According to Berliner, this pivot has led to NPR losing not just conservatives, but even moderates and traditional liberals. One exasperated listener summed up the complaints of these latter groups ably, asking Berliner, “Why is NPR telling me what to think?”
Why, indeed? Because based on Berliner’s article, that is precisely what NPR has been doing, and with ever-increasing shrillness, to boot. To go over the full catalogue of his indictments of his employer would take too long (and anyway, you should really read his piece), but in essence, he accuses NPR of selective amnesia when it comes to pushing the discredited Russiagate hoax, dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story, aggressively pushing misleading COVID coverage, framing the Israel-Palestine war along “intersectional” lines (read: supporting Hamas), and generally abusing its editorial independence by running articles and stories that are way out of the mainstream. At one point, Berliner notes with wonder that of NPR’s editorial positions in Washington, D.C., 87 are held by Democrats and zero by Republicans. Yes, zero. And apparently, judging by Berliner’s tales of being given the runaround by upper management when it comes to viewpoint diversity, they’re in no hurry to raise that number.
Now, heaven knows, we don’t particularly care if a government radio conglomerate, which was only established thanks to an act of Congress, and exclusively seems to command an audience of soy-drinking moral hemophiliacs, has lost its way and is now going under. Which NPR is. Badly. Nevertheless, we do want to draw attention to this story, because despite our schadenfreude at the fall of these self-appointed cultural guardians, it is worth remembering that NPR is what Leftists – and their allies in the world of Woke Capital -- want all media to be like. They’d rather that independent media, which most conservative media is (including this magazine), go the way of the Dodo bird, if only because it provides competition for what they would rather be a liberal monopoly on information, like the bad old days when CBS, ABC, and NBC basically had the ability to dictate political reality, facts be damned.
It is not mere power hunger that drives this desire. As the debacles at NPR show, the self-appointed “elite” have vanished so thoroughly into their own solipsistic echo chambers, and given in so completely to epistemic arrogance, that they literally cannot conceive of themselves as incorrect. We are reminded of when Stephen Colbert sniffed at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” To be fair to Colbert, he was talking about the fact that the reasoning behind the Iraq war had turned out to be bogus, which (ironically) those of us in the America First Right seem to remember better than the Left these days.
However, and Berliner’s story about NPR proves this, the lessons we took from Iraq were completely different from the lessons which the “elite” did. For example, Berliner relates that when the US Department of Energy decided (with low confidence) that COVID had come from a lab leak, rather than admit to their error in pushing the “natural origins” theory, NPR staffers deflected by saying this was just like when the intelligence community had said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, disregarding the fact that they had (by Berliner’s admission) swallowed the intelligence community’s line on Russiagate for years. Yes, it’s reasonable to point out that the government has been highly mistaken before, but given the selectiveness involved, it’s clear that what NPR and the rest of the liberal “elite” class who support it concluded from the failure of intelligence in Iraq was not that the government sometimes makes mistakes, but rather that it only makes mistakes when it comes to conclusions with which they disagree. Just as anyone – like us – who points out the failures of their ideology must be spreading “misinformation.” Because they really believe they can’t get anything wrong; reality has a liberal bias, don’t you know?
Well, sorry, but it doesn’t; if anything, if you want to know who reality is “biased” against, look at who’s trying to use the levers of the state to prevent you from knowing what it is, or to intentionally push one narrative to the exclusion of another. Unlike Leftists, we do not believe that the solution to that kind of dishonesty is to appoint some kind of government Ministry of Truth: that only exacerbates the problem. Rather, we believe that the only way to defeat dishonesty is to enable truth-tellers to operate without persecution. And today, the most fierce truth-tellers can be found almost exclusively in the independent media. The fact that Uri Berliner had to publish his criticism of NPR at an independent outlet – The Free Press – and not at NPR itself is all the proof you need of that.
So even as you fiddle while the NPRs of the world burn, remember that celebrating the downfall of liars is not the most important service that can be done to the truth. The most important service that can be done to the truth is to support those who tell it. Independent media is doing that. We are doing that. And both we and independent media need help and protection if we’re to prevent the arrogant powers-that-be from forcing America to look at the world through their muddied and jaundiced glasses.
