I miss listening to NPR. I miss reading the New Yorker. I miss watching sports. I gave up on NPR about 4 years ago now, when Terry Gross asked the author of a book about Jim Jones, the maniac killer of many of his pathetic followers, if he saw many similarities between Jones and Trump. And of course he did! Oh my God yes! came the gist of his immediate reply. Gross of course was delighted.
That was the moment I realized that the Left, a group I'd previously belonged to, had genuinely gone mad. It's only gotten much worse since then. I disagree with Matt fairly often, but he's got this one nailed down. These people have without question snapped their collective cap. I don't believe there's any help for them.
Yes, Matt, you hit this one right out of the park. I stopped listening to public radio several years ago when I could take no more. NPR is the very worst virtue signaler of wokedom on the planet. At least with the NY Times, I can skip over the columnists that make my flesh crawl: Michelle Goldberg, Ezra Klein, Spenser Bokat Lindel, Jennifer Boylan, Kara Swisher, Roxanne Gay, the entire Editorial Board, and others. But with public radio, as soon as I turn it on, I'm subjected to every hectoring, double hyphenated do-gooder on their roster. My only escape is not to turn it on in the first place.
NPR used to be one of my prime news sources, but it's become so ridiculous it seems like an SNL skit. After some recent local election here in LA, they described the winner as "only the fifth woman of color to hold the post". I couldn't stop laughing.
Up here in Canada, the same phenomenon has been happening with our NPR equivalent CBC Radio. A decade ago, i was a huge proponent for CBC and used to listen regularly by air and podcast - i even wrote my MP and asked them to advocate for increasing their funding and adding a new local station in our area.
But - and here's something you've never heard before anywhere else - several years ago something changed. They kinda snapped. They stopped being thoughtful omnivorous examiners of culture, and made a hard left turn into the ditch of nonstop white-knuckled cultural enforcers. It's their duty, you see, to tell you how you should be thinking and acting, self-righteous fucking Daniel Tiger for grownup-ass shit. Now every time i start my car and catch the 10 seconds before my bluetooth kicks in, they're talking about one of three things: race, trans, or covid. (And often they are mashing them all together into one Voltron of whinging). There is *nothing else*. The repetition is maddening - literal preachers are less preachy than this! Unless you've got the Memento disease, it's totally unlistenable. Kinda sad.
I used to listen to NPR religiously in the 80s when I worked the graveyard shift at a local hospital. I loved their nightly segment featuring Afro-pop. Then in the 90s, they dumped the music and re-branded as Victim Radio. No purported identity group is too small or ephemeral not to warrant a one hour sentimental 'centering' of its deep pain and psychic woundedness; no alleged injustice so slight or self-imposed that it can't be called a systematic human rights catastrophe; no broken finger-nail so trivial that it can't be seen as traumatic deserving of a lifetime of taxpayer supported therapy. The world of NPR is filled with hapless victims of a faceless soul-crushing global system whose daily struggle against the horror and indignity of its marginalization is the subject of hours on hours on hours of somnolent chronicling by self-indulgent bourgeoise puritans. What would we do without NPR? I mean what other broadcaster would have blown the lid off the great national scandal of neighborhood shade inequality?
I'm a liberal/leftist working in media in a major east coast city and I've found NPR to a smug fuckfest for years, almost solely piloted by the self-righteous NIMBYs (and YIMBYs!) you don't want to be trapped at a dinner party with (and I unfortunately have been). I've often longed for some actual thoughtful, earthy, working-class people involved in these kinds of enterprises instead of the faux-polite Ivy-league circle jerk that it's become.
But somehow Taibbi's still right fucking on here: it's become much, much, MUCH worse!
NPR exists to reinforce narratives and to establish comfortable identities within an ideological framework. It assures its listeners that they will not be alone if they crawl into the witty, velvety cocoon that it weaves.
It is very good at what it does, which is unrelated to fostering a curious and informed public.
There was a Blocked & Reported episode that discussed the NPR show Code Switch piling on a Palestinian-American businessman who they had determined was guilty of racism. He was guilty of nothing other than having a daughter who'd posted some racist/stupid stuff in her teens, but the way they treated it you'd have thought he'd been a secret Grand Wizard. It was incredibly fucked up to listen to, and really showed the intellectual rot that NPR has suffered over time.
Holy shit. Because of this piece, I have wasted the whole morning reading the most benign drivel in history. NPR is a glorified gossip column. What is it that these people want? White actors are only allowed to play the villain? White tick tockers are only allowed to perform dances created by other white people? White playwrights are no longer allowed to write fucking plays?!?!?! SHUT THE FUCK UP NPR!!!!!
I nearly fell off my chair laughing at this. For humor value alone it is a worthy contribution to public discourse. "Pinned to the wrestling mat beyond the three-count"? Ha ha! There is truth in Matt's humor that somehow defuses the despair that I otherwise often feel about the censorship and narrative warfare he is describing.
This article brilliantly describes why my wife, who is an otherwise intelligent individual, has morphed into a woke social justice warrior in recent months. Years ago she internalized the canard that NPR is "unbiased" and does "great journalism". So basically she believes everything they tell her with the fervent ardor of a newly converted disciple. The fact that my tax dollars partially fund this media monstrosity is only the icing on this bad-tasting cake. I hope I live long enough to see these grifters defunded completely.
I have said this before, but Minnesota Public Radio (and NPR), which I loved for 20 years, has become exactly this type of partisan viewpoint driven media for nearly a decade and gets worse each year.
There is often zero presentation of values (values which I often personally disagree with) which large swathes of the country hold. Long pieces on immigration policy, where not just the interviewees, but the NPR "journalists" assume that the only criteria considered for whether someone should be accepted (and if at all possible rapidly naturalized) into the US is "will they be better off than where they were living before?".
The very concept that any other consideration should be on the table, or that the law itself should be followed is at best totally ignored. When not ignored, such values/thoughts are treated as ipso facto evidence of extreme racism and white supremacy. It is a ridiculous joke of a presentation, absolutely just as biased as Ben Shapiro, and has driven many left-centrists like myself to treat it with the same disdain we do Fox News.
When the riots were very serious in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, and random cars of people were showing up at liquor stores and pharmacies with guns at 4pm on a weekday with police response measured in hours, you could turn on Minnesota Public Radio, and the entire discussion was on the main "peaceful march" surrounded by journalists and hundreds of police. That and regular programming like "Texas Poetry Hour".
Large swathes of time where you would have had zero idea listening to what had been a great local news station, where 90% of the staff is based in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, that anything was amiss from a public safety standpoint. It was a complete betrayal of its mission in the service of a political project, one which would have made Pravda proud.
What do we get instead of news? Instead what we get is daily racism update. Housing prices up? Article about how this is all about racism and differentially impacts minorities. Housing prices down? Article about how this is all about racism and differentially impacts minorities. Does either article provide much in the way of actual research or figures to back up this position? No. Weather unseasonably hot? Racism! Weather unseasonably cold Racism!
This sounds like a joke but it is not. Typically they latch on to some single datapoint, might even be a datapoint that this is 8.94% bad for white people and 9.02% bad for black people. They also often don't even consider if some other piece of data or way of framing the problem would show an actual benefit for minorities. That isn't part of the mission, ideology is their mission.
Conveying reality isn't the mission anymore...it is sad, at times I almost get emotional about it.
I miss listening to NPR. I miss reading the New Yorker. I miss watching sports. I gave up on NPR about 4 years ago now, when Terry Gross asked the author of a book about Jim Jones, the maniac killer of many of his pathetic followers, if he saw many similarities between Jones and Trump. And of course he did! Oh my God yes! came the gist of his immediate reply. Gross of course was delighted.
That was the moment I realized that the Left, a group I'd previously belonged to, had genuinely gone mad. It's only gotten much worse since then. I disagree with Matt fairly often, but he's got this one nailed down. These people have without question snapped their collective cap. I don't believe there's any help for them.
I listened to "All Things Considered" for many years and gradually it changed to "Only Things We Like Considered" and it is no longer interesting.
Yes, Matt, you hit this one right out of the park. I stopped listening to public radio several years ago when I could take no more. NPR is the very worst virtue signaler of wokedom on the planet. At least with the NY Times, I can skip over the columnists that make my flesh crawl: Michelle Goldberg, Ezra Klein, Spenser Bokat Lindel, Jennifer Boylan, Kara Swisher, Roxanne Gay, the entire Editorial Board, and others. But with public radio, as soon as I turn it on, I'm subjected to every hectoring, double hyphenated do-gooder on their roster. My only escape is not to turn it on in the first place.
NPR used to be one of my prime news sources, but it's become so ridiculous it seems like an SNL skit. After some recent local election here in LA, they described the winner as "only the fifth woman of color to hold the post". I couldn't stop laughing.
"One of these professional analysts has to figure this one out eventually, right?"
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Up here in Canada, the same phenomenon has been happening with our NPR equivalent CBC Radio. A decade ago, i was a huge proponent for CBC and used to listen regularly by air and podcast - i even wrote my MP and asked them to advocate for increasing their funding and adding a new local station in our area.
But - and here's something you've never heard before anywhere else - several years ago something changed. They kinda snapped. They stopped being thoughtful omnivorous examiners of culture, and made a hard left turn into the ditch of nonstop white-knuckled cultural enforcers. It's their duty, you see, to tell you how you should be thinking and acting, self-righteous fucking Daniel Tiger for grownup-ass shit. Now every time i start my car and catch the 10 seconds before my bluetooth kicks in, they're talking about one of three things: race, trans, or covid. (And often they are mashing them all together into one Voltron of whinging). There is *nothing else*. The repetition is maddening - literal preachers are less preachy than this! Unless you've got the Memento disease, it's totally unlistenable. Kinda sad.
I used to listen to NPR religiously in the 80s when I worked the graveyard shift at a local hospital. I loved their nightly segment featuring Afro-pop. Then in the 90s, they dumped the music and re-branded as Victim Radio. No purported identity group is too small or ephemeral not to warrant a one hour sentimental 'centering' of its deep pain and psychic woundedness; no alleged injustice so slight or self-imposed that it can't be called a systematic human rights catastrophe; no broken finger-nail so trivial that it can't be seen as traumatic deserving of a lifetime of taxpayer supported therapy. The world of NPR is filled with hapless victims of a faceless soul-crushing global system whose daily struggle against the horror and indignity of its marginalization is the subject of hours on hours on hours of somnolent chronicling by self-indulgent bourgeoise puritans. What would we do without NPR? I mean what other broadcaster would have blown the lid off the great national scandal of neighborhood shade inequality?
I'm a liberal/leftist working in media in a major east coast city and I've found NPR to a smug fuckfest for years, almost solely piloted by the self-righteous NIMBYs (and YIMBYs!) you don't want to be trapped at a dinner party with (and I unfortunately have been). I've often longed for some actual thoughtful, earthy, working-class people involved in these kinds of enterprises instead of the faux-polite Ivy-league circle jerk that it's become.
But somehow Taibbi's still right fucking on here: it's become much, much, MUCH worse!
I miss "Car Talk."
NPR exists to reinforce narratives and to establish comfortable identities within an ideological framework. It assures its listeners that they will not be alone if they crawl into the witty, velvety cocoon that it weaves.
It is very good at what it does, which is unrelated to fostering a curious and informed public.
I say this as a fairly left-wing individual.
There was a Blocked & Reported episode that discussed the NPR show Code Switch piling on a Palestinian-American businessman who they had determined was guilty of racism. He was guilty of nothing other than having a daughter who'd posted some racist/stupid stuff in her teens, but the way they treated it you'd have thought he'd been a secret Grand Wizard. It was incredibly fucked up to listen to, and really showed the intellectual rot that NPR has suffered over time.
Holy shit. Because of this piece, I have wasted the whole morning reading the most benign drivel in history. NPR is a glorified gossip column. What is it that these people want? White actors are only allowed to play the villain? White tick tockers are only allowed to perform dances created by other white people? White playwrights are no longer allowed to write fucking plays?!?!?! SHUT THE FUCK UP NPR!!!!!
It is quite telling that NPR have removed their commenting feature.
I nearly fell off my chair laughing at this. For humor value alone it is a worthy contribution to public discourse. "Pinned to the wrestling mat beyond the three-count"? Ha ha! There is truth in Matt's humor that somehow defuses the despair that I otherwise often feel about the censorship and narrative warfare he is describing.
This article brilliantly describes why my wife, who is an otherwise intelligent individual, has morphed into a woke social justice warrior in recent months. Years ago she internalized the canard that NPR is "unbiased" and does "great journalism". So basically she believes everything they tell her with the fervent ardor of a newly converted disciple. The fact that my tax dollars partially fund this media monstrosity is only the icing on this bad-tasting cake. I hope I live long enough to see these grifters defunded completely.
I have said this before, but Minnesota Public Radio (and NPR), which I loved for 20 years, has become exactly this type of partisan viewpoint driven media for nearly a decade and gets worse each year.
There is often zero presentation of values (values which I often personally disagree with) which large swathes of the country hold. Long pieces on immigration policy, where not just the interviewees, but the NPR "journalists" assume that the only criteria considered for whether someone should be accepted (and if at all possible rapidly naturalized) into the US is "will they be better off than where they were living before?".
The very concept that any other consideration should be on the table, or that the law itself should be followed is at best totally ignored. When not ignored, such values/thoughts are treated as ipso facto evidence of extreme racism and white supremacy. It is a ridiculous joke of a presentation, absolutely just as biased as Ben Shapiro, and has driven many left-centrists like myself to treat it with the same disdain we do Fox News.
When the riots were very serious in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, and random cars of people were showing up at liquor stores and pharmacies with guns at 4pm on a weekday with police response measured in hours, you could turn on Minnesota Public Radio, and the entire discussion was on the main "peaceful march" surrounded by journalists and hundreds of police. That and regular programming like "Texas Poetry Hour".
Large swathes of time where you would have had zero idea listening to what had been a great local news station, where 90% of the staff is based in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, that anything was amiss from a public safety standpoint. It was a complete betrayal of its mission in the service of a political project, one which would have made Pravda proud.
What do we get instead of news? Instead what we get is daily racism update. Housing prices up? Article about how this is all about racism and differentially impacts minorities. Housing prices down? Article about how this is all about racism and differentially impacts minorities. Does either article provide much in the way of actual research or figures to back up this position? No. Weather unseasonably hot? Racism! Weather unseasonably cold Racism!
This sounds like a joke but it is not. Typically they latch on to some single datapoint, might even be a datapoint that this is 8.94% bad for white people and 9.02% bad for black people. They also often don't even consider if some other piece of data or way of framing the problem would show an actual benefit for minorities. That isn't part of the mission, ideology is their mission.
Conveying reality isn't the mission anymore...it is sad, at times I almost get emotional about it.