Hypocrisy Now!

More on NPR's inability to apply a critical lens to itself

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Last week, WNYC—America’s most listened-to public radio station—spoke with lefty journalist Amy Goodman, the subject of the new documentary, “Steal This Story, Please!” I haven’t seen the movie, but I did listen to Goodman discuss her career, her show Democracy Now! (which airs on some NPR stations, among other outlets), and the state of journalism on the midday show All of It.

Many of the sentiments she espoused, I agreed with. “I personally think you’re waving the American flag when you express dissent,” she said. “I think dissent is what will save us.”

She used that language several more times.

I am an advocate for independent media. It is absolutely critical to be a sanctuary for dissent. I think dissent will save us. Independent media is the oxygen of a Democratic society. As we see these corporate newsrooms being devastated, the legacy media being sliced and diced, Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, cutting a third of the newsroom, we have to support independent media brought to us by the listeners, the viewers, the readers who are really citizens, citizens of the world craving authentic voices. This is the kind of media that will save us.

Oddly, she doesn’t mention publications like this one, BROADview, which lives on the premier independent platform (and charges writers plenty for it), Substack. Or that many of us who made our living writing for the media retreated here because not only legacy media but the supposedly independent outlets, like Democracy Now!, wouldn’t allow dissent on the gender issue.

Here’s a sampling of Democracy Now! stories:

Each of these stories is carefully crafted to go deeper than traditional media, to push beyond the left/right framing and consult dissenting liberals to show us that, for instance, “banning trans women” actually means allowing men who identify as women to compete—as long as they do so in their sex, not their identity, category. No one is banned!

Oh wait, sorry, no, that’s what you get on Substack, not mainstream, liberal, or left media.

It pains me that many old school lefties are still unaware that they’re framing injustices against men as what could (and dare I say should) be framed as injustices against women; they do not realize that the sly switch from sex to gender identity upends many of their long-held cherished causes and beliefs.

What I have wanted in the five-plus years since I’ve been fully public with what I’ve learned—in the hopes that others would learn it, too—is to be allowed to dissent. I want those who see the issue differently to be considered, and not just labeled bigot or transphobe. It turned out that we in the dissenting camp also had science on our side, which should have shifted the entire framing of the conversation.

It didn’t.

After WNYC star journalist Brian Lehrer’s recent disastrous conversation with Michael Shermer, he pivoted slightly to acknowledge some dissent and concerns about the science of gender-affirming care. Or rather, he brought on someone to explain why we shouldn’t listen to the dissent or be concerned. Who? Mr. Jack Turban, the doctor whose own studies were deemed so low-quality that they couldn’t determine whether gender medical interventions will hurt or help young people.

Turban said on the program that “there are over 20 studies in this area. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, but they all point in the same direction that these kids are getting better with treatment.”

They don’t, though. That’s what it means to have weak evidence. They point in no direction. Lehrer failed to point out that it was Turban’s own incredibly weak evidence, based on anonymous surveys, that was rated weak.

Yesterday, Lehrer spoke with Frederick S. Barrett, director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, about psychedelics, after Trump released an Executive Order to speed up research on them. (I will give Trump credit where it’s due: this seems like a good thing.) They talked about the effectiveness of the psychedelic ibogaine, which some people claim can be a silver bullet of sorts.

“Is that real science or is that podcaster chatter?” Lehrer asked.

Barrett admitted that the research is based on low-quality surveys and reviews, and that “none of this to date has been done within a controlled experimental context.” Why? It’s too risky. It has a known cardiotoxicity that can kill people.

I couldn’t help but think of the stories I’ve heard of young people committing suicide after transition—including the two in the rare long-term research we have in this country, who were simply excised from the data. We need to follow up with all medically transitioned young people because we may discover that they have the same high rate of suicidality and completed suicide as the adults did. It was the ineffectiveness of transition in adults that inspired the Dutch to intervene earlier. No one is finding out if it worked.

If dissent is what will save us, these media outlets need to allow dissident voices to raise these important points. Democracy, not hypocrisy, now.