Non-gender recommendation:
Recently, I heard someone reminisce about the good ole days of NPR, the pleasure of the driveway moments, or standing in the kitchen, absorbed in the stories wafting from the radio, and how much he missed that experience. So many people related to his lament. There are days when I can barely listen to the smarm and the bias—and yet, it’s often still droning in the background.
That was the case when I heard author Mitch Albom on NPR’s Fresh Air this week. It was droning, but then I stopped chopping onions and actually listened to him describe his work with Haitian orphanages. Shocking, depressing, harrowing, a little uplifting—and a reminder that anything I’m complaining about it is a privilege.
What are your non-gender recommendations this week?
News:
The media has spent a lot of time talking about, well, the media—specifically, Bari Weiss’s elevation to head of CBS News. My personal take on the outcry over her ascendance is that it’s a distraction from the much larger issue: that President Trump’s billionaire buddy Larry Ellison is at the helm of the entire company. I don’t deny that Weiss and The Free Press, for which I’ve written, have biases. But I’m not in denial that the mainstream media spent the last decade veering hard to the left. The hope is that pulling it back rightward lands it somewhere in the middle, where it can cast a skeptical eye on all sides. But who knows? I wonder if NBC is following CBS to the center, as they are shuttering that paragon of unbiased journalism, NBC Out, which produces “unique content about, and of interest to, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.”
Speaking of smarm…John Oliver did one of his performative outrage segments on Weiss’s ascent, focusing on some of FP’s slip-ups. Oliver highlighted clinic whistleblower Jamie Reed’s Free Press essay, which contributed to the closing of the Washington University pediatric gender clinic, and noted that Reed might have gotten a couple of details wrong, and that subsequent investigations didn’t turn up a trail of harmed patients, as she asserted.