NPR

Ethics Quote of the Week: Citizen Free Press

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Bwaaahaha, perhaps you should have cut out the bias, bitches.”

—Citizen Free Press, on all the whining and breast-beating from public television and radio talent and execss over NPR and PBS finally losing taxpayer support.

Citizen Free Press is the successor to the Drudge Report as the go-to conservative news aggregator. It’s a bit too unprofessional for me most of the time, with links headlined “Nancy Pelosi should have shut her pie hole!” and such, but this time, its colloquialism hit the mark.

The arrogance of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been offensive for decades. It has been a hard left propaganda machine, the automatic foe of Republican Presidents and the reliable enabler of Democrats since anyone can remember. NPR’s Supreme Court commentator Nina Totenberg was a buddy of the late progressive SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a clear conflict of interest, but she didn’t care and neither did NPR: after all, the idea was to bash the conservative decisions anyway. Ken Burns disgracefully turned his documentary on the Jews and the Holocaust into a Trump-bashing screed, and PBS just nodded its metaphorical head in agreement. There are too many examples of both networks spinning reality to support Woke goals and narratives to tote up.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“As far as the accusations that we’re biased, I’d stand up and say, ‘Please show me a story that concerns you.’”

The infuriatingly dishonest, smug and biased Katherine Maher, head of NPR, on CNN yesterday.

Social media and others, like Senator John Kennedy and Instapundit, are going wild picking obvious examples. Hell, I have a lot of them; here’s one you may have forgotten (I had).

If Congress doesn’t finally strip public funding from NPR and PBS, there is no reason to trust those people to do anything. The Democrats love them because they are permanent propaganda mouthpieces for their party, but what’s the Republicans’ excuse?

Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

—NPR CEO Katherine Maher

Elon Musk posted the video of Maher saying this…

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1856343280344010803

I can’t find the date of that speech or the context of the quote, but what possible context could justify it? If that isn’t pure Big Brother, what is? “Can’t let the truth get in the way of progress!” This is the totalitarian mindset that (I hope) was one of the things enough voters rejected a week ago. This is the ends justifies the means ideology embraced by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including the news media that lied, dissembled, covered up and broadcast false narratives during the campaign and, of course, long before.

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No, NPR, Trump Was 100% Right About Kamala Harris’s Race, And You Are The Liar

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

In the process of being grilled at yesterday’s conference of black journalists, Donald Trump noted the constant fluctuating of Kamala Harris’s racial identification according to what audience she’s addressing and what will best serve her ambition at the time. In the cooking show segment above, for example (I apologize for Juanita’s vulgarity), Kamala pronounced herself “Indian.”

Ethics Alarms generally refers to her as “sort-of black” [I now see that WordPress’s AI bot presumes to challenge my use of the term “generally.” It can bite me.] Trump said, “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black.”

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Dispatches From the Great Stupid: NPR Unmasked (Cont.)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I know I should be writing about the college campuses revealing to administrators and faculty that they have successfully indoctrinated their students into being anti-Semites, bigots, and fascists while remaining ignorant of history and ethics. I’m really tired today, however, and for a while, at least, I’m going to indulge myself elaborating on an earlier ethics mess: the revelation that National Public Radio has become a malign force in American culture, and will lie, obfuscate and spin to disguise its true nature and objectives.

I found two notes worth pondering. From the Times (I’m not making this up)—

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Update on NPR’s Unmasking

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

That is kind of a fanciful title, I guess. The only people who didn’t realize that NPR has been strongly biased leftward over the last, oh, two decades or more would be those who agree with that bias, so naturally think the taxpayer funded radio network is just “telling it as it is.” Selective editing to make, say, Ted Cruz sound like a far-right nut case, or having a Supreme Court correspondent who is pals with the most liberal justice on the Court are just, you know, “mistakes.”

But having an insider who is obviously a progressive Democrat himself blow the whistle and announce that “the nonprofit radio network had allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage” (Ya think???) meant that attention must be paid, and the furious reaction of NPR’s leadership to that statement of the obvious–-“How DARE he! We’re NPR!”—gave instant credibility to his indictment, again, not that it should have needed any more, if people were paying attention.

Now comes the news of the obvious other shoe dropping: Uri Berliner, the senior business editor who blew said whistle, has been suspended by the network but for just for five days. In an interview with NPR earlier this week, Berliner revealed that NPR said he would be fired if he violated the policy against unapproved work for another media outlets again. Apparently NPR figured out that the Streisand Effect applies, and the more they go after Berliner and deny, deny, deny, the more visible the network’s progressive propaganda proclivities will be.

They figured it out too late, unfortunately. The mask, which was hanging anyway, is off now. NPR can blame any future criticism on Republicans and conservatives “pouncing,” but as long as it is led by a woman whose social media comments mark her as an extreme anti-American social justice activist, the strategy is unlikely to work. Fine, let NPR preach to the metaphorical choir—but I shouldn’t have to pay for it.

Meanwhile…

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WHAAAAT? NPR is Politically BIASED??? How Could That Be? [CORRECTED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Oh for heaven’s sake. National Public Radio’s cronies in Woke Journalism Land are stunned that Uri Berliner, a senior business editor who worked at NPR for 25 years, wrote in an essay published on Substack that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.” Seldom has the “Die Hard” clip above from the Ethics Alarms archive been more appropriate.

Here’s the Ethics Alarms NPR tag, which mostly catalogues the examples of NPR bias and unethical journalism Ethics Alarms has covered, and I’m sure it is still a drop in the metaphorical bucket. NPR was an Ethics Dunce recipient—again— just a few months ago.

NPR is extremely biased; its bias is flagrant and undeniable and has seeped into it programing on virtually every topic for decades. The only thing shocking about an NPR editor publicly admitting this is that anyone who was marinated in the organization’s dishonest and untrustworthy culture would be capable of telling the truth.

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Ethics Dunce: National Public Radio

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…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.”

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Good Elon, Bad Elon: Round And Round And Round Twitter Goes And Where It Stops, Nobody Knows…

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

I’m still hoping for the best with Elon Musk’s brave though chaotic attempt to rescue Twitter from the agents of progressive and Democrat propaganda….but I’m not going to spend a lot of time ramping up Ethics Alarms new presence on the platform until I am confident that I won’t have to quit in disgust again.

This week so far there have been two Twitter-related events that I view as ethically encouraging:

1. Musk tweaked National Public Radio as it so richly deserves by labeling it “state-affiliated media” on the platform. Trying to be nice, Musk changed the label to “government-funded media,” causing NPR promptly to throw a fit and quit Twitter, announcing that it would “no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform.” (Well, except for the New York Post when Twitter silenced it to keep the Hunter Biden laptop story from hurting Joe Biden at the polls.)

Amusingly, NPR puffed itself up with hot air, huffing that the network is protecting its credibility and its ability to produce journalism without “a shadow of negativity.” “The downside, whatever the downside, doesn’t change that fact,” NPR CEO John Lansing said, “I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility.”

I guess he means “other than NPR,” whose partisan toadying is legendary.

Lansing continued the hilarity by writing, “It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards.” Standards? Hmmm...I can’t recall the last NPR ethics story EA has posted; let’s see…HA! Just a week ago: NPR Wonders If Transgender Athletes Have A Physical Advantage Over Female Competitors. Before that: NPR Says There Are “Pros And Cons” Of A Candidate For Governor Calling Someone “Motherfucker” During A Speech…

Care to guess the party affiliation of the candidate NPR was defending? Tough one! Why, it was Beto O’Roarke, the Democratic candidate to unseat GOP Texas Governor Abbott. NPR described O’Rourke’s gutter language as a “snappy interjection,” though the snappy interjection was somehow not fit to print. The NPR headline used “f-bomb” while the text employed “motherf*****”. We pay taxes for this garbage “analysis”?

The indignant NPR excuse for objecting to “government funded” is also self-indicting. NPR’s own news story says,

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New Rule! Only White, Straight Men Need To Be Civil

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Last week, a looming $30 million budget shortfall prompted NPR to eliminate 10% of its staff across all its departments.  It killed several podcasts and so far, 84 employees are gone; more will follow.

One of the podcasts sent into the archives was “Louder Than A Riot,” which explored how hip-hop’s “Black women and queer folk have dealt with the same oppression [hip-hop] was built to escape.” So after getting the bad news, “Louder Than A Riot’s” staff took to Twitter and accused NPR of bias in its layoff decisions:

What support for that did the angry staff have? Oh, none. But NPR is a nest of progressives who don’t believe in ethics, so playing the discrimination card was a reflex, and Facts Don’t Matter. As it turned out, NPR did engage in discrimination, but the “good’ kind:  the layoffs had been  “structured in a way” so they would not disproportionately affect people of color and other marginalized groups. In other words, skin color and sexual proclivities were used to decide who to fire, and being white and non-LGTBQ was held against employees.

That’s unethical.

Also illegal.

Also “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” exemplified. Continue reading →