HE is thumbs–up on Uri Berliner’s 4.9 Free Press essay about how NPR’s entrenched liberal dogma and orthodoxy led to a pattern of eating its own tail when Donald Trump came to power. Most of the article tells the straight dope.
NPR’s ideological and institutional opposition to a flood of aggressive Trump malignancies over the last seven years (2017 until today) has led to the government-funded org preaching to a much smaller choir, Berliner says. Advanced wokeness has resulted in listener trust levels dropping considerably since 2011.
Many of Berliner’s judgments seem unassailable and inarguable. Many but not all.
Berliner is 100% correct in the matter of NPR’s coverage of the nearly four-year-old George Floyd murder and their subsequent obsessive filtering of everything by way of identity and identity politics in particular (all white folks are guilty of overt or unconscious racial bias and are therefore deserving of constant correction, somber self-reflection and shaming while all POCs are blessed and beautiful).
Berliner is also completely correct in stating that NPR suppressed coverage of the Wuhan lab leak theory, which was initially derided as possibly racist but which is now recognized as the most likely explanation of what triggered the pandemic.
But his article also strongly implies that suspected Russiagate collusion was bullshit when the Mueller Report concluded that while there wasn’t sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution, there was a coordinated Russian government-led effort to hurt or compromise Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and that the Trumpies knew they were benefitting from this and responded with glee.
It also states that the Hunter Biden laptop story and corruption charges were and are a legit news story when in fact it’s always been a ho-hummer. The facts merely expose a pattern of garden-variety influence peddling — unsavory and even odious behavior but small change at the end of the day. This establishment is shocked, shocked to learn that Hunter is a bad-egg son whose sordid activities have rubbed off on his dad to some extent. Sorry but it’s nothing to have a major heart attack over.
These two caveats aside, hive (i.e., the NPR kind) is jive.
