…or maybe I’m the Ethics Dunce: I assume that NPR’s management cares whether half the country sees it as progressive cant parrot and a water-carrier for the Democratic Party. Maybe they don’t; maybe they have assumed deplorables don’t listen to “Marketplace” and “Fresh Air,” and certainly don’t contribute much during radiothons. I know I don’t touch the local NPR stations (there are two of them) ever since the “Car Talk” guys ended up in the garage for good and after I was dumped as NPR’s ethics guy because I was insufficiently critical of Donald Trump.
Where was I? Oh, right….National Public Radio appointed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who had to hustle to scrub her social media record after the announcement because she periodically issued intemperate woke garbage in the past. Among the gems tracked down by reporter Shannon Thaler at the New York Post,
- “Trump is a racist.”
- “I mean, sure, looting is counter-productive. But it is hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property”
- “white silence is complicity”
- “I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught.”
..and more. Ethics Alarms has argued for a virtual statute of limitations regarding stupid social media messages when they are decades old or occurred before a public figure’s brain was fully developed, but the tweets found by the Post are recent. That 2020 tweet excusing looting and channeling the “1619 Project’s” libel is sufficient all by itself, or should be, to convince me that this woman shouldn’t be overseeing any media organization, especially one receiving taxpayer money.
To give NPR every benefit of the doubt, it probably felt that if it wasn’t going to select a black woman (Claudine Gay hadn’t been fired yet) in fealty to DEI, the next best pick would be a white woman who is bigoted against whites while indulging in sufficient levels of self-loathing. Deploring her “hysteric white woman voice,” in another tweet, she explained, “I was taught to do it. I’ve done it. It’s a disturbing recognition. While I don’t recall ever using it to deliberately expose another person to immediate physical harm on my own cognizance, it’s not impossible. That is whiteness.”
Ah, yes, that is whiteness! <sigh!>
Maher also was able to compensate for that ugly whiteness and her “white woman voice” by studying at the Arabic Language Institute at The American University in Cairo, Egypt and obtaining her Bachelor of Arts in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from New York University. That’s certainly a good basis for an antiAmerican, anti-white point of view.
In his expression of alarm at Maher’s rise on his blog, Jonathan Turley sees her extreme orientation as likely to support NPR’s tightening embrace of “advocacy journalism,” aka. “progressive propaganda.” I’ll have to leave it to him to tell me what happens. After I was ambushed on the air because my 100% correct explanation of how moldy sexual harassment accusations often arise against public figures didn’t comport with the host’s Trump Derangement, I vowed to be more prudent regarding my sock drawer organization whenever the urge struck to tune in NPR. And unlike too many of my vows, I’ve kept that one.
Ethics Alarms 
“I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught.”
Not surprising, but still stupid.
No, you aren’t superior to someone because you were born in a place that had better ethics at one point in its history. How in the world does anyone ever get to the point that they feel like their predecessors (not even necessarily their ancestors! Just people who lived in the same place) have any bearing on their own worth as an individual?!
She shouldn’t be managing a corner lemonade stand.
That photo reminded me of Bill Maher’s infamous comment about the unfairly maligned Catholic school kid having a “punchable face.” It’s completely unfair, I know, but that shot just emanates smugness to me. I’m sure she’s really a wonderful, kind, tender human being….
I recall my dad periodically listening to “Car Talk” and occasionally to “All Things Considered” when I was still a teenager, 40 years ago.
= – = – = – =
What’s wrong with NPR? It’s long had both the virtues and the faults of the sophisticated liberal urban middle class. Refined, sensitive, liberal, left-leaning, a little smug and self-congratulatory. Everyone knows that’s what you are getting. There have been years in my life when I listened to it at every opportunity. I listed to WSUI in Iowa City IA.
When I was still listening to it, it seemed like I could not listen to it for more than roughly 30 minutes without learning something.
In the last ten years NPR has gotten worse. The problem is that as the left-leaning liberals have drifted to the left and gone “woke,” they have been subject to what is now being called “ideological capture.”
Rather than belabor the point here, it’s best to refer you to this scathing, derisive analysis of NPR’s coverage of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. This is from the philosopher and gadfly Peter Boghossian who resigned his faculty position at Portland State University to become a roving epistemologist. If you can carve out 25 minutes, this video at YouTube really illuminates what NPR has become at its worst.
Thanks for reading.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
The video really should not be age restricted. The authors of the video consider it to be just plain meanness that YouTube marks it as Age Restricted.
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