Excellent essay, Lisa. But I wouldn't hold my breath for change.
NPR has been totally captured by trans ideology. I know, because I used to work there and because I'm still in touch with people there. The NPR Science Desk, which used to actually believe in and report on science, is now a cultural/political cheerleader. There's no getting through to them.
Lucky for me, I left before the DEI shit-show and trans psychosis took over the newsroom. It was just starting when I was there, but it wasn't yet all-encompassing. But I could see the writing on the wall.
I wrote about it here:
Cowardice On Parade: NPR, NYT, WaPo, and the “Free” Press
Yeah, I don’t think that’s likely to happen. People there are afraid to speak up. One of them, when asked, actually said he had an opinion but couldn’t reveal it because he still has two kids to put through school.
!!!!!
If that doesn’t indicate the extent of ideological capture and oppressive Orwellian “rightthink” then I don’t know what does.
What is tragic is that the woke far left has undermined the credibility of so many institutions and organizations. They are culpable for driving people into the arms of the right, unendingly counter productive. The Democratic party being a prime example and completely clueless. The question becomes why would you trust the judgement of someone who can not comprehend something as basic as this? Why trust them at all?
I know someone who used to be a public radio science reporter in NYC and SF and now produces a well known podcast. She responded to me personally when I shared a link to Affirmation Generation and described my personal experience on gender ideology and seemed to be on my side. But I am pretty sure she wouldn't say anything publically.
I come at this issue from the leftish side of the political spectrum, a 🇨🇦 atheist who is both proud of my support for organized labour (but not union leadership excess) & the power of collective action (but not mob rule), as well as the strongly held belief that biggish government is key to unlocking the potential of all citizens & residents.
But I also believe that left identitarianism *is* authoritarianism just as much as Trumpism is, and sex matters in many (though not all) areas of society, policy & law.
For which I am often tarred as a hateful right wing bigot.
[Biological facts & sociological data are not political, of course]
As such, while our views on many topics may diverge, our views on many topics seem to align.
And thus your post resonates deeply with me: I’ve all but turned my back on both PBS & NPR, I regularly fume at the coverage on the CBC (though it’s French counterpart, Radio-Canada, is a less captured source of current affairs information), and I have only recently begun to open back up to the Beeb.
All because what matters to me is the news, the facts as known & as they evolve, the (as best as possible) unbiased reporting through which I can inform my own opinions & decisions.
This loss of trust in publicly-funded or -subsidized media is heartbreaking, and also is an own goal for those of us who generally resist the right-populist politics of some of our countrymen & women.
When once “liberalism” espoused Englightenment values of reason & the pursuit of truth, it now often attempts to pass off a mirror version of left-populism as received truth of its own.
And we are all worse off for that, in my opinion, because corporately-owned outlets will almost invariably skew right given the necessarily capitalist nature of for-profit media, and an alternative that is grounded in facts and truth-seeking is critical in support of those who capitalism & corporate media narratives tend to leave behind and/or ignore.
So I join you in hoping that your $500M+ (USD) and our $1B+ (CAD) can be put to better use in the service of informing our compatriots coast to coast (to coast).
Not via a DOGE-like purge, but through a thoughtful, evidence- and standards-based approach which separates those who wish to practice the societally invaluable role of actual journalism from those who wish to set viewpoints for their listeners.
We’ll ALL be better off for such an endeavour — including those journalists who may bristle at the editorial constraints they face under capitalist ownership.
After all, Peace, Order & Good Government — the 🇨🇦 foundation upon which the 🇺🇸 dream of Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness can truly flourish for the greatest number of your & our people — demands and relies upon a well-informed electorate.
Nolan Investigates is unfortunately not representative. BBC reporters have been falling over themselves to center men’s feelings in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.
Yep, good description of why I stopped supporting NPR some years ago.
One little quibble: while the concept of “queer animals” is indeed inane, it is true that banana slugs are hermaphrodites (i.e., the same individual has male and female reproductive organs). Of course, this has nothing to do with “trans” or “gender” (and in fact reinforces the sex binary: one could say that these slugs are both male AND female simultaneously, not some intermediate sex).
From what I know about how, like gravity in physics, the economic law of supply and demand provides the lion's share of discipline to those who are selling something, wider awareness of publicly-funded journalism's decadence and corruption was inevitable once technological innovations made it less easy to hide. Although I've never taken an economics class, I've spent a fair number of decades reading about its theories and principles as a layperson. From my perspective, the most fascinating aspect of it is how a mostly free "homo economicus" tends to find a way to eventually get what he or she wants, despite the best efforts of authoritarian social engineers and their micromanaging bureaucrats.
Spend some time reading about the clients of Institute for Justice -- ij.org -- or perhaps historian David Beito's work on how "Great Society" programs crowded out Mutual Aid Societies, and you'll get an appreciation for the long-term damage to communities of Americans caused by the distorting effects of government subsidies and welfare programs. It's a story very similar to any environmentalist's lament over how human industrial efforts decimate the diversity of plant and animal life in some irreplaceable wonder of nature and destroy the delicate balance and harmony that once was.) As many of us who follow and support Lisa's work know well, a great many of mankind's efforts to escape the "nasty, brutish and short" aspects of human life (like the healthcare industrial complex that modern medicine has metastasized into) end up delivering more unintended consequences than the physical ease and happiness they were designed to provide.
But sooner or later communities re-group and find work-arounds (witness the Indie movements in Music and Film, and what online transactions have done to the U.S. Postal Service).
The story of how the vast majority of our fabled "Fourth Estate" got so corrupt and dysfunctional, while remaining (technically) private and presumably still subject to Schumpeter's rule of "creative destruction," is complex and ranges over many decades. Personally, I suspect a lot of the decline stems from the stranglehold that government has had on education at all levels in this country, which has reduced the quality of most of it to that of "government cheese." If your commoners are unable to read proficiently, they won't be interested in high-quality sources of information. And if elites who replace the staff of the institutions with the best standards increasingly arrive brainwashed by a university system hostile to humble intellectual inquiry, well . . . there's your big unintended consequence that results from subsidizing the education of the citizens upon whom a democracy relies. Had Thomas Jefferson lived to see today, I wonder if he might have added some caveats to his bold assertions that education should be universal and free at basic levels, and funded by taxpayers. If the consumers don't directly pay for the product, they become the product. Big tech's social media "opiate for the masses" has demonstrated that.
Fortunately, the unavoidable mechanisms of basic economics retake territory in human relational networks, just as relentlessly and speedily (from an evolutionary perspective) as Mother Nature retakes a post-apocalyptic city with vegetation and strange new varieties of beast (a process depicted in our most perceptive works of speculative fiction). If a large enough swath of the citizenry come to realize that the establishment press has been blowing smoke up our collective asses, it becomes a market for something better and more trustworthy. That's a demand that this "new media" gradually (via incremental successes and instructive failures) is evolving to meet.
I recently listened to an interview with documentarian, Michael Nayna, which includes an account of how Substack began. It provides a glimpse into how the dinosaurs of the media world are getting out-competed by all these fast-moving and breeding little rodent-like warm blooded creatures. (see https://youtu.be/pjWq3NeKzD0?si=I2JmCNCd6aPXfmaZ ). It's a difficult process for us temporally-challenged mere mortals to perceive while we're in the thick of it, but I think -- Trump or no Trump -- that the writing was always on the wall for corporate parasites like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. No doubt it and other such clueless institutions will continue to flood the system with their "flat earth" dogma and "cargo cult" scientism for a while longer. But I think a demand for the truth will always nourish the upstarts into eventual dominance because curiosity is still instinctual even in the breasts of human beings who are reared in the most flawed of societies; and that yearning for something better will fuel further entrepreneurial efforts to displace the dinosaurs with something beautiful and good.
dang it . . . I can't write short things . . . Here's second half of my post that won't display fully above:
The story of how the vast majority of our fabled "Fourth Estate" got so corrupt and dysfunctional, while remaining (technically) private and presumably still subject to Schumpeter's rule of "creative destruction," is complex and ranges over many decades. Personally, I suspect a lot of the decline stems from the stranglehold that government has had on education at all levels in this country, which has reduced the quality of most of it to that of "government cheese." If your commoners are unable to read proficiently, they won't be interested in high-quality sources of information. And if elites who replace the staff of the institutions with the best standards increasingly arrive brainwashed by a university system hostile to humble intellectual inquiry, well . . . there's your big unintended consequence that results from subsidizing the education of the citizens upon whom a democracy relies. Had Thomas Jefferson lived to see today, I wonder if he might have added some caveats to his bold assertions that education should be universal and free at basic levels, and funded by taxpayers. If the consumers don't directly pay for the product, they become the product. Big tech's social media "opiate for the masses" has demonstrated that.
Fortunately, the unavoidable mechanisms of basic economics retake territory in human relational networks, just as relentlessly and speedily (from an evolutionary perspective) as Mother Nature retakes a post-apocalyptic city with vegetation and strange new varieties of beast (a process depicted in our most perceptive works of speculative fiction). If a large enough swath of the citizenry come to realize that the establishment press has been blowing smoke up our collective asses, it becomes a market for something better and more trustworthy. That's a demand that this "new media" gradually (via incremental successes and instructive failures) is evolving to meet.
I recently listened to an interview with documentarian, Michael Nayna, which includes an account of how Substack began. It provides a glimpse into how the dinosaurs of the media world are getting out-competed by all these fast-moving and breeding little rodent-like warm blooded creatures. (see https://youtu.be/pjWq3NeKzD0?si=I2JmCNCd6aPXfmaZ ). It's a difficult process for us temporally-challenged mere mortals to perceive while we're in the thick of it, but I think -- Trump or no Trump -- that the writing was always on the wall for corporate parasites like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. No doubt it and other such clueless institutions will continue to flood the system with their "flat earth" dogma and "cargo cult" scientism for a while longer. But I think a demand for the truth will always nourish the upstarts into eventual dominance because curiosity is still instinctual even in the breasts of human beings who are reared in the most flawed of societies; and that yearning for something better will fuel further entrepreneurial efforts to displace the dinosaurs with something beautiful and good.
Thanks for this. I still watch the PBS Newshour but I find myself talking back to the anchors and guests especially on trans issues. They show incredible bias. I write them but always with the thought that it won’t get read, sigh.
We are still faithful NPR listeners though every time I hear the words "pregnant people" I realize how far I've drifted from the fold. The sound of Linda Wertheimer and Robert Siegel has been replaced by the sound of women giggling and gushing over some pop cultural moment.
I think also not only voices, what is true is not always what everyone thinks!
I think listening to the diversity of criticisms and trying to compare them against the truth may be key.
The "don't listen to this person's arguments, they are right wing" should be as ignored as I want "don't listen to this person, they're a never Trumper " to be.
What are they saying and which parts need verification before you believe them?
With many voices you can find out how people have tested claims and see which tests hold up. That helps!
I am still surprised at the lack of critical thinking in response to the attempt to focus on the authors of the HHS report, for instance. Many reporters are uncritically quoting people saying things like: if the report does this, it means that. The articles don't even say, well, the report does or doesn't do that! Or so and so says this is like conversion therapy, let's talk about conversion therapy....
Uncritically repeating talking point like gossip magazines....
Lisa Selin Davis is right to say that media leadership need to see themselves as opinion and culture reporters not advocates. But, they are not going to do that if their boards hire people who say “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction” from “getting things done.” Harold Bloom said something to the effect that the culture war is already lost because the professors of the "culture of resentment" had trained the next generation of graduate students. Both values and personnel have to change if there is to be an effective alternative to mere defunding.
The public has the right to decide how its money is spent in the edification of its citizens. That goes for private higher ed who aren't going the Hillsdale College route and refusing all public support. However, legislators also have to avoid specifying or prohibiting speech, the problem Ron DeSantis had with the Stop Woke Act. Selection of leadership, also employed by DeSantis, can be abused but at least it's more indirect and more importantly leaves specifics to expert developers of curriculum and programming.
Thanks for link to Uri Berliner piece, he seems to agree with you that there might be a way back for public radio news and does a great job tracking the significant events that happened since Trump was first elected and how NPR responded in a way that matches how many other organizations responded
Regarding Maher I did follow your link to her quote and saw it reads , “seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction, that's getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
I have a different take on that because it fits with the stance I take in couples therapy that we shouldn’t begin with the goal of proving whose truth is right or wrong because it promotes polarization and gets in the way of finding common ground through honoring different perspectives and the life experiences that inform our own biases—I think this is what Bill Doherty who is also a couples therapist would say too in promoting listening to each other and finding overlap in our values in the Braver Angels way
So it may be that NPR simply needs to bring in more dissenting voices and hold more civil dialogues in which people actually listen to each other with respect and I don’t see why this can’t happen like it has in alternative media, but Berliner’s point about the separate identity group diktats that control news within NPR would have to be challenged as a systemic problem and that’s pretty tough to do, there is a lack of self awareness among Dems that identity politics which was started in good faith caring about diversity and inclusion is fine but that kind of inclusivity needs to coexist now with ideological diversity and I believe they can, it would create a check against bias that prevents not only good policy making at large but prevents the news from being “frictionless” (Berliner’s term) and therefore the worst thing for their business model, boring 🥱
I’m thinking about the process behind the scenes that would help fix the organization’s culture so that the kind of journalism you want can be created
I’m not an organizational psychologist who consults with businesses but I’m sure they would have to gain trust that you’re not trying to get rid of diversity and inclusivity around personal identities but counterbalancing that with inclusivity of ideas and facts that need not be in conflict with caring about all marginalized groups
No one will be able to reform NPR/PBS, because the workers there are completely Woke. If you have fallen away from progressivism/political liberalism, the bias at NPR is astonishing. In particular, the "default liberal/progressive viewpoint" comes out in trannie propaganda and in illegals propaganda. The chief immigration reporter is Laura Lopez, whose parents are illegals. She is so obviously biased, but like I say, this is the "default viewpoint". Tranniedumb is another area in which the "default viewpoint" that trannies are oppressed, are marginalized, are victims, is repeated over and over.
The NPR chief says "We have independence of opinion at NPR". What she DOES NOT SAY is that everyone there is a liberal, so it doesn't matter if they are "free to express" the same tired cliched progressive boilerplate bullshit. I'm pulling for defunding. I've supported NPR/PBS for 40 years, but no more.
As I go through the encyclopedic document on pediatric medical transition published by the HHS, I am struck by the neutral, accurate language. I don't listen to NPR or watch PBS any more, so I'm not aware whether they're covering it at all. I'm publishing short analyses with additional information, such as data from the Swedish Study of Death Records (Dhejne, et al, Karolinska Inst. 2011) which found the suicide rate in trans identifying patients in the years and decades after sex trait modification surgery skyrocketed. These researchers were so surprised to find the natal female suicide rate to be 40 times the rate in age matched controls that they hid this datum by combining it with the natal males to come up with 19 times higher than both sex controls. Dr. Stephen B. Levine, formerly affirming psychiatrist, brought this out in his expert witness testimony before the Florida Board of Health a couple of years ago. I wait for this to be reported on, for an interview of this Levine, but I'm not holding my breath. Today's blog post at uteheggen.substack.com (always free) is the chapter HHS put out on Sweden and Finland reversing course, prioritizing therapy for trauma over risky medical interventions.
NPR and PBS are catering to the people that donate. Most of their funding comes from donations. NPR apparently only gets 1% of their funding from the federal government.
Bottom line, they are not going to piss off their customer based like Bezo's did with the Post. For Bezo's the Post is a hobby. For NPR and their employees, its their meal ticket.
Ultimately, they'll be fine without government funding. In fact it will probably increase the donations from the listeners and viewers who want to use it as their cause de jure agains Trump.
We know the sound of NPR's full orchestra, recorded through the finest equipment money can buy. Time for them to strip down to an acoustic trio and record a better demo tape.
Great article. Excellent quote from Uri Berliner - NPR "lost America's trust" by representing "the distilled world view of a very small segment of the U.S. population."
Excellent essay, Lisa. But I wouldn't hold my breath for change.
NPR has been totally captured by trans ideology. I know, because I used to work there and because I'm still in touch with people there. The NPR Science Desk, which used to actually believe in and report on science, is now a cultural/political cheerleader. There's no getting through to them.
Lucky for me, I left before the DEI shit-show and trans psychosis took over the newsroom. It was just starting when I was there, but it wasn't yet all-encompassing. But I could see the writing on the wall.
I wrote about it here:
Cowardice On Parade: NPR, NYT, WaPo, and the “Free” Press
https://lisasimeone.substack.com/p/cowardice-on-parade-npr-nyt-wapo
I would love to get someone who's still there and who quietly objects to talk about it...
Yeah, I don’t think that’s likely to happen. People there are afraid to speak up. One of them, when asked, actually said he had an opinion but couldn’t reveal it because he still has two kids to put through school.
!!!!!
If that doesn’t indicate the extent of ideological capture and oppressive Orwellian “rightthink” then I don’t know what does.
What is tragic is that the woke far left has undermined the credibility of so many institutions and organizations. They are culpable for driving people into the arms of the right, unendingly counter productive. The Democratic party being a prime example and completely clueless. The question becomes why would you trust the judgement of someone who can not comprehend something as basic as this? Why trust them at all?
This is something, Stosh, that I'm trying to get across to my fellow liberals. I try every day.
I know someone who used to be a public radio science reporter in NYC and SF and now produces a well known podcast. She responded to me personally when I shared a link to Affirmation Generation and described my personal experience on gender ideology and seemed to be on my side. But I am pretty sure she wouldn't say anything publically.
Thank you for your thoughtful post!
I come at this issue from the leftish side of the political spectrum, a 🇨🇦 atheist who is both proud of my support for organized labour (but not union leadership excess) & the power of collective action (but not mob rule), as well as the strongly held belief that biggish government is key to unlocking the potential of all citizens & residents.
But I also believe that left identitarianism *is* authoritarianism just as much as Trumpism is, and sex matters in many (though not all) areas of society, policy & law.
For which I am often tarred as a hateful right wing bigot.
[Biological facts & sociological data are not political, of course]
As such, while our views on many topics may diverge, our views on many topics seem to align.
And thus your post resonates deeply with me: I’ve all but turned my back on both PBS & NPR, I regularly fume at the coverage on the CBC (though it’s French counterpart, Radio-Canada, is a less captured source of current affairs information), and I have only recently begun to open back up to the Beeb.
All because what matters to me is the news, the facts as known & as they evolve, the (as best as possible) unbiased reporting through which I can inform my own opinions & decisions.
This loss of trust in publicly-funded or -subsidized media is heartbreaking, and also is an own goal for those of us who generally resist the right-populist politics of some of our countrymen & women.
When once “liberalism” espoused Englightenment values of reason & the pursuit of truth, it now often attempts to pass off a mirror version of left-populism as received truth of its own.
And we are all worse off for that, in my opinion, because corporately-owned outlets will almost invariably skew right given the necessarily capitalist nature of for-profit media, and an alternative that is grounded in facts and truth-seeking is critical in support of those who capitalism & corporate media narratives tend to leave behind and/or ignore.
So I join you in hoping that your $500M+ (USD) and our $1B+ (CAD) can be put to better use in the service of informing our compatriots coast to coast (to coast).
Not via a DOGE-like purge, but through a thoughtful, evidence- and standards-based approach which separates those who wish to practice the societally invaluable role of actual journalism from those who wish to set viewpoints for their listeners.
We’ll ALL be better off for such an endeavour — including those journalists who may bristle at the editorial constraints they face under capitalist ownership.
After all, Peace, Order & Good Government — the 🇨🇦 foundation upon which the 🇺🇸 dream of Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness can truly flourish for the greatest number of your & our people — demands and relies upon a well-informed electorate.
Also want to add a thank you for the link to Nolan Investigates. I think I may get my news from BBC at least until PBS regains its sanity
Nolan Investigates is unfortunately not representative. BBC reporters have been falling over themselves to center men’s feelings in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.
Yup, I thought so too but glad they are at least willing to have a podcast like this
Great piece, thanks!
Yep, good description of why I stopped supporting NPR some years ago.
One little quibble: while the concept of “queer animals” is indeed inane, it is true that banana slugs are hermaphrodites (i.e., the same individual has male and female reproductive organs). Of course, this has nothing to do with “trans” or “gender” (and in fact reinforces the sex binary: one could say that these slugs are both male AND female simultaneously, not some intermediate sex).
That's right. It's fine to report on clownfish! Just not as a way to say that people can change sex because...we're not clownfish.
This was just broadcast on my local station but I couldn't bring myself to listen. Maybe you or Lisa can and write about it. https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101909798/agustin-fuentes-on-why-sex-is-a-spectrum
From what I know about how, like gravity in physics, the economic law of supply and demand provides the lion's share of discipline to those who are selling something, wider awareness of publicly-funded journalism's decadence and corruption was inevitable once technological innovations made it less easy to hide. Although I've never taken an economics class, I've spent a fair number of decades reading about its theories and principles as a layperson. From my perspective, the most fascinating aspect of it is how a mostly free "homo economicus" tends to find a way to eventually get what he or she wants, despite the best efforts of authoritarian social engineers and their micromanaging bureaucrats.
Spend some time reading about the clients of Institute for Justice -- ij.org -- or perhaps historian David Beito's work on how "Great Society" programs crowded out Mutual Aid Societies, and you'll get an appreciation for the long-term damage to communities of Americans caused by the distorting effects of government subsidies and welfare programs. It's a story very similar to any environmentalist's lament over how human industrial efforts decimate the diversity of plant and animal life in some irreplaceable wonder of nature and destroy the delicate balance and harmony that once was.) As many of us who follow and support Lisa's work know well, a great many of mankind's efforts to escape the "nasty, brutish and short" aspects of human life (like the healthcare industrial complex that modern medicine has metastasized into) end up delivering more unintended consequences than the physical ease and happiness they were designed to provide.
But sooner or later communities re-group and find work-arounds (witness the Indie movements in Music and Film, and what online transactions have done to the U.S. Postal Service).
The story of how the vast majority of our fabled "Fourth Estate" got so corrupt and dysfunctional, while remaining (technically) private and presumably still subject to Schumpeter's rule of "creative destruction," is complex and ranges over many decades. Personally, I suspect a lot of the decline stems from the stranglehold that government has had on education at all levels in this country, which has reduced the quality of most of it to that of "government cheese." If your commoners are unable to read proficiently, they won't be interested in high-quality sources of information. And if elites who replace the staff of the institutions with the best standards increasingly arrive brainwashed by a university system hostile to humble intellectual inquiry, well . . . there's your big unintended consequence that results from subsidizing the education of the citizens upon whom a democracy relies. Had Thomas Jefferson lived to see today, I wonder if he might have added some caveats to his bold assertions that education should be universal and free at basic levels, and funded by taxpayers. If the consumers don't directly pay for the product, they become the product. Big tech's social media "opiate for the masses" has demonstrated that.
Fortunately, the unavoidable mechanisms of basic economics retake territory in human relational networks, just as relentlessly and speedily (from an evolutionary perspective) as Mother Nature retakes a post-apocalyptic city with vegetation and strange new varieties of beast (a process depicted in our most perceptive works of speculative fiction). If a large enough swath of the citizenry come to realize that the establishment press has been blowing smoke up our collective asses, it becomes a market for something better and more trustworthy. That's a demand that this "new media" gradually (via incremental successes and instructive failures) is evolving to meet.
I recently listened to an interview with documentarian, Michael Nayna, which includes an account of how Substack began. It provides a glimpse into how the dinosaurs of the media world are getting out-competed by all these fast-moving and breeding little rodent-like warm blooded creatures. (see https://youtu.be/pjWq3NeKzD0?si=I2JmCNCd6aPXfmaZ ). It's a difficult process for us temporally-challenged mere mortals to perceive while we're in the thick of it, but I think -- Trump or no Trump -- that the writing was always on the wall for corporate parasites like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. No doubt it and other such clueless institutions will continue to flood the system with their "flat earth" dogma and "cargo cult" scientism for a while longer. But I think a demand for the truth will always nourish the upstarts into eventual dominance because curiosity is still instinctual even in the breasts of human beings who are reared in the most flawed of societies; and that yearning for something better will fuel further entrepreneurial efforts to displace the dinosaurs with something beautiful and good.
dang it . . . I can't write short things . . . Here's second half of my post that won't display fully above:
The story of how the vast majority of our fabled "Fourth Estate" got so corrupt and dysfunctional, while remaining (technically) private and presumably still subject to Schumpeter's rule of "creative destruction," is complex and ranges over many decades. Personally, I suspect a lot of the decline stems from the stranglehold that government has had on education at all levels in this country, which has reduced the quality of most of it to that of "government cheese." If your commoners are unable to read proficiently, they won't be interested in high-quality sources of information. And if elites who replace the staff of the institutions with the best standards increasingly arrive brainwashed by a university system hostile to humble intellectual inquiry, well . . . there's your big unintended consequence that results from subsidizing the education of the citizens upon whom a democracy relies. Had Thomas Jefferson lived to see today, I wonder if he might have added some caveats to his bold assertions that education should be universal and free at basic levels, and funded by taxpayers. If the consumers don't directly pay for the product, they become the product. Big tech's social media "opiate for the masses" has demonstrated that.
Fortunately, the unavoidable mechanisms of basic economics retake territory in human relational networks, just as relentlessly and speedily (from an evolutionary perspective) as Mother Nature retakes a post-apocalyptic city with vegetation and strange new varieties of beast (a process depicted in our most perceptive works of speculative fiction). If a large enough swath of the citizenry come to realize that the establishment press has been blowing smoke up our collective asses, it becomes a market for something better and more trustworthy. That's a demand that this "new media" gradually (via incremental successes and instructive failures) is evolving to meet.
I recently listened to an interview with documentarian, Michael Nayna, which includes an account of how Substack began. It provides a glimpse into how the dinosaurs of the media world are getting out-competed by all these fast-moving and breeding little rodent-like warm blooded creatures. (see https://youtu.be/pjWq3NeKzD0?si=I2JmCNCd6aPXfmaZ ). It's a difficult process for us temporally-challenged mere mortals to perceive while we're in the thick of it, but I think -- Trump or no Trump -- that the writing was always on the wall for corporate parasites like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. No doubt it and other such clueless institutions will continue to flood the system with their "flat earth" dogma and "cargo cult" scientism for a while longer. But I think a demand for the truth will always nourish the upstarts into eventual dominance because curiosity is still instinctual even in the breasts of human beings who are reared in the most flawed of societies; and that yearning for something better will fuel further entrepreneurial efforts to displace the dinosaurs with something beautiful and good.
Thanks for this. I still watch the PBS Newshour but I find myself talking back to the anchors and guests especially on trans issues. They show incredible bias. I write them but always with the thought that it won’t get read, sigh.
We are still faithful NPR listeners though every time I hear the words "pregnant people" I realize how far I've drifted from the fold. The sound of Linda Wertheimer and Robert Siegel has been replaced by the sound of women giggling and gushing over some pop cultural moment.
Explains a lot about Wikipedia!
I think also not only voices, what is true is not always what everyone thinks!
I think listening to the diversity of criticisms and trying to compare them against the truth may be key.
The "don't listen to this person's arguments, they are right wing" should be as ignored as I want "don't listen to this person, they're a never Trumper " to be.
What are they saying and which parts need verification before you believe them?
With many voices you can find out how people have tested claims and see which tests hold up. That helps!
I am still surprised at the lack of critical thinking in response to the attempt to focus on the authors of the HHS report, for instance. Many reporters are uncritically quoting people saying things like: if the report does this, it means that. The articles don't even say, well, the report does or doesn't do that! Or so and so says this is like conversion therapy, let's talk about conversion therapy....
Uncritically repeating talking point like gossip magazines....
Lisa Selin Davis is right to say that media leadership need to see themselves as opinion and culture reporters not advocates. But, they are not going to do that if their boards hire people who say “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction” from “getting things done.” Harold Bloom said something to the effect that the culture war is already lost because the professors of the "culture of resentment" had trained the next generation of graduate students. Both values and personnel have to change if there is to be an effective alternative to mere defunding.
The public has the right to decide how its money is spent in the edification of its citizens. That goes for private higher ed who aren't going the Hillsdale College route and refusing all public support. However, legislators also have to avoid specifying or prohibiting speech, the problem Ron DeSantis had with the Stop Woke Act. Selection of leadership, also employed by DeSantis, can be abused but at least it's more indirect and more importantly leaves specifics to expert developers of curriculum and programming.
Thanks for link to Uri Berliner piece, he seems to agree with you that there might be a way back for public radio news and does a great job tracking the significant events that happened since Trump was first elected and how NPR responded in a way that matches how many other organizations responded
Regarding Maher I did follow your link to her quote and saw it reads , “seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction, that's getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
I have a different take on that because it fits with the stance I take in couples therapy that we shouldn’t begin with the goal of proving whose truth is right or wrong because it promotes polarization and gets in the way of finding common ground through honoring different perspectives and the life experiences that inform our own biases—I think this is what Bill Doherty who is also a couples therapist would say too in promoting listening to each other and finding overlap in our values in the Braver Angels way
So it may be that NPR simply needs to bring in more dissenting voices and hold more civil dialogues in which people actually listen to each other with respect and I don’t see why this can’t happen like it has in alternative media, but Berliner’s point about the separate identity group diktats that control news within NPR would have to be challenged as a systemic problem and that’s pretty tough to do, there is a lack of self awareness among Dems that identity politics which was started in good faith caring about diversity and inclusion is fine but that kind of inclusivity needs to coexist now with ideological diversity and I believe they can, it would create a check against bias that prevents not only good policy making at large but prevents the news from being “frictionless” (Berliner’s term) and therefore the worst thing for their business model, boring 🥱
Thanks for the context. I think it can make sense in plenty of arenas...just not journalism!
I’m thinking about the process behind the scenes that would help fix the organization’s culture so that the kind of journalism you want can be created
I’m not an organizational psychologist who consults with businesses but I’m sure they would have to gain trust that you’re not trying to get rid of diversity and inclusivity around personal identities but counterbalancing that with inclusivity of ideas and facts that need not be in conflict with caring about all marginalized groups
No one will be able to reform NPR/PBS, because the workers there are completely Woke. If you have fallen away from progressivism/political liberalism, the bias at NPR is astonishing. In particular, the "default liberal/progressive viewpoint" comes out in trannie propaganda and in illegals propaganda. The chief immigration reporter is Laura Lopez, whose parents are illegals. She is so obviously biased, but like I say, this is the "default viewpoint". Tranniedumb is another area in which the "default viewpoint" that trannies are oppressed, are marginalized, are victims, is repeated over and over.
The NPR chief says "We have independence of opinion at NPR". What she DOES NOT SAY is that everyone there is a liberal, so it doesn't matter if they are "free to express" the same tired cliched progressive boilerplate bullshit. I'm pulling for defunding. I've supported NPR/PBS for 40 years, but no more.
As I go through the encyclopedic document on pediatric medical transition published by the HHS, I am struck by the neutral, accurate language. I don't listen to NPR or watch PBS any more, so I'm not aware whether they're covering it at all. I'm publishing short analyses with additional information, such as data from the Swedish Study of Death Records (Dhejne, et al, Karolinska Inst. 2011) which found the suicide rate in trans identifying patients in the years and decades after sex trait modification surgery skyrocketed. These researchers were so surprised to find the natal female suicide rate to be 40 times the rate in age matched controls that they hid this datum by combining it with the natal males to come up with 19 times higher than both sex controls. Dr. Stephen B. Levine, formerly affirming psychiatrist, brought this out in his expert witness testimony before the Florida Board of Health a couple of years ago. I wait for this to be reported on, for an interview of this Levine, but I'm not holding my breath. Today's blog post at uteheggen.substack.com (always free) is the chapter HHS put out on Sweden and Finland reversing course, prioritizing therapy for trauma over risky medical interventions.
Very good summary.
NPR and PBS are catering to the people that donate. Most of their funding comes from donations. NPR apparently only gets 1% of their funding from the federal government.
Bottom line, they are not going to piss off their customer based like Bezo's did with the Post. For Bezo's the Post is a hobby. For NPR and their employees, its their meal ticket.
Ultimately, they'll be fine without government funding. In fact it will probably increase the donations from the listeners and viewers who want to use it as their cause de jure agains Trump.
We know the sound of NPR's full orchestra, recorded through the finest equipment money can buy. Time for them to strip down to an acoustic trio and record a better demo tape.
Great article. Excellent quote from Uri Berliner - NPR "lost America's trust" by representing "the distilled world view of a very small segment of the U.S. population."