Can NPR listeners handle the truth?
On Tuesday, 25-year NPR veteran Uri Berliner dared to tell America what half the nation has long since known: National Public Radio has lost its way. Writing for The Free Press, the offspring of New York Times apostate Bari Weiss, Berliner spells out in some detail NPR's catastrophic deviation from journalistic standards. Although NPR had…
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On Tuesday, 25-year NPR veteran Uri Berliner dared to tell America what half the nation has long since known: National Public Radio has lost its way.
Writing for The Free Press, the offspring of New York Times apostate Bari Weiss, Berliner spells out in some detail NPR's catastrophic deviation from journalistic standards.
Although NPR had been veering left for decades, Berliner traces its abandonment of objective reporting to the emergence of Donald Trump. To his credit, he spells out one case after another where NPR went seriously wrong.
"Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting," he acknowledges. Worse, NPR, hitched "[its] wagon to Trump's most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff."
In fact, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff no fewer than 25 times on the Russia collusion story. This was bad enough, but when the Mueller report showed Schiff to be a charlatan, NPR quietly dropped the story without apology or explanation.
NPR's performance on the Hunter Biden laptop story was proactively awful. Berliner quotes the immortal words of NPR's managing editor: "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."
This bit of media malpractice was enough to turn the election, but again, no explanation, no apology.
NPR's coverage of COVID was even more disastrous. Berliner details the network's appalling efforts to debunk the lab-leak theory long after it had become accepted wisdom.
Although unmentioned, I suspect NPR championed the lockdown, masking and mandatory vaccinations in spite of all the evidence suggesting these solutions were not only un-American but also potentially lethal. There has been no reckoning here either.
In each of these cases, NPT execs chose "to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection." Adds Berliner, "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."
I would like to think that NPR listeners would read Berliner's piece and take it to heart, but that is unlikely to happen. The audiences of NPR, the New York Times, CNN and the rest have been so marinated in misinformation for so long that to accept the truth they will have to redefine themselves.
Leftists, in fact, have so much equity invested in their seemingly superior knowledge base that they risk the loss not just of face but also of self-esteem by acknowledging their own gullibility.
Berliner, himself, is a case in point. Those few NPR listeners brave enough to read his piece and the fewer still wise enough to believe it will likely seek the same refuge he does: Yes, much of what we have been told about Donald Trump is false, but we are intuitive enough to recognize the man's evil.
In fact, Berliner uses the word "unfortunate" to describe both NPR's abandonment of journalist principle and the emergence of what he calls "a belligerent, truth-impaired president."
In his article, however, Berliner shows no evidence of Trump's impairment, and he makes no mention of Biden's much more egregious dissembling. In Berliner's world, Trump's mendacity is a given. Journalists have reached this conclusion by comparing their facts to Trump's, but as Berliner shows, their facts are not facts at all.
In arguing against interest, Berliner gives added credibility to his case against NPR. Unfortunately, his knee-jerk hostility to Trump shows he himself has not escaped the gravitational pull of Planet NPR. And if he cannot, there's little hope for the lemmings in the NPR audience.
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