rarely go past 1 minute these days. Could just be coincidence given, again, I rarely listen to any radio anymore these days, but I suspect it's not.

My commute is short - when I couldn't even tune into the further and more rural station to make it to work without this being the dominant angle 5 days in a row, I had to excuse myself from listening.

Now I get to listen to Spotify's "Discovery" queue instead of learning about the world, which while great is still a downgrade.

Not having read this essay, one thing that really stands out to me about the headline and the URL is how it frames NPR as the active party that "lost America's trust." This is in stark contrast to 99% of the recent mainstream narrative about people coming to view journalists and journalism outlets with mistrust and even disdain, which is more along the lines of, "Why do these dumb ignorant fucks not trust what we publish, when we're doing everything right? Clearly they must be getting manipulated by disinformation merchants who just know so well how to appeal to their tiny little minds." Back when journalists being less trusted by the public was becoming an issue during the Trump administration, I recall thinking that this should be a time for introspection for journalists, for them to question why they - literal professional writers and speakers - were just so bad at communicating that they were losing out not just to a politician but a politician of the dishonesty level of Trump. Such introspection has been rare indeed, and it's both nice to see it here and unsurprising that this guy was penalized for performing it.

Well yeah, introspection is hard, and being smart doesn’t make it easier.

I have to say that I used to consider NPR’s bias much more egregious than I do now.

I had assumed that like most public broadcasting networks (which one would imagine that ‘National Public Radio’ was) it was entirely an organ of the government, like the BBC or CBC or (Australian) ABC and so on. But it turns out that NPR is essentially just a charity radio station that gets like 10% or maybe less of its funds from the government. The US’s actual state broadcasting network (VoA) doesn’t really have any media presence domestically, and while it is broadly globalist liberal, as one would expect from the State Department, it isn’t really close to NPR anyway.

Their funding is very confusing.

They get very little direct money from the government. But they license out their content to a bunch of small and tiny radio stations that wouldn't exist at all without government money and grants.

So whenever the topic of funding comes up they get sort of talk out of both sides of their mouth . They'll say "we are mostly supported by donations", but then also say that if you cut government funding they'd have to drastically reduce their programming.

I suppose they could both be true if the donations are mostly for a few very popular radio programs.

The US’s actual state broadcasting network (VoA)

Huh, TIL. I had never heard of that thing before. But yeah, NPR isn't really that "national." I guess they used to be, but the government funding was mostly taken away in the 80s. They got a huge boost in the 2000s from the estate of the widow of Ray Kroc, the McDonald's founder. They don't have ads, exactly, but they do have corporate sponsors who are allowed to make statements on the show- the distinction is murky.

It’s the successor to Radio Free Europe/Asia, part of the funding deal is that they’re not allowed to broadcast to Americans.

When your propaganda is too toxic for your own consumption...

VoA is, surprisingly, a lot more balanced than most mainstream media (although of course it reflects US priorities). It serves an actual purpose, and to achieve that it can't just be American Pravda.

VoA is high quality precisely because it is bound by mandate to not broadcast to Americans. Its a bit anodyne and obviously fully asspuppeted by the State Department, but it is honestly refreshing to read articles about international issues and how it relates to US interests without the stink of culture war blanketing the presentation.

triggered by Trump

Yea, it's this. I've been listening to NPR daily for 2 decades, and I can't back it up with citations, but I know this shift happened in 2016. They went from giving a left-leaning viewpoint that still had some contact with reality to a fully cultural Marxist worldview where they would tell outrageously one-sided stories, lie by omission, and on occasion lie outright. Maybe they thought they were doing the right thing by aligning against Trump? I think Trump broke their principles. It's been a downhill slide ever since.

makes sense. I think Trump has some sort of weird polarizing energy, where some people really love him and others really hate him. NPR has attracted a core group of the latter, and they just can't think rationally anymore. I do agree they think they're "doing the right thing" by doing whatever they can to attack Trump, I just think it backfires because of how insipid and repetitive their messaging has become.

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