RIP, NPR: The broadcaster that thought emojis were racist.
Since the announcement of the funding pull, X has been awash in people celebrating with their favorite woke and otherwise ridiculous NPR moments. My personal favorite is the tweet that NPR put out in 2022 saying that people were being subconsciously racist if they used the wrong color thumbs-up emoji. There was also its segment about the LGBTQ+ community’s battle for the dinosaur emoji. But there are so many other choices.
On Wednesday, journalist Matt Taibbi started a delicious thread on X with the prompt: “What’s everyone’s favorite ridiculous NPR story?”
Examples poured down. The COVID era was NPR’s definite nadir, with daily shrieking about the need for social distancing and the shunning of vaccine deniers. Tweeters pointed out stories like NPR’s advocating for a permanent ban on handshakes. “I remember a host shaming and ridiculing a guest for advocating for schools to re-open for in-person learning,” someone wrote. Several chimed in with the NPR tweet that “a new poll finds 40 percent of respondents believe in a baseless conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a lab in China.”
There were plenty of moments where NPR backed the Steele Dossier or said that the Hunter Biden laptop story was fiction. But the funniest examples involved not important and highly-politicized news stories, but ridiculous cultural agenda reporting that mattered to almost no one. NPR has claimed, over the years, that country music has an implicit racial bias, that dieting is racist, and gave a lot of airtime to the woman who wrote the book “In Defense of Looting,” very relatable to the average listener.
Ordinary dull Americana fills NPR with a horror of being alive. An X user posted “one of our Massachusetts NPR hosts told an anecdote on air where her weekend ski trip was besmirched when one of the video games in the lodge arcade had gun controllers and “I don’t want to hear a machine gun when I’m out.” Another highlighted a feature on the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, “when the best players in the two leagues that comprise professional baseball play a game between each other.”
No word yet if NPR has ever brought on Randolph and Mortimer Duke to explain that they are commodities brokers. “Now, what are commodities? Commodities are agricultural products — like coffee that you had for breakfast. Wheat, which is used to make bread. Pork bellies, which is used to make bacon, which you might find in a ‘bacon, lettuce and tomato’ sandwich.”