NPR CEO AWFL Doubles Down on the Intense Regime Bias at the State Media Company;
In Past Tweets, She Declared Trump a "Racist"

Last week, an editor at NPR, who is still employed there, blasted the state media propaganda outlet for its intense partisanship and routine publication of disinformation, without later retraction or apologies.

By the way, he identifies himself as a Sarah-Lawerence-educated son of a lesbian and complete card-carrying liberal stereotype.

But even he's had his fill of NPR's insane religiosity.

I've Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust. Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.

By Uri Berliner

April 9, 2024

...

It's true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

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.

Yes it has, but let's agree its gotten worse.

...

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.

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America.

...

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump's presidency.

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump's most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR's guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR's coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens....

What's worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially 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.

Russiagate was not NPR's only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here's how NPR's managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: "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."

But it wasn't a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR's best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren't following the laptop story because it could help Trump.

When the essential facts of the Post's reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn't make the hard choice of transparency.

Of course, NPR -- which is always calling for the deplatforming of people who push "disinformation" -- once again went all-in on disinformation in denying even a possibility that the Wuhan covid modified bat virus was cooked up in the Wuhan covid modified bat virus laboratory.

Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren't about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn't budge when the Energy Department--the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research--concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that "the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus."

When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration's unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won't get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.

He writes that the fact that there are zero Republican editors at NPR -- it's 87 Democrats to zero Republicans -- results in zero skepticism of the left's various fake-news insertions into the media bloodstream.

By the way, media "Republicans" tend to be, at best, country club Bushies. They're not actually conservatives.

But NPR considers country-club Bushies to be too toxic to hire.

There's an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It's frictionless--one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It's almost like an assembly line.

The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance--disseminated by news management--we're asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories--on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

He concludes his piece in hopes that the newly-hired CEO will be open to different perspectives and will be dogged about regaining the public trust.

The newly-hired CEO says "Fuck you, Fascist."

Now NPR CEO Katherine Maher has responded and appeared to confirm that the publicly supported media company has no intention to bring greater balance to its coverage or editorial staff.

...

Maher responded to none of these specific points in substance. Instead, she attacks Berliner as "profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning" to his colleagues by calling out the company for its political bias.

In a memo Friday, Maher told the staff that Berliner attacked not only "the quality of our editorial process and the integrity of our journalists" but "our people on the basis of who we are."

He did not attack you on "the basis of who [you] are," meaning, race or sex or sexuality. That is the constant lie of hard-left partisans: Anytime you're criticized, you ignore the criticism and attack fabricated "bad motives" of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.

In dismissing the criticism of bias, Maher adopted a spin common on law faculties where Republicans and conservatives have been largely purged. When confronted on the lack of ideological diversity, faculty often express disbelief that anyone would assume that they are biased simply because they continue to effectively bar republicans, libertarians, or conservatives.

Many also insist that there are more important forms of diversity than ideological or political perspectives. The result is the faculties today largely stretch from the left to the far left in terms of diversity.

Maher offered a similar spin while suggesting (falsely) that Berliner was somehow opposed to a diverse workplace:

"It is deeply simplistic to assert that the diversity of America can be reduced to any particular set of beliefs, and faulty reasoning to infer that identity is determinative of one's thoughts or political leanings. Each of our colleagues are here because they are excellent, accomplished professionals with an intense commitment to our work: we are stronger because of the work we do together, and we owe each other our utmost respect. We fulfill our mission best when we look and sound like the country we serve."

Apparently NPR didn't do its due diligence in researching this woman's intense partisan bias.

What am I saying -- of course they did. They were looking for intense partisan bias:

Shannon Thaler at the New York Post reassembled Maher's deleted postings including a 2018 declaration that "Donald Trump is a racist" and a variety of race-based commentary. That included a statement that appeared to excuse looting.

She is also quoted for saying that "white silence is complicity." She has described her own "hysteric white woman voice." She further stated: "I was taught to do it. I've done it. It's a disturbing recognition. While I don't recall ever using it to deliberately expose another person to immediate physical harm on my own cognizance, it's not impossible. That is whiteness."

She further stated "I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn't have slaves, or so I'd been taught."

Matt Taibbi is hopeful. Even though NPR has rejected any criticism of Regime Radio, at least the mainstream media is giving these criticisms a fair hearing.

Just kidding, they're attacking it like starving rats in a feeding frenzy.

Berliner's piece was immediately swallowed, mangled, and regurgitated as new propaganda. CNN media writer Oliver Darcy wrote "NPR faces right-wing revolt and calls for defunding after editor claims left-wing bias," establishing the format that this was not about factual impropriety, but about a "right-wing revolt" against claimed "left-wing bias." The New York Times did much the same thing, saying "NPR is in Turmoil After It is Accused of Left-Wing Bias," adding that Berliner's piece generated "firestorm... especially among conservatives." On cue, human error-vane Jonathan Chait chimed in to insist "The Media Did Not Make Up Trump's Russia Scandal."

But this wasn't about "bias." It was about ethics, or a lack of them. But this has been going on for so long, most people have forgotten what ethics look like. Audiences have been trained to think that a station or person that doesn't make overtly political coverage decisions is just hiding its real biases, which must be either right-wing, corrupt, or both. So someone like Berliner, when he talks about feeling "obliged" to cover even Donald Trump fairly, is actually just concealing a form of unfairness, or inspiring another tribe of unfair actors. Fair equals unfair.

He recalls his own surprise at the entire media going all-in on fantastical and throughly un-evidenced claims of Trump being an actual agent of Putin, and wondering: What the hell is going on?

I'll tell you what's going on: The arrogant, narcissistic and completely incompetent Ruling Class had a mass nervous breakdown in 2016 and turned to conspiracy theories and a dark demonic religion for succor.

Related: NPR posts "gleefully" about how wonderful it will be when the Soros DA convicts Trump in a corrupt trial and strips Trump of the right to cast a vote in his own favor.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:46 PM

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