|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
The great years of public broadcasting were the 1970s when Masterpiece Theater presented critically-acclaimed historical dramas like I, Claudius or The Life of George Sand. NPR(National Public Radio) – and especially its Philadelphia TV affiliate, WHYY – was also noted for its concerts and offbeat poetry and arts and culture documentaries, that included poets reciting their work or being shown living their lives in downtown urban tenements.
The years passed and suddenly there was NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ with Terry Gross. This was the pre-political Terry Gross – when there was no Donald Trump to obsess on – where the topics focused on interviews with authors, historians, scientists and musicians. At this time NPR commentators still spoke rhythmically clear sounding English rather than the affected and very whiny ‘baby talk’ (where every sentence ends in a question mark and where the word ‘so’ is used to begin sentences) you hear on the station today.
Ironically, the NPR babytalk voice revolution happened about the same time the station erupted into full-blooded wokeness.
“It [NPR] is close to unlistenable now because of this political evangelism in nearly every minute of airtime,” a 2022 Intellectual Takeout article declared. “The same lens is applied to every topic under the sun and mercilessly forced into every segment.”
The article then questioned the station’s “moral preaching about dangerous conspiracies… that endlessly tells its listeners how fearful they should be about non-existent horrors like an epidemic of police violence against unarmed and non-resisting black men.”
Tune into NPR any time of the day or night and within minutes you’re likely to hear chatter about how awful Republicans are, threats to democracy via conservative politicians, how the right exaggerates the threat of illegal immigration, why biological men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, how climate change is influencing people not to have children, or how Christianity is finally waking up and changing its doctrines to adopt to the dictates of secular culture.
Even if you happen upon an innocuous NPR Jeopardy-like quiz show on a Saturday morning – where contestants are fed “uplifting” questions having to do with Democrat policies and snide questions about conservatives – it becomes plainly obvious that far-left ideology has saturated every square inch of NPR.
No matter where you turn – NPR car talk, garden talk, or any show generally unrelated to politics – the host will invariably find a way to let in those ideological winds. Every hour, every minute, the NPR agenda never quits.
One has only to recall the case of Uri Berliner, a senior business editor who worked at NPR for a quarter of a century, who in April 2024 wrote in The Free Press, a Substack publication, that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.”
Berliner listed a litany of journalistic NPR abominations in its coverage of the origins of Covid-19 and even the war in Gaza. Berliner said the broadcaster “had allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage, risking its trust with audiences.”
Former President Trump at the time made it clear, as he’d done many times in the past, that NPR’s government funding should end because it is a “national trust” and people relied on it for fair reporting.
That did not happen. Instead, NPR weathered the crisis – Berliner was suspended for 5 days without pay but ultimately he opted to resign – as many (but not all) of his colleagues condemned what he wrote in The Free Press.
The Chicago Tribune, reporting on the story in April 2024, revealed one of Berliner’s arguments was that “the station had unethically refused to run anything it thought might help Trump,” and that, “NPR had thus changed from a neutral news outfit, following the facts, to a cabal of advocates for one side of the political divide.”
“It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent,” Berliner observed, “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.”
Berliner laid most of the blame for the station’s 24/7 embrace of woke culture on John Lansing, NPR’s former chief executive, now replaced by Katherine Maher.
Lansing was very clear about NPR’s mission. In 2020, he stated:
“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism, we can be agents of change. The leaders in public media-starting with me-must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. … And we must commit ourselves-body and soul-to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions. We must do all this not as a ‘project’, not as an extracurricular activity, we must do this because, by definition, it is our work.”
But Maher might as well be Lansing’s body and brain double. Before he resigned from NPR, Berliner cited Maher’s past posts on X; especially one in 2018 that called Donald Trump a racist, another condemning Hillary Clinton for “erasing language for non-binary people” because she used terms like “boy” and “girl.”
“Maher is always on about her own ‘white cis mobility privilege,’ even as she continues to exercise it all day,” wrote Crispin Sartwell in Sublation Magazine. “When your CEO is telling you how it’s going to be, and decrying her own privilege as she does so, she’s liable to leave you confused…”
The National Review summed up Maher as “so cringe-inducingly woke that she almost reads like an intentionally cruel parody of wokeness.”
In May 2024 the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held hearings on media bias after Berliner’s NPR allegations. Maher, as the newly hired president and CEO of NPR was invited to participate but she declined to appear and said in a statement that the hearing conflicted with a “previously scheduled and publicly posted all-day meeting” of the company’s board of directors.
Democrats called the Hearing a waste of time. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Florida, stated, “This Congress will unfortunately go down in history as the least productive in modern time, wasting time and taxpayer dollars on witch hunts.”
The committee targeting NPR, she added, paralleled the communist actions of Chinese and Russian governments and Republicans “were undermining” journalism.
Castor told the Committee NPR reporting was objective and should receive more federal money.
Post House committee hearings WHYY-NPR news seems to have doubled down in the bias department. One WHYY news headline in October 2004 read: “Trump Invokes racist tropes, calling Harris ‘lazy as hell’ and ‘slow.’” This headline is reminiscent of the headlines in the Marxist-oriented underground newspapers in the late 1960s. Call it a headline and editorial wrapped up in one.
WHYY’s cultural news reporting is just as bad. The headline for an interview with black opera star Latonia Moore read: “Opera is full of racism. What can be done to revolutionize it?” The answer: nothing. That’s because the singer in this case refused to tap into NPR’s agenda and give them what they wanted: how terrible it is to be black in the white privilege world of opera.
Only one conclusion can be drawn from all this: NPR, with its skewed leftist ideological reporting-that even creeps into its Saturday afternoon “fun” quiz shows-is really a hazard to the nation’s mental health. And it should not be supported in any way by taxpayer money.
The longer NPR is allowed to go on and suck money from the government and allow left wing politics to contaminate the news and influence the wording of its stories and headlines-while emerging victorious after viral accusations by respected journalists like Uri Berliner-the more it stands to influence legacy media which is becoming more and more like NPR.
We are, sadly, a nation surrounded by NPR media whether it’s NBC, CBS or MSNBC.
The Ronna McDaniel story is a case in point.
The former GOP Chair was hired by NBC News as a political analyst but was canned after protests from other NBC hosts who criticized her work to “undermine the 2020 election.”
What is this if not the malevolent influence of that free range entity known as NPR?
N udniks
P alestinians
R ecidivists
Nazi Propaganda Radio how long have we been Financing this stuff?! Far too long if you ask me
It’s past time to dump npr….it doesn’t have a day without pushing woke bologna!
NPR is the personification of the nanny state that infantalizes the population like a gigantic schoolyard with them, naturally , as the teachers ; you can see this on full display with Tim Waltz’s wife
This is the soft tyranny of BIG MOTHER instead of Big Brother , because MOther is always right
Was that a typo?
Did you mean sift tyranny, or soft tranny?
😏
…so of course I had to typo there.
Damn
sigh °`
NPR and PBS should not get any taxpayer funding, ever.
NPR and PBS may have made sense 50 years ago as an alternative to the “Big 3” television networks,, as well as radio. CBS, ABC, and NBC dominated the airwaves, and much of what you saw on television or heard on the radio was merely repetitive or an echo of what was on the other channels/stations, which was commercially driven by advertisers, hence the term “soap opera” for daytime dramas targeted to housewives sponsored by soap makers.
PBS and NPR would provide a medium whereby the people could go on the air, and create their own content. And initially, it was pretty much like that. Local public radio stations played classical or jazz music, and maybe had one or two talk shows or lectures. Public television had “educational programming” which was locally produced, of which Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was one of the most famous.
The debut of Sesame Street in 1969 created a new trend in public broadcasting, namely creation of content not locally, but by slick national companies, which would then syndicate their programs, for fairly high fees, to local stations. Suddenly, the fund drives for local stations were not to pay for keeping the lights on, but to pay for those syndication fees.
Since then, PBS and NPR have become de facto commercial television and radio networks, without all the messy business of having to deal with advertisers
and shareholders or be held accountable. And they’ve done it with corporate money, foundation money, your pledge money, and a big chunk of government money.
With new forms of communication media having come on the scene, the rationale behind PBS and NPR has really evaporated in an era of streaming media.
And then there is the politics. It is gospel truth that PBS and NPR are heavily slanted to the left—and public money is used to promote a leftist agenda. If any government funds are used, they should be used to promote all points of view equally.
With that in mind, it’s high time for Uncle Sam to either privatize PBS and NPR as actual commercial networks and let them go out on their own, or reinvent them as real public access radio and television, with more locally produced content and less nationally syndicated stuff and make public broadcasting truly public.
NPR (National PALESTINE Radio) is listened to by suburban white intolerant left Karens and the cucks and capons they temporarily deign to tolerate, while they drive their Volvos and EVs and swill soy lattes. This is an unaccountably affluent (in spite of doing nothing to create wealth nor work worthy of mention) group whose baleful listening preferences shouldn’t be subsidized by the taxpayers. They can revive “Air America” if they want that kind of happy horseshit and woke propaganda so badly.
Is NPR actually still in business? Maybe that’s another Day 1 job for Trump after the more important stuff is taken care of.
O how we long for NPR of days passed with Car Talk and “Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers”,
If NPR has a value. Let it stand on its own two feet. Pull government funding.
“NPR commentators still spoke…clear sounding English rather than…whiny ‘baby talk’ (…where the word ‘so’ is used to begin sentences) you hear on the station today.”
Interesting. I’ve been noticing that, the overuse of the word “so” (particularly for beginning a sentence).
“Tune into NPR any time of the day or night and within minutes you’re likely to hear chatter about…how Christianity is finally waking up and changing its doctrines to adopt to the dictates of secular culture.”
Christianity has not been waking up to anything (though, yes, it seems they are…to NPR). Christendom has not heeded the commands of the Lord through Paul to not be “ignorant.” Christendom has rejected the command to be “rightly dividing the word of truth,” and so Christendom thinks they’re Israel (they’re not). Much of Christendom is based on Replacement Theology, which is wrong.
Christendom’s willful ignorance has been greatly assisted, and gladly, by the modern versions of the Bible. The modernization of the Bible began in ernest with the work of Wescott and Hort in the 19th century. Today, the result is a member of the TCC (Textual Confidence Collective) saying the KJB is no longer readable. The member says the KJB is “sufficiently unintelligible.” Churches have gone along with this ridiculous charge, and a great many now use the ESV and the NIV. Those versions have removed the key to understanding the Bible. The key being in II Tim. 2:15. Not good.
If Congress would just do its damn job and actually write and pass a budget (last time that happened W was president) instead of impoverishing us all with the continuing resolution charade, it would be a simple matter to simply zero out the NBP and PBS budget lines and be done with them.
The baby talk (endind every sentence with a questioning inflection) became common many years ago among white women. Since npr has been feminized, it’s no surprise its hosts exhibit this annoying trait
When I was in school up at U.Buffalo I would often tune in to NPR and it was so satisfying. There were a few anchors whose voice I was hypnotized by and whose programming was always fair and interesting. Now, I lapsed from my college days and couldn’t listen at 4PM any longer anyway but recently when I listened – even Terry Gross who always enjoyed had shifted to a kind of propandizing leftist bias and it was unlistenable. So biased and skewed towards anything to do with Blacks and their self-created victimhood. And it had happened to BAI with Afro centric broadcasting that celebrated Africans flying around on gliders in the 12th Century. Or the network of cities that were on the level of high civilization. (This really happened and we were expected to belive this hogwash). Gone were the days of Bob Fass and high intellectual broadcasting by the likes of Larry Josephson and Steve Post – who steered me through adolescence at Stuyvesant H.S. Now certainly it’s true ‘If you’re not a socialist at 20 you have no heart and if you’re still one at 40 – no brain and I may have shifted in my pt of view from the alienation of early adulthood. ( which started when i made my way around the globe in a lilttle less than 2 yrs on the lowest of budgets but with an open heart and a lot of curiousity – and experienced what life was like e.g. in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India etc. The worm began to turn and eventually bloomed into a full American patriotism.) https://youtu.be/tKk1tqyrDeU?si=MvBenN7fdmeBVPme won Best Sci Fi Film Golden State Film Festival.
Stephan Morrow
Artistic Director’
The Great American Play Series
You nailed it
The day after the election I described it as comedy gold
Much better than sat night live
It’s so unintentionally funny
I love try to guess how they will get the snide woke stuff into a show on say Antarctica
They never fail
I think hell would be having to spend time locked in a room with them
I find the incessant use of the phrase “without evidence” particularly obnoxious.
If a Republican asserts a belief, no matter how self-evident, it is tagged with “without evidence”.
On the other hand, a Democrat can state an opinion like “Trump will reduce women’s rights”, and the phrase will NEVER be appended!
I couldn’t resist commenting