I hate to say ‘I told you so,’ but I did. I told Uri Berliner too.
Berliner laid waste to National Public Radio in an article in The Free Press. Everything he said – the one-sided news, the one-sided commentary, the woke take on everything, the refusal to admit failure, etc. – was instantly recognizable by anyone who’s tuned into NPR in the last decade.
But I criticized Berliner for this – his ideas about how to cure what ails NPR.
With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong.
I considered that naïve. His idea that the organization, that’s woke from the grassroots to the CEO, could simply put aside its ideology and return to doing actual journalism replete with conflicting sides, differing voices and, that rarest of birds, journalistic integrity, could simply see the light and change looked highly unlikely. My belief was (and is) that idealogues don’t change. They think they’re right and everyone else is wrong and in need of being educated by them in Right Think. And, since NPR has long been an echo chamber of woke ideology, I doubted that Berliner’s “fix” would fix anything.
And sure enough. Far from taking his criticisms to heart, the latest news is that Berliner, a 25-year veteran of NPR, has quit his job following his five-day suspension without pay and an article on the NPR site by David Folkenflik that carefully avoids the issues Berliner raised and ignores the very things he called for – reassessment, introspection, reform.
It’s not happening. Folkenflik’s piece is balanced, giving Berliner’s article an honest hearing without condescension. And, like any balanced article, it offers the opportunity for NPR to rebut Berliner’s criticisms. Tellingly, no one does so.
Perhaps Berliner’s main criticism was of an absence of what he called ‘viewpoint diversity’ at NPR. So how does Folkenflik’s piece respond? How does it demonstrate viewpoint diversity there? It doesn’t. Instead, it quotes senior digital news editor Fernando Alfonso who believes that workplace diversity is achieved, not by a vigorous exchange of conflicting ideas, but by “people who look like me.” A diversity of voices, we learn, is actually just variations in skin tones and has nothing to do with airing differing ideas, something NPR notoriously fails to do.
Black people and white people can think alike, and do at NPR but, weirdly, NPR is certain they don’t, hence its assumption that diversity of color = diversity of ideas.
Folkenflik quotes former NPR CEO, John Lansing as wanting to “make sure [NPR] sounds like all of America,” certainly a noble aspiration, the problem being that NPR neither gets close to that ideal nor even tries. It’s range of viewpoints runs the gamut from A to B. As Berliner pointed out,
Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.
For an organization that assumes that skin color is all, how can NPR be content with an almost completely white audience? How likely is it that NPR “sounds like all of America” if its audience is only the narrowest sliver thereof? No one quoted by Folkenflik betrays the slightest awareness that wokeness isn’t the voice of America.
Did NPR blow major stories? It did. Did it misrepresent issues like the Russia collusion hoax and the origin of COVID? Yes. Ditto the Biden laptop debacle. Those failures were a direct and predictable result of an ideology that filters out salient facts if they conflict with the preferred narrative. But shocking journalistic failure isn’t considered a problem at NPR; that’s confined to the vanishingly rare risk of questioning the Received Word.
Meanwhile, declining audience share and the resulting layoff of 10% of the NPR workforce last year, Folkenflik ignores completely, strongly suggesting he doesn’t see them as problems either. What about the fact that blacks and Hispanics don’t tune in? We might think that, if anything, would get the attention of NPR executives and reporters. But, even though Berliner raised the issue, no one thought it worthy of comment. So, even the well-being of the organization, even its failure to get close to its own stated goals take a backseat to its promotion of woke ideology.
At least the coda to this sorry affair is comic. The Fool enters stage left in the person of new CEO Katherine Maher whose hot embrace of progressive talking points seems to have entirely overwhelmed any capacity for critical thinking she may once have had. Maher’s tweets have proved to be a gold mine of woke gibberish and a complete absence of self-awareness. She’s the woman who’s worth about $1.3 million but who, during the George Floyd riots, announced her opposition to private property. She’s financially contributed to Stacy Abrams’ quixotic campaign of election denial, called truth a “distraction” to journalism and Bill Maher a “racist bigot,” and excoriated herself for her “cis white mobility privilege.”
The point being that, with such a person piloting the NPR ship and everyday employees snugly on board, it’s no wonder Berliner’s hope for a come-to-Jesus moment came to nothing. The truth may be a distraction, but, at NPR, it’s not much of one.
At this point, I’m with Nellie Bowles at the Free Press. Spraying the country with the toxic sludge of wokeism is fine, but NPR needs to do it with its own money, not mine. Contrary to its claims, NPR wouldn’t exist without the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars it receives directly and through its 1,000+ affiliated stations and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
I say NPR either fires the wokesters and starts doing real journalism or it loses its public funding.
Until then, Mr. Berliner, I told you so, and, frankly, you should have known all along.
This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
