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Originally posted by whozit:
Geez, what's the point of posting anything here anymore, the only posts people reply to have over 1,000 replies. Good riddance.

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"An Open-Minded Spirit No Longer Exists Within NPR" - NPR Veteran Excoriates Outlet Over Hunter, Russiagate Activism or ...

I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

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Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.

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.

Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.

When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.

Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.

The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.

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Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”

Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”

When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.

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to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization.

You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America.

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the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.

“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
OTOH posts get a lot more views than replies. Perhaps there is an audience of lurkers who don't want to get caught in flame wars.

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Originally posted by whozit:
Geez, what's the point of posting anything here anymore, the only posts people reply to have over 1,000 replies. Good riddance.

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Regardless of the troubling trends in American journalism, we should all recognize the importance of a free, fair and functioning press. The current situation is alarming news for our Republic, which assumes a well-informed public that can sustain our system of government and way of life. By supporting the next generation of fair-minded journalists and bringing traditional journalistic values back into newsrooms, we can restore balance to this critical American institution – and save a future Uri Berliner from needing to write a similar tell-all

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Regardless of the troubling trends in American journalism, we should all recognize the importance of a free, fair and functioning press. The current situation is alarming news for our Republic, which assumes a well-informed public that can sustain our system of government and way of life. By supporting the next generation of fair-minded journalists and bringing traditional journalistic values back into newsrooms, we can restore balance to this critical American institution – and save a future Uri Berliner from needing to write a similar tell-all

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
All I've got to say about AIDS is that it was blown extremely out of proportion if it is real and it terrorized an entire generation out of having sex with the constant propaganda shown to them on TV, even during Saturday morning cartoons along the anti-drug PSAs. (Specifically, Generation X)

Maybe it WAS a big thing in California. As you know, I'm from the Midwest. I have not only never known anybody who had AIDS, but I've never known anybody who has known anybody who had AIDS.

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Instead Of Introspection, NPR Suspends Veteran Journalist Who Called Out Partisan Trainwreck

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
"This Person Is A Crazy Racist": New NPR CEO Exposed As Woke Activist

Last week, veteran NPR reporter Uri Berliner - a longtime 'Subaru driving' lefty who was raised by a 'lesbian peace activist mother' - wrote a scathing report accusing the network of overwhelming bias.

Introspection was the last thing on NPR's mind, however, as new CEO Katherine Maher chastised Berliner as "profoundly disrespectful, hateful, and demeaning" to his colleagues for calling out political bias.

As Jonathan Turley notes:

In a memo Friday, Maher told the staff that Berliner attacked not only “the quality of our editorial process and the integrity of our journalists” but “our people on the basis of who we are.”

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Maher’s response was hardly surprising. She was a controversial hire at NPR. Many had hoped that NPR would seek a CEO who could steer the company away from its partisan and activistic trend. The prospect could have brought moderates and conservatives back into NPR’s listening audience. Maher, however, was part of that trend.

This should come as no surprise given Maher's history as a complete lunatic who spews woke diatribes on X - calling herself "someone with cis white mobility privilege" and other nonsense.

In response to journalist Chris Rufo pointing this out, Elon Musk replied that she's a "crazy racist!"

Maher also says that "America is addicted to white supremacy," which is the "real issue."

She also excused looters, and even slammed Hillary Clinton for correctly gendering individuals.

What's the answer? Donald Trump suggests defunding them.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/person-crazy-racist-new-npr-ceo-ex
posed-woke-activist

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Not that NPR means much to many people here, but IMHO since reality doesn't adhere to a narrative, if you're aiming to understand the world you will in all probability land on both sides of whatever narrative divde exists. That is, you will probably piss off people on both sides of whatever divide exists, especially in a polarized society where people have chosen sides and aren't thinking, they're primed to get angry.

I wonder if there's a place in today's society for reporters like that, or if respect for understanding is too long gone.

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