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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."

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.

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.