The story made quite a splash when it dropped a week ago. A fellow named Uri Berliner wrote a piece for the Free Press, an online outlet, critical of his employer, National Public Radio, for having essentially become a Left-wing mouthpiece.
Now a week might as well be a decade in the current age 0f 24/7, high-volume, light-speed, bleeds-leads, news cycles. But there are new developments, providing the opportunity to share the story once again and generate a little content. For his trouble, Berliner got fired by NPR, a couple of days ago. Technically he “resigned” after being “suspended” for five days.
Right.
Neither the story nor its epilogue were a surprise to anyone outside the Blue Bubble. It had long been apparent to anyone to the right of Noam Chomsky that NPR, once a well-respected brand, had succumbed to the mind-virus that is modern Leftism. It was equally apparent that The Borg does not tolerate dissent, so Berliner had to go.
I was a faithful listener of NPR for many years, even though I lean right, politically. All Things Considered was a daily treat. It was good stuff, mostly: thoughtful, informative, often offbeat stories about life and the human condition. There was no discernible slant, the stories made you think or laugh. You looked forward to each new episode.
But somewhere along the line the mood shifted. The curious, light-hearted tone slipped away. The human-interest stories were gradually replaced with politically tinged set pieces featuring cardboard-cutout villains and victims. If you listened closely you could hear the finger waggling back and forth.
Good guys, bad guys; Blue hats, good. Red hats, bad. I was one of those guys in a red hat, so it felt very much like a lecture. You are an awful human and now we’re going to tell you why, for the umpteenth time, until you get it. If you are even capable of getting it, that is.
But I wasn’t an awful human, and neither were any of the people I knew who shared my outlook. We just had different viewpoints. The New Order found these viewpoints objectionable and wasn’t shy about saying so.
So I quit listening. I voted with my fingers and turned the dial. And so did many others.
Berliner tried to tell them. A good Liberal of the old school: humane, open-minded, curious, tolerant, objective; he loved his job, loved what his institution once was, hated what it had become. He tried to tell them but they wouldn’t listen because they couldn’t. There was good and there was bad and there was Black and there was white. And that was that.
Still he persisted. They needed to know, they were on the wrong track, they were losing loyal listeners. But this only irritated them because they knew, with the certainty born of True Belief, that they were right and those others were wrong and why would we want anything to do with those people anyway?
So they did what ideologues everywhere do: They killed the messenger. And then doubled down.
If there was any doubt about NPR’s future path, the recent selection of Katherine Maher as CEO eliminated it. She is a Liberal of the new school: incurious, political to her core, didactic, bristling with hidden triggers, slanted so far to the Left she might just topple over. Her Twitter feed reads like a parody of Left-wing rightthink, a real life Titania McGrath.
She even looks the part.
© 2024 by Scott P. Snell
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