Transcript - America This Week, Mar 28, 2025: "A Good Leak Scandal is Hard to Find"

Has NPR turned over a new leaf? What really happened with Chatgate? Matt and Walter discuss all this, the Alien Enemies Act, and Flannery O'Connor's classic, "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: How’s it going, Walter?

Walter Kirn: Well, in so many ways it’s going well because we had a little blast of summertime in Montana. It’s all about the weather here, really. Nothing much happens socially but meteorologically much does. And yesterday was summer two days after it being winter, and it’s going to be winter again this weekend. So that involves all kinds of decisions about whether to change your tires, whether to drive out to a place that might be covered in snow and see if you can get, like in my cabin.

Matt Taibbi: Put the bear traps out.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Put the bear traps out. Arm up with the shotgun in case the woodpeckers are taking off my …

Matt Taibbi: Or really anybody. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Well, it’s true that you should really always go to your undefended Montana wilderness cabin with a gun in hand. And the short story we’re going to read today-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I was going to say.

Walter Kirn: ... will prove that yet again. I mean, there’s so many short stories that would have ended otherwise if someone had just had a gun.

Matt Taibbi: Right? It’s like an ad for the NRA.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Flannery O’Connor. But we’ll get to that later.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So it’s a little bit opposite here in New Jersey. I’m a little chilly here after ... But it’s been nice and another ridiculously busy week. Although this chat gate scandal with Jeffrey Goldberg, which we’ll get to in a minute, it kind of has the feel of an old school Trump scandal that’s manufactured and stupid as opposed to some of the new ones, which are more grounded in things that are actually happening. But we’ll get to that.

So we wanted to start off with something that’s just funny. We’ve covered on the show a little while ago there was a whistleblower of sorts at NPR, named Yuri Berliner, who wrote a long piece in the Free Press basically talking about what it was really like inside NPR. And he recently, I guess, came out with a piece that cited a statistic showing that in the staff there were 87 registered Democrats and no Republicans. And this came up in the congressional testimony of Catherine Maher, the CEO of NPR, who is now trying to justify NPR’s existence to a Republican congress that is very much in the mood to cut everything that it doesn’t like. And I would have to assume that it includes NPR. So there was an exchange between Jim Jordan and Katherine Maher, and it’s worth listening to. Let’s just start with that.

Katherine Marr: The former senior business editor for NPR.

Jim Jordan: How long did he work at NPR?

Katherine Marr: I believe he was there just over 25 years.

Jim Jordan: 25 years? Award-winning journalist? Did he win any awards?

Katherine Marr: Our time to …

Jim Jordan: Peabody Award. That’s pretty important, isn’t it?

Katherine Marr: That is. It’s-

Jim Jordan: A pretty distinguished journalist, right?

Katherine Marr: Certainly.

Jim Jordan: And he wrote a long story about what you do at NPR. Is NPR biased?

Katherine Marr: Congressman, I have never seen any instance of-

Jim Jordan: Never?

Katherine Marr: ... of political bias determining editorial decisions. No.

Jim Jordan: Well, Mr. Berliner-

Matt Taibbi: So we just pause for a second. That was laughter in a congressional hearing at the CEO of NPR simply saying that, “I’ve never seen any evidence of bias in the newsroom.” But let’s listen a little further.

Jim Jordan: ... last year wrote, in the DC area editorial positions at NPR, he said he found 87 registered Democrats, zero Republicans. Is that accurate?

Katherine Marr: We do not track the numbers or the voter registration. But I find that concerning.

Jim Jordan: An award-winning journalists who worked 25 years at NPR, Mr. Berliner, was he lying when he wrote that?

Katherine Marr: I am not presuming such. I just don’t have, we don’t track that information about our journalists.

Jim Jordan: 87 to zero, and you’re not biased?

Katherine Marr: I think that is concerning if those numbers are accurate.

Jim Jordan: It wasn’t 44, 43. Wasn’t 60, 27. It wasn’t 70, 17. It wasn’t even 80 to seven. It was 87 Democrats, zero Republicans. And you say NPR is not biased.

How about the big stories over the last few years? According to Mr. Berliner, again, he wrote on the-

Matt Taibbi: So Walter, what’s your reaction to, first of all, to Katherine Maher? I find it funny. And look, it’s a serious discussion because NPR has been a part of American life for a long time and for a long time had a very respected place in our society. It’s produced a lot of terrific programming over the years and it’s in trouble now. If I had to bet, I would guess they would not come out the other end of this thing intact. And there’s a question: should they? Well, let’s get into it. First of all, with your reaction?

Walter Kirn: Okay, NPR in general. I come from the native home of NPR, which is the Minneapolis, St. Paul area of Minnesota where Minnesota Public Radio produces a lot of the greatest content and most notably, Prairie Home Companion from the past.

Matt Taibbi: Prairie Home Companion, yep.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I knew Garrison Keillor, was the first writer I ever met. He was sitting under a tree at a neighbor’s 4th of July celebration in my little town. I asked him, because I knew he was a writer, what it was like to be one and he tipped his hat down and wouldn’t talk to me. That was the early ‘70s before he became the big star. I can only imagine how insufferable he was then. And the rumors around Minnesota was that he was insufferable indeed.

Another show, From the Top, which is a kid’s music show, is produced by my mom’s next door neighbor. As was a cooking show that is syndicated. I’ve been around NPR really my whole life. And I always perceived it as a culturally open, fun, left in the sense that it was more likely to bring people from the slight counter culture and adapt them to greater acceptance by the mainstream. Garrison was also a writer for Time Magazine and so on. He had very liberal opinions but the show was a little different.

Anyway, when I lived on a farm then in Montana back in the ‘90s, listening to NPR, which was the only really audible station out where I was, was absolutely a daily ritual. And I got my news there and I got my entertainment shows like Car Talk, et cetera. Then somewhere-

Matt Taibbi: By the way, that’s where I come from, which is the other big hub of NPR is WGBH in Boston.

Walter Kirn: Is Boston.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And so that’s how I saw NPR, as this mixture of slightly goofy but higher toned entertainment. And this very sober news that was done in a voice that was very distinctive. I don’t know if it was the sound of sophistication or the sound of ease, but it had a tone that nothing else did. It wasn’t quite as severe as the regular network broadcasts,

Matt Taibbi: So I always thought it had Polish without being tacky. It was an interesting sort of stylistic approach even for commercial media, which it isn’t, and which she kind of ... Well, actually she said the opposite in her testimony. But I always thought that NPR from a style point of view did a lot of interesting things for public radio back in the day. But …

Walter Kirn: Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me! It had a game show from a pier or something in Chicago. All of these other entertainment products that actually probably did pretty well commercially in some sense within the nonprofit world.

One thing that always caused me alert when I listened to NPR was the names of the sponsors. They were what we now call NGOs or the Pew Charitable Trust, the Ford Foundation. Now, we’ve come to see that those places were not the objective and politically neutral institutions that we may have thought at the time. They line up pretty squarely with what’s called now the establishment or the liberal establishment, or something maybe even to the left of that but never bothered me.

Then through some life change I didn’t listen to NPR for a few years. And then a few years ago, maybe in the mid-teens I turned it back on and it was unlistenable. Every single story had been stretched on the Procrustean rack to yield a point about American racism, jingoism, stupidity, or just general inferiority to what we might be or should have been. It was a guilt trip par excellence. And it was-

Matt Taibbi: Endless.

Walter Kirn: And endless. And it was ridiculous because it was creative. It was sort of like the opposite of Church Lady on Dana Carvey’s skits on Saturday Night Live where you could find any phenomena and relate it to the Devil. Well, NPR could tell any story. I mean, they could talk about a 20-car pile up in fog on a freeway in southern Utah and it would turn out to be a story about gender. Or it would turn out to be a story about slavery.

Matt Taibbi: So it is so funny, Walter, that you say that. And I guarantee you folks who are listening, we did not coordinate this. But-

Walter Kirn: No. We don’t coordinate.

Matt Taibbi: We don’t coordinate. So before the show today, after watching that testimony by Katherine Maher, I went on the NPR site and just looked for what was on today, what were some of the features they were running right now. And one of them was a story that was entitled, the Real Reason for the Meghan Markle Hate. And I’m sorry, “Meghan Markle’s Netflix Show angered critics. This columnist says she knows why.” And it’s worth listening to for about a minute because it will get to something that you just talked about.

Speaker 1: The Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, has a new show on Netflix, it’s called With Love, Meghan, and in it Markle or Meghan Sussex, as she tells us she now wants to be known, offers tips on homemaking and entertains guests in a beautiful California estate. So pretty typical lifestyle show. It’s already been picked up for another season. So why all the hate? The snarky memes, the takedown pieces. Leslie Gray Streeter thinks she knows. Earlier this month she published a column with the Baltimore Banner. It’s headline, the Real Reason People Are Mad at Meghan Markle’s new lifestyle show, and she’s with us now to tell us more about it. Welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Leslie Gray Streeter: Thank you for having me. I love this subject and I get so many comments about it.

Speaker 1: Okay, so out with it. What’s the real reason?

Leslie Gray Streeter: The real reason is I’m going to say racism and jealousy that is couched in racism and a little classism. And just basically being mad that people have things that we might want that we don’t have. And then racism.

Matt Taibbi: Okay, I’m sorry. Let’s rewind that. Let’s rewind that to about 40 seconds so that people, in case you missed that, it was not one racism, it was racism, racism, and racism.

Walter Kirn: Bracketed by racism.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Exactly. Let’s listen to that answer just one more time.

Speaker 1: Okay. So out with it, what’s the real reason?

Leslie Gray Streeter: The real reason is I’m going to say racism and jealousy that is couched in racism and a little classism. And just basically being mad that people have things that we might want that we don’t have. And then racism.

Speaker 1: And what makes you convinced of that?

Walter Kirn: Wow. The victimization of the British royal family.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah, exactly. There can’t possibly be any other reason that people can’t stand Meghan Markle other than racism, racism, and racism.

Walter Kirn: But classism too, Matt, she slipped that in there. So racism is generally a feeling that someone is our inferior or less valuable than other human beings. But she also said that envy is a part of it. Envy of her material splendor and endowments. So we’ve combined contempt for the supposed inferiors with envy for our superiors. And we have the perfect motive that makes no sense at all. First of all, I hate her for the fact that she has a huge estate in somewhere near Santa Barbara filled with flowers and so on, because not only do I not want the British royal family living here at all, I don’t want them living well. And I especially don’t you want-

Matt Taibbi: You want them running from Buford Pusser.

Walter Kirn: Especially don’t want them living well by virtue of reality TV. Had they done something noble to lift up America or, I don’t know, help the armed forces, or any of the things that past aristocrats had to do in order to win admiration, that’s one thing. But being on Oprah and doing dumb shows that are exploitive of American women and so on, because I see that. My real reason for not liking her show is that she’s dumb, that she apparently has moved beyond her station, not because as a woman who’s partially of color she should be at a lower station, but because she’s not good at anything and her husband isn’t good at anything. They say he was a good helicopter pilot once in Afghanistan or something, but I don’t see it. She’s married to a guy who used to dress up as a Nazi now for fun parties.

But it is galling to be told in the voices of NPR, the most smug, self-satisfied-