Uri Berliner has worked at NPR for 25 years. He still works there. And today he published this essay in @TheFP: thefp.com/p/npr-editor-h…
@bariweiss @TheFP The saddest part is that our tax dollars go to fund a progressive activist organization
As i can see by first and last name he probably came from USSR. Our generation ( the educated ones) never trusted government, and we all have very curious minds. We are screaming for American to wake up, you are one step away from 1917 Russia, i think many know what came after. 😢🙏🏻
@bariweiss @TheFP Very interesting read. Interesting to read a first hand account of everything we assumed was going on at NPR. It a communist takeover of just one institution but is happened to many others as well.
@bariweiss @TheFP I loved the story until Berliner revealed he was a genocide denier. I have no patience with people who deny the obvious genocide in Gaza being committed by the IDF with the complete backing of the US govt.
@bariweiss @TheFP "If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way. But it hasn’t." I am a conservative. I listened to NPR for years– I quit about 7 years ago. I also drive a Subaru.
@bariweiss @TheFP Interesting article and admission. But it has always leaned left. Even his stat from the past were still over 30% left and much less for the right. And reporters are supposed to ask questions. Questions mean investigate. They just propagate and always have.
@bariweiss @TheFP Wow. A real journalist. I thought they were extinct. I thought the same was true about integrity. I was wrong about both. #UriBerliner #RealJournalism
@bariweiss @TheFP Yup, it started getting bad around 2013ish, thats when I stopped listening.
@bariweiss @TheFP He’s probably going to need to update his résumé this afternoon. Just sayin.
I got in my wife's car this morning and the radio was tuned to NPR. I used to listen to NPR for hours upon hours, before there was podcasting and ubiquitous 4g internet. Late nights driving highway 441 home from UGA in the pitch black of pine forests, punctuated by the occasional half-abandoned small towns: Eatonton, Dublin, McRae. On the radio you either had Jesus, or NPR. NPR gave me Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz. McPartland was an ancient and elegant woman who could recount stories of her acquaintance with musical legends from the distant past, and she could play the piano with the fluency of a casual conversation. You could also hear the BBC quiz show "My Word," and be mesmerized by the erudite voice of Frank Muir, a voice so English and upper-class that it even featured an intentionally cultivated lisp. And, of course, Prairie Home Companion, that font of mirth and music and wit emanating from the voice of Garrison Keillor. This morning I was reminded of why I don't listen to them anymore. A "journalist" in the anxious voice of a soccer-mom-during-COVID was inviting listeners to collectively wring their hands with her about the growing menace of white extremism. She was in the middle of noting the reluctance of many to ask for the help of the DHS in combatting this threat, noting DHS's own contributions to American atrocities such as putting kids in cages. How could they be trusted to handle the problem when they themselves are basically cross-burning Klan members? The country can be meaningfully divided between those that listen to NPR, those that do not. A far smaller cohort consists of those like myself that used to listen to it, and who cannot listen to it any more. We have no home in this new universe. NPR is made for the educated crowd, and I was educated at a boarding school far from my native south Georgia. I always stood in two worlds and felt neither fully at home nor fully a stranger in either of them. The world of south Georgia is Christian. The educated world's religion appeared, to me, to be what Robert Pirsig called the Church of Reason. I've always been fascinated by attempts to reconcile the Christian world view with that of the Church of Reason, and I've been reading and thinking about it all my life. The Christian church's greatest problem, in my eyes, was that it couldn't be universalist. It could not account for the fate of my Chinese and Indian-born classmates at boarding school. On the other hand, the Church of Reason didn't seem to have much to say about the meaning of life. In fact, the natural trajectory of its teachings was to conclude that "meaning" is a subjective illusion for fools. Its harsh, but also wonderfully universalist. Equally open to Indians, Chinese, or even caterpillars and space aliens for that matter. Something has changed in the decades since those dark nights on the highway listening to NPR. The Church of Reason has changed, and it is no longer universalist. It has gained in its ability to speak about the meaning of life, and to produce historical narratives that give its congregants comfort- but it has gained this at the expense of its universalism. The historical narrative it weaves is, in my eyes, just as fantastic and ludicrous as the story of Jesus's resurrection must seem to a progressive atheist. It is a story saturated with religious symbols- but instead of Jesus, we have in his place "people of color," really a dumbed-down version of Rousseau's "noble savage" at the end of the day- or the "patriarchy," roughly corresponding to the demiurge of the Gnostics. from America because every one of them has a 4.0. A look at gradeinflation.com gives some support to this anecdote, showing the steady rise in GPA's all the way back to 1983. What would be the cumulative effect be of education becoming slowly uncoupled from actual competence over a generation or two? I think we are seeing it.