The Number One Rule When Dealing with Any Organization

We have schools that don’t teach, public health organizations that don’t protect our health, news reporters who are not curious and a Department of “Defense,” an aggressive perpetrator of violence around the world, the world’s biggest bully and propaganda machine. What do each of these institutions have in common? They often fail to do the work they claim to do. Economist Thomas Sowell's advice:

When examining institutions, it is critically important “to distinguish between:

(1) examining issues and institutions in terms of their process characteristics versus

(2) examining them in terms of their proclaimed goals or ideals….

Knowledge and Decisions, Preface to 1996 Edition.

Continue ReadingThe Number One Rule When Dealing with Any Organization

Corporate Media Lies About NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s Ideology

It was totally predictable that the corporate media (mainstream media or MSM) is trying to pretend that there is nothing to see about recent revelations about Katherine Maher, CEO of NPR. They are pretending her illiberal woke-drenched ideology has no relevance to the illiberal woke-drenched ideology of the modern version of NPR. Andrew Sullivan also noticed this cover-up in his recent link-rich article*:

I used to be quite fond of NPR. Each time I’d tune in, I’d be treated to calm, reassuring voices, occasional folk music and high-minded liberalism. Yes, it was biased — but in a tolerable, occasionally hilarious way, still relaying facts about the world, occasionally even letting an always-qualified “conservative” voice on its airwaves. Yes, we used to refer to “All Things Considered” as “All Things Distorted,” but it was a tease, not an indictment.

And so when I read the NYT story about the new NPR CEO, Katherine Maher, being criticized for past tweets that were “embracing liberal causes,” it felt like a blast of ‘90s nostalgia. Who running the MSM doesn’t “embrace liberal causes”? Ditto the WSJ’s description: that the tweets “indicate liberal leanings.” Or the Washington Post, which wrote that Maher’s tweets included calling Tump a “deranged racist” and a photo of her “wearing a Biden hat, or wistfully daydreaming about hanging out with Kamala D. Harris.”

Nothing to see here. Nothing new. Just a liberal CEO getting blasted by a far-right activist (in this case, Chris Rufo), after an NPR stalwart, Uri Berliner, wrote a public critique of NPR. A tale as old as the MSM.

But of course, the MSM is lying — by obfuscating Maher’s politics and her tweets to make her views seem far milder than they are. She is not, in fact, a liberal of any kind. She is — as the tweets and the record prove — a near-parody of an illiberal leftist, dedicated to replacing open and free debate with benign censorship, and to constructing a journalistic regime rooted not in the pursuit of truth but in the urgent task of dismantling “white supremacy.”

Sullivan also noticed that substantial drop-off in NPR audience since 2017, from 11M to about 8M. I'm not in a mood to hear about correlation and causation on these numbers . . .

Continue ReadingCorporate Media Lies About NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s Ideology

More on NPR and Wikipedia

I even have less respect for NPR and Wikipedia today than I did yesterday.

For more on Wikipedia corruption.

For more about NPR's CEO.

Matt Taibbi's take on NPR:

Last week, NPR senior editor Uri Berliner rattled the media world with a tell-all piece in The Free Press, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” He detailed a series of problems, including what he described as a transition from a “liberal bent” to a more “knee-jerk, activist, [and] scolding” posture, representing the “distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.” He also described serious coverage failures surrounding Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and Covid-19.

The ghoul pools in the media world started immediately. It’s one thing for a former employee to out so many serious newsroom problems (including a devastating account of one of NPR’s “best” journalists admitting to being glad to not cover the laptop story, because it “could help Trump”), but it’s rare for a still-working senior employee to drop that kind of bomb. Berliner in fact was hit with a five-day unpaid suspension last Friday, but this wasn’t announced until Tuesday, when I wrote, “The Vegas over/under line on Berliner’s days left has not been released.”

Whatever that line might have been, betting the under would have been smart. Berliner resigned today, taking a direct shot at new CEO Katherine Maher in the process, writing in an email:

I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new C.E.O. whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay
.

Continue ReadingMore on NPR and Wikipedia

The Inversion of the Central Missions of our Sense-Making Institutions

The CEO of NPR was previously the executive director of (the now severely compromised, though still somewhat useful) Wikipedia. Katherine Maher's admission is an important data point--we don't usually get it so clearly from the top in their own words. One after another, our most important sense-making institutions in the United States have abandoned their primary missions, incentivized by tax-funded government cut-outs. Their leadership has become power-mad, narcissistic and arrogant. They see you as a child and they are your self-appointed nanny. It is totalitarianism wrapped in well-coifed elitism. Their vision clashes with the vision of the Founders of this country.

Continue ReadingThe Inversion of the Central Missions of our Sense-Making Institutions