Transcript- America This Week, April 12, 2024: "NPR's Greatest Hits."

Matt and Walter dive into NPR editor Uri Berliner's comments, then review some of the most curious NPR stories of late. Also: "Jackals and Arabs" by Franz Kafka

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, what’s going on? Any up in the air, real world adventures that you have to share with us?

Walter Kirn: Well, now that you mention it, yeah, since the last show I’ve been to New York City and back from Montana.

Matt Taibbi: Did you see the eclipse, by the way?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I saw it from Times Square, dude.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, wow.

Walter Kirn: It was like a UFO movie; you know how you greet the aliens from places like Times Square and the National Mall. Well, I was in Times Square with the most diverse crowd of UFO viewers, probably in the United States, and one of the most massive, I mean, eclipse viewers, excuse me. And I seem to be maybe one out of a thousand people who was actually in my Midwestern way willing to buy eclipse glasses. So if I break out in a deadly eye infection, it’s because I had to lend my eclipse glasses to maybe 800 strangers.

Matt Taibbi: Why would you not buy eclipse glasses? That’s not something I understand.

Walter Kirn: Somebody said, “I forgot.” And I was like, you forgot? This is the best-publicized eclipse in the history of mankind. They’ve been talking about it for seven months, and you forgot to buy glasses. But anyway, I was very liberal in my lending, my own pair, and people used them. They held them over their camera lenses so they could take pictures of the eclipse.

Matt Taibbi: That doesn’t really work.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I mean, they barely got back to me. After 40 minutes of standing there, they finally cycled back to me, and I was able to see it, but I did see it, and it was only 85% in New York City, but I think 85% is enough. Who needs total eclipses? It’s when you first see that big chunk coming out of it that I think you get the real spooky feeling. And after that, it’s just a kind of progression, but it’s that startlement that comes of knowing that the sun can be an eclipse.

Matt Taibbi: Right, right. Yeah, no, it was a good one. I’ve only seen two. One I actually somehow didn’t know was coming, and so when everything went dark, I was really surprised. I was about 24. This one was pretty cool. I was in New Jersey, I would say we got a little bit, it seemed like a little bit more than 85%. It was almost total, but it was cool. Very cool.

Walter Kirn: What was weird in Manhattan too, because there were skyscrapers involved, okay? The sun kept moving as it traveled west behind skyscrapers. So you would have to move, the crowd would have to move east to see sort of behind, get an angle up behind the skyscraper.

Matt Taibbi: What you needed was the green goblin to come screaming around the corner and just start throwing those up.

Walter Kirn: They had helicopters up, and they had these strange black suburbans with complicated satellite and microwave equipment. I don’t know what they were expecting, but it started to get kind of creepy in the last half hour before it started because so much equipment had been moved in. And I was going on the Greg Gutfeld show that night. So I was near the base of Fox News near Rockefeller Center, and they had a set put up outside the building for live eclipse viewing, and it was their weather team that they assigned to the eclipse, which I found interesting. I mean, you don’t expect them to have an astronomy team, but weather is, to me, something that occurs on earth not far, far out in the vacuum of space, where there actually, by definition, is no weather.

Matt Taibbi: Well, tides, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, are tides weather? I guess, maybe. It’s unclear what weather really is, actually, but somehow the eclipse didn’t seem like it was weather to me. But weather reporting is its own special genre.

Matt Taibbi: I love it.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, exactly. Getting excited about things that have no real human content. I mean, disaster weather is different when you’re standing chest-deep in a hurricane surge or something. But this kind of weather, which is just a mathematical progression of one lunar object over a solar object, making that into a colorful thing, is a real skill. Not sure they’ve managed it.

Matt Taibbi: But it’s in keeping with, we had an earthquake, then we had an eclipse, so we need another sort of large-scale natural event next week, and we’ll know we’re heading toward the apocalypse. So stuff happened this week, but probably the most interesting thing, and the thing that we can probably have the most interesting dialogue about, was actually a story about a media company. A couple of days ago, I don’t know if this happened to you, my phone suddenly blew up with texts from politicians, other journalists, all sorts of people who normally I’d be talking to about real news stories, but the subject was NPR, and it was because Bari Weiss’ Free Press had an article by a fellow named Uri Berliner, and we’ll just show the, let’s show actual screen here, and he’s now being described as a whistleblower, by the way, which is interesting. I don’t know. Do you think whistleblower applies? I’m not really sure if that’s the case. Maybe it is because they’ll want to fire him probably.

But anyway, the headline is: “I’ve been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s how we lost America’s Trust.” And he has a lead that’s very provocative, “You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag-carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t particularly describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence-educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother. I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.” So this is the person who’s been driven too far by working at NPR, and he talks about how NPR has always had a liberal bent, but in recent years it’s changed.