It’s Time for NPR to Earn Its Own Funding With Respectable Reporting

I don't want to forced to fund NPR any more than want to be forced to fund Fox News. Uri Berliner served as the senior business editor at NPR from 1999 until his resignation in April 2024. What follows is an excerpt from his article, "Happy Independence Day, NPR." Anyone who has been paying attention knows that he not exaggerating the far-left slide of NPR:

Once fairly evenly divided between liberals, moderates, and conservatives, NPR’s news audience shifted sharply to the left. And by 2023, liberals outnumbered conservatives more than six to one. True to the tote bag cliché, NPR became an accessory for Whole Foods shoppers. Which is sad, because in another era, NPR, and public radio more broadly, developed some of the most creative and entertaining programming anywhere, from Car Talk to This American Life, Planet Money, Radiolab and A Prairie Home Companion.

Thanks in part to this ideological transformation, NPR botched major stories—and damaged its bond with the American people.

To name a couple of prominent examples: It repeatedly insisted that the lab leak theory of Covid had been debunked and it refused to cover Hunter Biden’s laptop. NPR’s reporting on the most contentious issues of the day—climate change, youth gender medicine, and the war in Gaza—leaned on moralizing and emotional certitude more than on rigorous factual analysis.

Embracing the mantras of the Great Awokening, NPR became a caricature of itself with headlines like these:

Microfeminism: The Next Big Thing in Fighting the Patriarchy

Which Skin Color Emoji Should You Use? The Answer Can Be More Complex than You Think

Black Women’s Groups Find Health and Healing on Hikes, But Sometimes Racism, Too

Bringing Diversity to Maine’s Nearly All-White Lobster Fleet

Diet Culture Can Hurt Kids. This Author Advises Parents to Reclaim the Word ‘Fat’

These Drag Artists Know How to Turn Climate Activism into a Joyful Blowout

Continue ReadingIt’s Time for NPR to Earn Its Own Funding With Respectable Reporting

FB Rant About the Many People Who Cling to Legacy News

On FB: I offered this to someone:

"If you keep sticking closely to legacy news as your primary information ecosystem, you will stay stuck where you are."

Here's the comment I received in return:

I've read and checked the stuff you cite. It is garbage. It is not factual, it is not truthful, it is not honest. When you first start posting this stuff, I looked under the hood. I read what they cited, including papers published in journals. I googled and found the stuff they screenshot and did not link to. I did my own research. And I found that the folks you are relying on consistently misrepresented the sources they cited. And by misrepresented, I don't mean minor errors. Indeed, a couple of times the author of a work being cited specifically called out the misrepresentation of their work.

Your insistence that I stick too closely to "legacy news" for my information is a statement made without any knowledge about what I read and rely on. I believe that I read a wider range of original sources than you do. I know that I read them with a whole lot more care than you read yours.

So I offered the following:

Did you take a stand against teenage girls being told by "experts" to cut off their breasts or getting permanently sterilized with "puberty blockers"? Did you raise your voice when males started invading women's sports? Where have you been on the issue of all of those Asian students who have been kept out of Ivy League Schools due to DEI? Why were you silent when 51 deep state operatives swung the election to Biden re the Hunter Biden Laptop? Did you shout it from the rafters when it was clear that Joe Biden was completely incompetent to serve as dog catcher? Didn't you sit on your hands during all those Biden pardons, including Fauci? I don't remember you ever expressing concern about the vast censorship-industrial complex that has been exposed by the Twitter Files and beyond, based on a massive factual record discussed in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. And what about "open the gates" unvetted immigration that has been destroying communities--denied by the the same Biden Whitehouse that was allowing it? Where have you been for the BIG issues for the past four years? I know. You've hanging out with your tribe. That's why I say that you cling to legacy news. I voted for Biden, but then I figured what was happening and I criticized the fuck out of him. I went counter-narrative on that story and others. I've been doing what one is supposed to do: Try to make sense of the world regardless of what one's "tribe" thinks. And I don't wait for permission from the thoroughly corrupted legacy news outlets or my tribe before I start voicing my concerns.

Continue ReadingFB Rant About the Many People Who Cling to Legacy News

Discrimination Against Certain Writers …

Is the pipeline to success open to all good fiction writers in the U.S.? Apparently not.

Charlie Kirk comments on the statistics offered by Matthew Schmitz:

Why are young men the most conservative they've been in decades? Because they grew up under liberalism, and they know its only unifying principle is constant anti-white and anti-male discrimination.

Need proof? Not a single white male born after 1984 has published a work of fiction in the New Yorker, America's most famous literary magazine. Did they all forget how to write? Of course not. They're being kept out because of their race and sex.

The left assumed young men would simply embrace being dispossessed and hated. They were wrong.

Continue ReadingDiscrimination Against Certain Writers …

A Tale of Two Informational Ecosystems

For years it has been increasingly difficult for me to have a give-and-take conversation with a Democrat. I've voted almost entirely with the Democrats all my life, and I remain committed to what were, more or less, the Democratic values that were known and accepted by the far majority of Democrats 10 to 15 years ago: anti-war, anti-censorship, don't judge people by irrelevant characteristics like the way they look, deference to the family re how to raise children, etc.

Now it is almost impossible to talk. My guiding assumption is that almost all people think and act rationally based upon what they know and believe. We live in two primary informational ecosystems, however, and the one embraced by most self-proclaimed modern day Democrats has ever-fewer connection points with those who are not in that tribe. It is for that reason that I have, indeed, been posting X links to my FB page, to the the dismay of what turns out to be a smallish group of very loud people who respond almost entirely with ad hominem attacks. I also receive many private messages thanking me for sharing these posts, many of these also adding that they can't "like" or res-hare my links because of social and economic repercussions. Such a sad state of affairs.  BTW, Elon Musk has encouraged the sharing of X posts to those who are still trapped in the Matrix:

I try to explain what I'm doing on FB and why, but it's difficult to see much progress. In this way, the resistance to free speech and fear of wide-open discussion seems so much like a religion! Here's one of my recent FB posts:

If you eat shitty food, your body will suffer. If you ingest shitty information, you will act "rationally" on the basis of that bad information. If you are extremely smart, you will think and act extremely well on behalf of that shitty information. There are thousands of Iago-equivalents on on the federal payroll. Their job is to insidiously gain control of your brain so that (in the case of modern-day Democrats) you'll become pro-censorship, pro-war and and a big believer in race-essentialism (among many other things). In short, you'll become the opposite of what you were 10 years ago, you won't know why you did the 180 and you won't even be concerned that you have betrayed many of your deepest convictions.

Before you weigh in on any issue of national importance, the first question you need to ask yourself is whether your world view has been hijacked by US censorship and propaganda. The "misinformation" and "malinformation" system is extremely sophisticated, developed over the decades by deep state experts. Based on recent disclosures, legacy media have been significantly funded by USAID and other federal sources for many years, going back to Project Mockingbird and beyond. Whether you are "smart" has nothing to do with it. Your only hope is to read widely and read news sources that conflict with each other so you can weigh the evidence for yourself. This will take too much work for many people. They will get fatigued and stick with U.S. approved "news" sources and they are the most over-confident people here on FB.

Continue ReadingA Tale of Two Informational Ecosystems