NPR is dying. Long live NPR?
An inside look at the culture of public radio.
Lately, I’ve been a semi-regular guest on my friend
‘s show Media Studies, which he livestreams weekly. On the latest episode, we discussed former NPR senior editor Uri Berliner’s Free Press piece titled I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust. (Our discussion starts at 19:13.) Predictably, Berliner’s criticisms of NPR’s work culture and ideological entrenchment caused a stir in media circles, but it also hit close to home for Brown, who worked as a reporter at the NPR affiliate in the city we both live in.As Brown says in the clip:
“I totally understood where [Berliner] was coming from. It made total sense to me. I think he laid it out incredibly well. […] I don’t think news from a perspective is necessarily wrong, but I think that news from a perspective without admitting what the perspective is, it’s deceptive.”
We go back and forth about NPR for upwards of an hour and a half, so there’s a lot there.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Brown has effectively been living the life of a “media analyst” since the ripe old age of 8, when he would sit in front of the TV — by choice, mind you — and immerse himself in longform news shows like 60 Minutes. He’s basically never stopped thinking about, researching, and talking about media in all its forms ever since. In addition to radio, Brown has worked in print media (a daily newspaper), television (an NBC affiliate station), and online. After leaving our local NPR affiliate, he hosted USA Today’s podcast 5 Things (now The Excerpt) before striking out on his own.
Brown and I both follow sports and culture stories rather avidly, so I like to pick his brain about the big meta-media stories of the hour and get his bigger-picture sense for where things might be headed, drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of ratings, analytics, trends and technology. We would talk endlessly about these topics for years before we ever sat in front of a microphone, and Brown was ahead of the curve in urging me to establish my footing as an online presence.
One of the things that unites our career paths is that we’ve both held heterodox outlooks in media environments characterized by intense ideological uniformity. The same has held true of our social circles as well, and I would say that James and I each had a non-partisan way of thinking long before either of us had heard the term “heterodox.” Crucially, we’re both non-white bookish types who grew up in lower-income urban neighborhoods (i.e: the ghetto). Which means we’ve both had a front-row seat as our respective corners of media lurched towards an increasingly irrational and reductionist fixation on race — led mostly by people who don’t look like us or, if they do, aren’t from backgrounds like ours.
These days, the overwhelming majority of the people we’d call our professional peers are vehemently hostile to perspectives like mine and Brown’s. Media Studies is one of the platforms where we speak freely. But, as we’ve long known, no amount of prestige in the progressive-captured media sphere is enough to protect those who speak out from catching shrapnel. Just ask Uri Berliner…
For more background on Berliner, I would highly recommend this paywalled episode of
:
For years, Brown and I have wondered how long it’ll be before there’s any respite from the repressive censorious culture we all find ourselves in currently. I tend to feel that the pendulum is swinging back towards a more moderate place — but I share Brown’s view that we can expect to be stuck with the excesses of “wokeness” in some form or another for a long time. Also, if China and Russia are any indication, there’s just no guarantee that history has to balance itself out.
Moreover, both James and I understand that there’s a rising wave of censoriousness coming from the conservative/right-wing sphere. So it’s hard to have any sense of where we’re headed. What we can tell you is that it’s unlikely that the forces governing NPR’s ideological orientation will see fit to change course, even as all indications show the ship to be headed for an iceberg. On the livestream with James, I compared the ossified worldview at progressive bastions like NPR, The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic to Easter Island.
And, as I said in my tweet thread responding to NPR’s circle-the-wagons rebuttal of Berliner:
NPR doubling-down against Uri Berliner’s assessment of their bias is a like a goldfish insisting it doesn't live in a fishbowl. Of COURSE it's going to do that — it's literally incapable of doing anything else. Those who've gotten drunk on the sense that they dictate the terms of culture are NOT GOING TO LET IT GO until their hands are pried off the steering wheel. The best we can all do is ignore them as they wither on the vine — and do our best not to succumb to our own fish-eye view.
I do, by the way, feel optimistic about the future, though I think the fight against ideological capture is going to be hard-won. But, as I said to Brown in the livestream, people will realize that they have an appetite for temperance and nuance only after some intrepid media types step out on a limb and create platforms that offer those things. I think that’s already happening, and I see a groundswell of reasoned dialogue taking place across the internet. Let’s hope I’m right.
In the meantime…
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Was it actually news to anyone that NPR had a left leaning bias? Who already didn't know that?