Orwell Watch: NPR and the Death of Fairness
A story about facts and decency is quickly reduced to another partisan bias tale.
Earlier this week on The Free Press, Uri Berliner dropped a bomb on the public media world with “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” As discussed on the new America This Week, the longtime senior editor described how NPR fumbled three stories: Covid, the Hunter Biden laptop affair, and the Trump-Russia scandal. Regarding the latter:
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… What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection.
Berliner’s piece was immediately swallowed, mangled, and regurgitated as new propaganda. CNN media writer Oliver Darcy wrote “NPR faces right-wing revolt and calls for defunding after editor claims left-wing bias,” establishing the format that this was not about factual impropriety, but about a “right-wing revolt” against claimed “left-wing bias.” The New York Times did much the same thing, saying “NPR is in Turmoil After It is Accused of Left-Wing Bias,” adding that Berliner’s piece generated “firestorm… especially among conservatives.” On cue, human error-vane Jonathan Chait chimed in to insist “The Media Did Not Make Up Trump’s Russia Scandal.”
But this wasn’t about “bias.” It was about ethics, or a lack of them. But this has been going on for so long, most people have forgotten what ethics look like. Audiences have been trained to think that a station or person that doesn’t make overtly political coverage decisions is just hiding its real biases, which must be either right-wing, corrupt, or both. So someone like Berliner, when he talks about feeling “obliged” to cover even Donald Trump fairly, is actually just concealing a form of unfairness, or inspiring another tribe of unfair actors. Fair equals unfair. It’s impressive propaganda, actually. His story brought back bad memories:
Seven years ago, I thought Donald Trump’s election was the most absorbing political drama I’d seen. I was 46 when he was sworn in and as excited as I’d been as a writer. I’d hit the bestseller list with Insane Clown President, a campaign diary that was not even a book until publishers threw some things together after Trump won. What if I tried to write a coherent story about this character? Here was a deluxe version of Crazy Eddie Antar who said things like “I love war” and “torture works,” and who’d once sold Trump Steak gift cards for $1,037 in an “impressive full-color presentation folder.” Who knew what handing this person keys to the Treasury and Pentagon would look like? I imagined Chuck Grassley seeing the first bill for an $80 billion combat necktie. This would be great material automatically.
I arranged to spend Trump’s presidency covering his White House as a salacious character drama for Rolling Stone. One episode into the monthly series, the story took a turn, in the form of the Russia scandal. As I saw it there were only two possibilities, both very difficult to imagine being true. One was the biggest political espionage story ever: a compromised American president! The other was the biggest intelligence smear/lie ever. Again, hard to believe, but it had to be one or the other, and either would be a massive, all-time scandal.
In Washington I watched from the Senate gallery as Amy Klobuchar argued Democrats must commit to “ensuring that Russia’s hacking invasions and blackmail do not go unchecked.” It sounded off. I had no choice but to wonder if Trump’s accusers were turning themselves into a bigger story than Trump. Was this stuff true? Even after a first “Trump The Destroyer” feature went to print, the “blackmail” line made me nervous. I made a few phone calls about Christopher Steele, apparent source of the blackmail language. The former spy had testified in a British hearing that he hadn’t intended that they be “republished to the world at large.” By then, the aforementioned Schiff made news by reading most of the reports on the floor of congress. I contacted his office to ask about confirmation. As noted before, a staffer sent this:
The Committee hopes to speak with Mr. Steele in order to help substantiate or refute each of the allegations contained in the dossier.
They hadn’t checked. It was now definite something was up. As Berliner points out, Schiff alluded to evidence, but whenever you lifted the cup, there’d be no ball there. Still, even this was interesting. In my case I had no problem switching focus, naively thinking my magazine might feel the same. After all, they’d encouraged me to go from cheering Barack Obama’s election in 2008 to writing an 8,000-word exposé on his Citigroup bailout a year later. But Trump changed everything. Eventually I made a formal pitch to Rolling Stone asking for time to investigate, arguing if there was anything crooked in the Russia story, we’d get to be the first “mainstream” outlet to report as much. For the first time there, I was told no.
By that time I was 47, which suddenly no longer felt young. I’d spent all those years learning two concepts. One, all true stories are newsworthy, a corollary being there’s no true story that’s not newsworthy. The other was the audience decides what to do with information, not us. This system simplified work and made audiences feel respected. It took years to learn to see and appreciate the beauty of the arrangement. All of the sudden I was pushing 50 and told we had to learn a new ethos. I wouldn’t do it, arguing among other things it would backfire even as short-term political strategy, and soon was out the door.
The reaction to this NPR story brought all this back. Berliner is saying when you screw up facts, it “shatters trust and engenders cynicism.” Within 24 hours of publication, his message was re-framed to be about “left-wing bias.” I’ve seen people on social media mention his age in a negative way (he’s 14 years older than me), implying his gripes weren’t real but based on a fogey impatience with NPR’s relentless niche-wokeness. Berliner went to Sarah Lawrence and was raised by a lesbian peace activist; if that played a role, I doubt it was major. He was speaking from experience about the importance of not making mistakes, somehow no longer valued.
Once someone determined Trump was so bad it was okay to lie about him, it set the precedent that the only thing that mattered was a subject’s politics. If you were on the right side, you got fairness, but if you weren’t, you didn’t. That in turn turned reporters into political judges. Previously your politics didn’t matter, since it was the audience making the judgements. We were taught to go after anything that smelled interesting and to be at least a little coy about revealing political leanings, if we had meaningful ones at all. You see even Berliner, an NPR lifer, talking about how “the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched” in the Hunter Biden laptop story, passed over by NPR “because it could help Trump.” I seriously doubt Berliner had a major desire to go after Hunter Biden, but all journalists used to get equally horny for any big story. What are reporters supposed to do now, close their eyes and think of baseball statistics?
The new CEO of NPR Katherine Maher is the cringiest commissar you have ever seen. Pronouns, status seeking club memberships, and "non-denominational Seders". She appears to have been grown in a vat somewhere, a mix of Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games and Carrie Matheson from Homeland: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/commissar-npr-ceo-katherine-maher-she-her
Who would bet against her giving wrongthinker Uri the boot?
NPR is no different than any other mainstream media outlet today. They exist not to inform the public, but to move the world as it is closer to the world as it should be—and what it should be is a progressive empyrean. The point isn’t to deliver the news, or to even convey true information. The point is to express the right attitude. Wrong information is tolerated when it allows the right attitude. And the right information is ignored if it supports the wrong attitude.
https://www.euphoricrecall.net/p/our-sacred-airwaves