ED MORRISSEY: All (Approved) Things Considered: How We Lost Our Way at NPR.
“If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way,” NPR veteran Uri Berliner writes. “But it hasn’t.” Perhaps not, but it’s been that way for longer than Berliner wants to admit, too.
And it’s not just NPR that Berliner dresses down in this detailed and damning mea culpa from inside the house, so to speak, at The Free Press. What Berliner writes about his own media organization pretty much applies to all American mainstream media outlets, and just as much as at NPR, if not more.
Berliner puts the beginning of the corruption at the election of Donald Trump, when NPR went all-in on Adam Schiff’s McCarthyism — and failed to call it out when it collapsed:
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.
What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially 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.
In 2010, NPR attacked the Tea Party, a group of fiscally responsible grownups whose protests against government waste often ended with their cleaning up their protest sites, not destroying them: Taxpayer-Funded Immaturity: NPR Teaches Readers ‘To Speak Tea Bag.’
As Glenn noted in October of 2016, “I’m increasingly concerned that the neutralization of the Tea Party movement — an effort by both major parties — may have convinced a lot of people that civics-book style polite political participation is for chumps.”
As did the DNC-MSM’s coverage of Mitt Romney. In 2012, when Romney faced off against Obama, NPR attacked him with racial dog whistles that only Cokie Roberts could hear.
And then the network wondered why the Republican rank and file united behind Trump in 2016:
Oh you guys want to Portray Mitt Romney as an extreme and abusive sociopath? Okay, well here's the real thing then.
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) February 22, 2024
Flashback: How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class. “For a long time, the notion that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state—one that confers power and privilege to white people and systematically denies them to people of color—was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, largely through liberal media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. What changed? Most obviously: white liberals. Their enthusiasm for wokeness created a feedback loop with the media outlets to which they are paying subscribers. And the impact has been monumental: Once distinct publications and news channels are now staggeringly uniform.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Our Ruling Class Monoculture.