The Nose: NPR's Really Bad Week

On webpage formatting

(I just have to say that my original email was split into appropriate paragraphs and looks much more disheveled as it's posted on this page. This is really exacerbated above six or seven sentences.)

E-mail from Bob

I have to admit that I have become a NPR junkie. Exhausted with all the other media outlets, I found stability.

My smartphone’s podcast software is my most used app by far!! And 9 of 10 subscriptions are from NPR. A weekend doesn’t go by without listening to This American Life, Wait Wait Don’t tell me, etc. I catchup on my local WNPR shows, scanning through the Colin Mac shows or the AWESOME Where we live show.

NO OTHER MEDIA OUTLET PROVIDES THIS SERVICE, LEVEL OF ACCESSIBILITY, OR QUALITY.

The availability of podcasts hours after the broadcast, with the addition of incredible and knowledgeable broadcasters both national and locally, places the organization miles above all other media outlets!

E-mail from Lillian

The thing that upsets me the most about this whole thing, is that now the Right Wingnuts will never let it go. This will be their "talking point" for years. It just makes my stomach hurt!!!

E-mail from Mark

I think part of what your missing is the tape backs up the impression of NPR & NPR people as being elistist.
Just as one of your panel just said NPR saves the Midwest from "country music & religion " on radio

E-mail from Sara

It would appear that NPR has fallen victim to Operation Seventh Grade Girl- the high tech spy mission that is obviously run by highly tricky and intelligent conservatives who are masters of disguise. First they attacked ACORN in stereo typical pimp gear and now they have taken on the appearance of fundamental Muslims. Their tactic of getting people to talk badly about other people behind those other people's back in sinisterly genius. Maybe they can bring Osama Bin Laud to justice by getting Kahdaffi to call him a poopie head on tape.

E-mail from Marilyn

What kind of fundraiser goes to lunch with a prospective client without first checking the organization on the web? Did they set up a phony website as well? Mr. Schiller had already resigned from NPR when he had the meeting. A fundraiser will raise money for anyone. Perhaps HE was the perpetrator of the scam and will now go on to a high-paying job with a right-wing organization. What happened to his NPR luncheon companion?
Maybe I’m prone to conspiracy theories, but it seems to me NPR caved without doing some background checking.

E-mail from Karl

It seems like everything I've ever written you about journalism has been leading up to this subject. So I apologize in advance for a long, unbalanced slog, more of a background piece, which will necessarily repeat some ideas I've communicated before. One of your other listeners can do the "fair and balancing" stuff in my stead.*

"First they came for ACORN, and I said nothing, because ACORN worked with powerless and indigent people but was opposed by everyone in my Rolodex. Then they came for Shirley Sherrod, and I was silent, because I didn't learn anything from the pattern of fabulism inflicted on ACORN. Then they came for Senator Mary Landrieu, and I said nothing because who knows what felonious wiretapping really is? Then they came for Planned Parenthood, and I had to cover 'the controversy', because sometimes abortion is icky and lots of people think a two-cell fertilized egg is a baby."

That's the problem with NPR: Lefties like me have been all over the Andrew Breitbarts since James O'Keefe first lied to Fox News about wearing his Huggy Bear Starter Kit to ACORN offices. And what has NPR done about it? How have they prepared themselves?

Yes, there's a problem with Schiller's remarks. I'm tying it to what you mentioned about public radio culture. Two things: "Your opinions don't matter here," you wrote, ("you" meaning "the host"). And "a listener said 'I like the WNPR Colin more than the AM radio Colin'."

For the first, I've always wanted to ask you, in response: What's the easiest way to get liberal ideas, those left of the Network Evening News, reliably and repeatedly on NPR? The right wing has a pipeline. But for the left, it seems the best way is to quit your job as host and spend your days calling in to shows!

For the second, you are more enjoyable on WNPR because spend less time hanging up on idiots and needing to tell ignorants, "It's been proved elsewhere, I don't have to do it all over again now".

But that doesn't work on public radio, does it? And even less so on NPR mothership product. There's no position so right-wing that it can't be "part of the conversation" because some thinktank hack with an impressive, established letterhead is in some managing editor's Rolodex, and saying something in a polite enough manner. You've heard what it takes to make someone like Tom Ashbrook shut someone up for lying. NPR doesn't know any better except privileging the lies of both the right and the left, and since the left is much more invested in the ideas of journalism, finding things out, and not, the imbalance is perceptible.

The most rewarding thing about following you to publc radio was getting a lot more of Tom Dankosky. So I was fascinated last September when he sat down with the NPR ombud and got her to admit some amazing things. She said "NPR's journalism is straight down the middle" (okay, close enough, fine), but "NPR has to convince right-wingers that we're even-handed, without changing our journalistic output." (Remember, this was a month before the Juan Williams 'debacle', before millions of right-wingers came out of the woodwork to bemoan how much they "used to respect NPR".)

What kind of naive fool thinks that can ever be done? Has anyone at NPR Central had a real conversation with a Republican lately? The last "reasonable" one was spotted on Fox News this week yelling at clouds, complaining that kids are all listening to "enema man" and "snoop snoop poopy dog", preventing them from sending thank-you cards for Christmas gifts. Why did Alan Simpson say this? It's a function of bathing in the right-wing self-reinforcing echo chamber that he forgot to temper himself to sound moderate and reasonable.

Mr. Schiller's broken some sort of unwritten NPR rule and forgot to start his first paragraph about right-wing extremists with the phrase "But the Democrats...". The Teabaggers are ARE xenophobic. Actual Christians DO shudder over the Tea Party's use of "God" as a political weapon. Muslim voices sidelined from the news product in the USA RESULT in shoddier and less informative output.

But what NPR expects to accomplish by totally disowning all his words, and their interest in getting further comments from O'Keefe, is beyond me. I subscribe to Jay Rosen's idea that no news orgs are "above politics", that NPR has political enemies, and to not treat them differently from friends or neutral parties is to be a sitting duck. At long last, will that idea finally sink into NPR? As news professional to layperson, please tell me what I'm missing. When it comes to NPR, what will "make it better" for the right except taking a feed of Rush Limbaugh and broadcasting it on NPR stations 24x7? How many apologies will prevent the next attack?

Cordially,
Karl in Bloomfield

*Disclaimer: WNPR's local programming is not included in any of my lambastes against "NPR". This is a mothership problem. You, Mr. Dankosky, and Faith--when she's not sampling too much wine on the air, which is often--are worth every penny and word of praise.