Dictionary.com says: “Polemic definition: a controversial argument, as one against some opinion, doctrine, etc..” Taxpayer supported and left-leaning National Public Radio (NPR) has as its chief executive officer (CEO) Katherine Maher. Uri Berliner served NPR for over decades, including as a senior business editor. Berliner’s politics are self-described as left-leaning who in his words: “I fit the NPR mold.” But Berliner recently authored an op-ed via the Bari Weiss led Free Press media platform. That Free Press op-ed headline said: “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” The subheading said: “Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.” Not long after that op-ed kicked up a firestorm, Berliner was suspended. One would presume that CEO Maher was involved in that decision on Berliner. NPR has periodically reported on manufactured housing related topics, as have others in mainstream media. NPR is thus a useful specific case study for understanding modern media and its role in modern American society. Additionally, since NPR is taxpayer supported, it has additional ramifications.
From the article linked here whose title included this phrase: “If You Tell a Lie Big Enough and Keep Repeating It, People Will Eventually Come to Believe the Lie” comes the following pull quotes.
A) ‘Tell them what you will say. Say it with convincing evidence. Tell them what you told them.’ Paraphrase of junior high school tip in English class on how to write a good paper or article.
B) “Forget what they told you. [If] You want the truth, follow the money.” – Roxanne Bland, author.
C) “The system is rigged.” – Senator Bernie Sanders (VT-DS), Donald J. Trump (as candidate and as the 45th President of the United States, R), Senator Elizabeth Warren (MA-D), along with a host of other candidates, officials, and pundits.
D) “Propaganda works” on “most Americans.” – Guy Benson, author.
E) “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” – Joseph Goebbels, Jewish Virtual Library.
F) “The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” —Vladimir Lenin.
G) “Paltering is the active use of truthful statements to convey a misleading impression. Across 2 pilot studies and 6 experiments, we identify paltering as a distinct form of deception.” Harvard (2017). “Paltering is the active use of selective truthful statements to mislead. The term as applied in psychology and mediation studies was developed by researchers at the John F. Kennedy School of Government in the late 2000s. The first known use of palter to describe acting insincerely or deceitfully was in the 1580s.” – Wikipedia.
H) “Facts are stubborn things.” More specifically: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” ― John Adams, GoodReads.
I) “See to it that no one deceives you.” – Jesus, 24:4. “You cannot serve both God and money.” Jesus, Mt 6:24.
Those notions are useful in setting the stage for the report linked below made available to the Masthead on MHProNews by the Daily Signal in Part I, below. Part II will provide additional information with a focused Masthead analysis and commentary.
Part I
With NPR’s Left-Wing Bias Again Exposed, Its Taxpayer Subsidies Draw Renewed Scrutiny
Jarrett Stepman / @JarrettStepman / April 18, 2024
Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of the book “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Send an email to Jarrett
It’s been a week since a liberal, 25-year veteran editor for National Public Radio published a damning online essay about the network’s biased, left-wing coverage, and there appears to have been no self-reflection by NPR’s powers that be.
Uri Berliner, who authored the essay, was chastised by NPR employees, suspended, and finally submitted his resignation Wednesday.
I can’t say I’m surprised.
With apologies to Berliner, who said that he’d rather see the taxpayer-subsidized network reform itself and get back to serving the broader public, rather than be defunded, he hasn’t quite come to grips with the depth of the problem.
The West’s compromised and radical institutions won’t reform willingly. They are part of a tightly knit, self-reinforcing system that uniformly rewards left-wing ideology and punishes even mild dissent.
If you want a look at where NPR is headed, just take a look at the social media posts of the network’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, who took over at the helm in January.
Old media posts and media appearances paint an almost ludicrously predictable picture of what NPR has become. The portrait they create is of a woman who seems more like an AI bot crafted by Google employees, rather than a real person.
She has backed every left-wing cause, cheered every Democratic presidential candidate with pom-poms, and riffed on the news with every kind of woke inanity you can think of.
Follow journalist Christopher Rufo on X for the latest: https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo.
Here are some of the more noteworthy reveals.
This is what she said about “truth” at a 2022 TED Talk, when she was the CEO of Wikimedia.
“Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done,” she said. “That is not to say that the truth doesn’t exist or to say that the truth isn’t important. Clearly, the search for the truth has led us to do great things … [but] one reason we have such glorious chronicles to the human experience and all forms of culture is because we acknowledge there are many different truths.
Here’s the new NPR CEO Katherine Maher (and former chief executive of Wikipedia) explaining that “the truth” is an outdated concept.
Everyone can have their own truth:
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 17, 2024
Maher is all aboard the relativistic “my truth” train. She said she cracked down on the “free and open” ethos at Wikipedia because it was too often based on a “white male, Westernized construct” that led to “exclusion of communities and languages.”
It’s no surprise then that she’s not a huge fan of the problematic First Amendment, which she saw as the “No. 1 challenge” to combating what she called “disinformation and misinformation.”
She said she coordinated with the government to suppress content related to COVID-19 and the 2020 election.
As a quick reminder to our nation’s cultural elites like Maher: The First Amendment was designed to protect free speech, not because all speech is good, but because it was the best way to protect the truth.
Why does the head of a major media organization seem to have a problem with a constitutional amendment protecting the free press?
The problem at NPR isn’t just the woman in charge.
If anything, it seems like the most empowered employees want to do more to smash dissent and control the narrative. Are these employees in the majority? Who knows, but given how quickly Berliner was purged, it doesn’t take a lot to surmise that people like him aren’t going to be listened to behind closed doors.
So, what can be done to fix NPR? I’d suggest that asking for the network to fire Maher might be satisfying, but won’t ultimately solve the underlying problem.
If NPR were to fire her, she would likely just be replaced by another AI chatbot with similar, but perhaps slightly stealthier opinions.
Many on the Left believe—correctly—that their position within America’s most elite institutions is unassailable. Speaking the generic, DEI-laden language of the institutions is how one makes it to the top in the institutional rat race.
This is why the nation’s most elite private high schools are often even more absurdly left-wing than public schools. They know that the path to success doesn’t just come from grades, or accomplishments, or genuine merit. Instead, it comes from a combination of immutable and select mutable personal characteristics and from relentlessly being on the right side of the “narrative” at all times.
That’s how revolutionary regimes often operate, whether it be France in the late 18th century or the Soviet Union in the early 20th century.
Maher played that game flawlessly, which is why today she is NPR’s CEO.
“The new CEO of NPR is part of a rising cohort of affluent, left-wing, female managers who dominate HR and DEI,” Rufo wrote for City Journal. “… They value safety over liberty, censorship over debate, and relativism over truth.”
In some rare cases, somebody different rises to the top and is willing to defy institutional left-wing gatekeepers. That’s the Elon Musk model and why his takeover of Twitter, now X, was such a big deal.
That’s unlikely to happen with NPR, as it’s more directly connected to higher education and the federal government.
The only way forward for positive “change” at NPR is to not only pull the plug on the network’s direct funding, but also to cut off the flow of grant money that has floated many of its most ridiculous programs.
Out of the hundreds of millions of dollars Congress appropriates to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a significant amount is appropriated to local NPR affiliates through grants.
Maybe if NPR is totally defunded and forced to operate on its own, the network will have to finally reckon with its narrow, shrunken audience.
BREAKING: Rep. Jim Banks to introduce legislation to defund NPR. The American people should not be subsiding a CEO who is explicitly anti-truth, anti-speech, and anti-First Amendment. https://t.co/qndvhuPExw
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 18, 2024
Let’s stop using taxpayers’ money on media organizations with leaders that treat the First Amendment as if it’s problematic. Is that too much to ask? ##
Part II – Additional Information with More Masthead on MHProNews Analysis and Commentary
Like it or not, it is useful and arguably beneficial to understand that media is routinely biased. For years, MHProNews has provided a link and/or a variation of the graphic like the revised one below for some years.
MHProNews has been quite clear that there are often valid insights from sources that span the left-right divide. For instance, antitrust issues may be more pronounced in some cases from left-leaning sources. That noted, there are certainly concerns that should be explored about left-leaning (or, for that matter, right-leaning) sources that may engage in paltering, posturing, or providing their readers/viewers/listeners with noble sounding platitudes that don’t stand up to scrutiny.
At least two of the above reports involve self-proclaimed leftists who are either called into questions others on the left and/or who came to the realization that their leftist beliefs didn’t stand up to scrutiny.
What is fascinating is that the progressive ideology has been plied into numerous aspects of our society for well over a century. Yet, the problems our society faces in some obvious ways are deteriorating. See the report linked below.
The importance of honest media in a society like ours is important if not essential. To learn more, see the reports linked above and below.
Manufactured housing is underperforming in part because of a nexus of institutional failures. Mainstream media has a role to play in solving this conundrum. Some may argue that the status quo is preferred by influential or powerful elites.
- “The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” —Vladimir Lenin.
- “Paltering is the active use of truthful statements to convey a misleading impression.”
- “The system is rigged.”
At the present time, based upon known and proven home building methods, there is an evidence-based case to be made that the affordable housing crisis can’t be solved without millions of more manufactured homes. Are other forms of housing useful too? Of course. But only inherently affordable housing can solve the affordable housing crisis. Mainstream media, operations like NPR and all others, have a role to play in shining the light of truth on these issues and controversies.
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Stay tuned for more of what is ‘behind the curtains’ as well as what is obvious and in your face reporting that are not found anywhere else in MHVille. It is all here, which may explain why this is the runaway largest and most-read source for authentic manufactured home “News through the lens of manufactured homes and factory-built housing” © where “We Provide, You Decide.” © ## (Affordable housing, manufactured homes, reports, fact-checks, analysis, and commentary. Third-party images or content are provided under fair use guidelines for media.) (See Related Reports, further below. Text/image boxes often are hot-linked to other reports that can be access by clicking on them.)
By L.A. “Tony” Kovach – for MHProNews.com.
Tony earned a journalism scholarship and earned numerous awards in history and in manufactured housing.
For example, he earned the prestigious Lottinville Award in history from the University of Oklahoma, where he studied history and business management. He’s a managing member and co-founder of LifeStyle Factory Homes, LLC, the parent company to MHProNews, and MHLivingNews.com.
This article reflects the LLC’s and/or the writer’s position, and may or may not reflect the views of sponsors or supporters.
Connect on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/latonykovach
Related References:
The text/image boxes below are linked to other reports, which can be accessed by clicking on them.
