PicoBlog

"For instance, when Roe vs. Wade was overturned NPR reporting referred standardly to the side that would call themselves pro-life as “anti-abortion rights activists.” I get how hard finding appropriate nomenclature for all this is. Yet in the immediate days before that decision NPR had been covering efforts at gun control legislation. Never once did they refer to its proponents as “anti-gun rights activists.”

I don't think these are the best examples of NPR's ideological thumbs on the scales. It is definitely more accurate to call the political and cultural movement that is focused entirely around banning and limiting abortions and abortion access as "anti-abortion" rather than "pro life", which was a nice PR marketing term that movement invented for itself decades ago, but "pro life" in a general sense has a lot more meaning than simply being opposed to abortion access and promoting a carry-to-term pregnancy mandate (that in its most "pure" and extreme ends does not even allow for the health and life of the mother), but very noticeably less focused on "quality of life" enhancements and goals outside of carrying a child to term under any circumstance. I get not every movement can be all things at any one point, but the "pro life" movement is 100% focused around abortion access and very few other aspects of promoting "life" to any agreed upon standard of quality, hence "anti-abortion" is a much more accurate moniker for this movement.

"Gun rights", by the same token, is a more or less accurate moniker for the movement that seeks to maximize gun access and ownership. "Anti-gun rights" however, is not so much as the goals of most gun control advocates (ah.. "pro gun control", now there's a much better moniker) is not to eliminate gun rights completely (at least as a mainstream and politically/Constitutionally viable agenda that most credible groups have to organize around versus fantasy outcomes feverishly posted on comments boards) but to impose "controls" on the manufacturing, distribution and ownership of guns, gun types and ammunition, while not so much engaging in the right, or not, to own guns in the abstract sense, it's about modernizing the intent of the 2nd Amendment in a world where guns are not single action musket rifles, and the usage of guns for nefarious means versus "forming a well regulated militia" is much more prevalent and the modern landscape does not seem to much match the Founder's intentions as written - but I digress - the point of the gun control movement is to control the "what and how much" within the confines of the rights versus litigating the rights themselves, hence "pro gun control" is a better description of the movement then "anti-gun rights" since most of these groups are not trying to repeal the 2nd Amendment.

So I think NPR is more or less using better agenda focused language than the "PR" language used by various Groups to describe themselves. A better example of "woke ideology" (sigh, I am growing to hate the term "woke" but we all know what it means at this point, so using it here) in play in various NPR/public radio programming is Mike Pesca's example he used in his podcast to illustrate: a program devoted to "slow train tourism" (a classicly truly niche and nerdy public radio offering if there ever was one - and a complete raison d'etre for public radio in the first place!), basically a guided tour of taking long and slow train rides across various US landscapes and taking the time to enjoy the travel and sightseeing from the train's view that we normally do not get driving or flying - was "reviewed" by a public radio produced show in which the hosts decided the "right take" on this was to completely destroy the nice and nerdy take about the various scenescapes that could be appreciated BECAUSE GENOCIDE HAPPENED HERE OK, the US is built on stolen land so any US citizen merely appreciating the "scenery" is appropriating "stolen views" COLONIALISM, also RACIST because only white people (ostensibly) would be able to afford and want to take "slow trains" for this purpose so it was automatically coded as "white" and therefore "problematic" and needing of "unpacking", etc. It was a nutty and nihilistic take on something that's so on its face inoffensive and completely divorced from culture war topics that they had to work hard to make it one, and very much reflective of the current progressive-left ethos - nothing can be righteously enjoyed or appreciated without the constant either self lashing of the white progressive for the sins of colonization/racism in order to be an "anti-racist white", or the revving up of grievances of non-whites in all topics (few of which of those non-whites seem to be eagerly tuning into public radio to be told that they should find a racial/ethnic grievance in "slow train rides", for example, based on NPR's own demographic audience numbers, let alone - which seems to indicate that not only are the producers of shows like this missing their super liberal/middle/upper middle class white professional audience with this repetitive and intrusive insistence on washing every. friggin. topic. through a now familiar "here's why puppy dogs and ice cream are racist white supremacy colonizing and problematic" "lens", but they are also not really meeting their targeted minority audiences because simply, few to no "regular" persons of any background spend their lives and free time, mental and emotional spaces like this, viewing everything under the sun through an "intersectional"/"anti-racist" "lens" (ugh, more terminology that I've increasingly eye rolled through but here again, we know what it means!), nor desires to have to carry around omipresent guilt/grievance around to "unpack" when they would... rather enjoy the scenery on a slow train ride?

That would have been a much better sample of the way that progressive activist ideological "lenses" have infected various public radio programming than the above examples - and I would add Berliner's cheap shots at the "Russiagate" and "Hunter Biden Laptop Story" that many other posters have provided very well argued defenses of "liberal media's sins" regarding - honestly those asides made me wonder who his audience was, or rather, if The Free Press was imposing some sort of editorial stamp on including those topics as "evidence" of NPR's "wokeness" and unreliability based on TFP's own biases and editorial narratives regarding.

At any rate, Berliner failed to do "actual journalism" in depicting what exactly NPR (the press in general) got "wrong" about these stories given the known facts at the time of those stories, versus Monday morning quarterbacking on revealed facts months/years after the stories, let alone a pretty big handwaving over the circumstances of both stories to where the right wing narrative about both is very much inaccurate and disputable.. Berliner would have been able to make a much better case for a seeped in ideological twist to everything had he not included those very debatable items, which does kind of make me wonder about his own biases...So, he's not wrong, but some of the manner and outlet that he chose are probably seem less conducive to the outcome he claims to desire?

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