NPR: An Assembly Line of Woke Narratives

Daily it seems, woke narratives are coming under greater and more destructive fire.  It’s beginning to look like lying and distorting facts, cancelations and suppression of speech aren’t favored by most people.  Neither is name-calling in lieu of reasoned argument; ditto anti-white racism and misandry.  Indeed, in the market of public opinion, voting seems to be running strongly against woke narratives and themes.

The most recent indication comes from National Public Radio senior business editor, Uri Berliner.

Berliner’s toiled in the NPR vineyards for 25 years; he knew the old NPR and knows it now.  What he says reveals little that we didn’t already suspect, but insider information is always valuable.

There’s an unspoken consensus [at NPR] about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.

That consensus comes after years of blowing story after story due entirely to, well, that consensus, aka, an unwholesome combination of woke ideology and Trump Derangement Syndrome.  So NPR swallowed hook line and sinker Russiagate and Adam Schiff’s repeated assurances (NPR interviewed him 25 times!) that he had the goods on Trump.  It did the same with the Hunter Biden laptop story and the competing theories about the origins of COVID.  Perhaps worse, when its coverage of those stories was found to conflict with the facts, editors ignored that fact too.  Neither retractions, corrections nor serious introspection followed any of the flawed, one-sided reporting.

That’s not surprising because, as Berliner says, telling the truth about important news events is no longer the point at NPR.  The mission now embeds in woke ideology and tilts at woke windmills.  So, on NPR, racism stalks every corner and minute of American life, requiring the media outlet to dedicate itself to unearthing it (in, for example, the names of birds!) and its eradication.

That in turn means that its workforce must “look like America,” and align, not with our diversity of viewpoints, but a diversity of skin color, ethnicity and sex.  The result?  NPR is a political monotone.  Berliner checked the political leanings of the editorial staff of NPR’s Washington headquarters and found 87 Democrats and zero Republicans.

With that sort of political homogeneity and a ubiquitous woke ideology, NPR is losing advertising revenue and its audience that is the very opposite of diverse.  Just 6% of NPR’s listeners are black and 7% Hispanic, far below their numbers in society at large.

Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.

Given its unvaried landscape of woke ideology, few people (including its own audience) seem to trust NPR.  In February, a Harris Poll of NPR listeners revealed that just three in 10 said they found NPR to be trustworthy.  Amazing.  More amazing still is the fact that NPR staffers crowed about the finding because it was better than those for CNN and the New York Times. 

In short, NPR is a mess.

As important as the Berliner article is, he nowhere asks the salient question “why?”  Why do intelligent, educated people hug to their bosoms the most threadbare of ideologies and promote it in derogation of all that’s sensible, democratic and free?  How can they fail to see that what’s done to the candidate they don’t like can be done to the one they do?  How can they fail to do simple, basic research, like locating and reporting on the facts of police shootings in the wake of George Floyd’s death?  Perhaps 15 minutes online would have demonstrated the realities of police shootings, the race of victims and of the police doing the shooting.  But if anyone at NPR spent those 15 minutes, its reporting didn’t show it.

Again, why?  The answer is not that these people were taught this nonsense by ivory-tower radicals in college, although they probably were.  College students “learn” much that greater maturity teaches them to reject.  At least among the woke, that seems to be no longer true. 

What happened to the native skepticism with which most of us come amply endowed?  When someone claims that Anthony Fauci but not Jay Bhattacharya or Martin Kulldorff can be trusted to give us the facts on COVID, whatever happened to just basic inquiry?  Why did NPR learn nothing from its failure to ask obvious questions about the Trump/Russia Collusion hoax?  Or the hoax about the Hunter Biden laptop?  Or countless other failures.  Making a mistake is one thing; making scores of them in a short time is yet another; still another is continuing to do the same things that led to those mistakes in the first place.

My personal answer is that people today have a yearning, bred of their inundation by Internet messages, for simplicity – simple concepts, simple frameworks, simple answers.  And that’s exactly what ideology provides, indeed it’s perhaps its greatest selling point.  Memorize a few easy ideas, apply them relentlessly to events and - presto! - the world falls neatly into place, no stressful thinking, no time-consuming research required.

Whatever the cause of the woke madness, it’s certain that Berliner’s prescription for what ails NPR won’t work.

With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong.

But that “cure” misdiagnoses the patient.  Berliner bemoans the fact that, first, at NPR, “nothing changes” and, second, that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview,” but doesn’t connect the two.  The simple truth is that, at an organization at which wokeism is the one and true religion embraced by all, the belief that “we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism” and “face up to where we’ve gone wrong” sounds pitifully naïve.

Like every ideology, wokeism assumes itself to be correct, every dissenting view to be incorrect and the antidote to too little wokeism is more of it.  Not exactly a recipe for introspection, much less reform.