National Public Radio’s Debacle and the ‘Vibe Shift’ – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

If you haven’t read it, you’ve missed what every journalist in America has probably read: a brutal column on how National Public Radio (NPR) lost America’s trust, written last week by a 25-year NPR veteran, Uri Berliner.

It may be shaping up as a game-changer, but not because it exposed anything new.  It didn’t, but this time, most every national news outlet in America reported on Berliner’s column and, more surprisingly, didn’t deny much of it.

Berliner’s column seems to be cranking the spotlight on mainstream media up to full blast. NPR may be among the very worst, but much of what Berliner wrote applies to much of the traditional news media. Hopefully, all media will get the message – in Illinois, too.

NPR, as Berliner describes, is hostile to viewpoint diversity, staffed entirely by leftists and woke to the point of silliness. NPR, he says, embraced a knee-jerk, activist, scolding posture, representing the “distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”

Most importantly, Berliner describes how NPR willfully distorted the news. It peddled the Russia collusion hoax, rejected any coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop and its evidence of Biden family corruption, and censored criticism of establishment views on Covid.

That’s what most Americans already know, which is part of Berliner’s point. NPR’s audience has consequently shrunk to a niche on the far left, he explained. For NPR, Berliner says, that’s “devastating both for its journalism and its business model.” [Emphasis added.]

People are consuming less news, worsening the financial plight of traditional news media, though the downturn has hit most newer, online sights as well.

Why? Is NPR unique?  Haven’t many other outlets likewise shunned moderates and conservatives?

Of course they have. Take one topic Berliner wrote about as an example – suppression of news of the Hunter Biden laptop. That suppression by NPR and many other outlets in the months prior to the 2020 election is monumentally important because it likely tipped the 2020 election, since Donald Trump lost by a microscopic margin – less than 40,000 votes spread among three or four states. Worse, that suppression was accomplished with the help of dozens of former and current U.S. intelligence officials, as Berliner wrote and many others have documented.

NPR was not alone in suppressing that story. You’ll find virtually nothing, for example, in the national news pages of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times about Biden corruption or the laptop. For that matter, you’ll never find much of anything on those pages embarrassing to the Biden Administration. The Atlantic was another offender. Anne Applebaum, its most prominent writer, smugly said they ignored the laptop story because they didn’t find it “relevant” or “interesting.”

Then we have WBEZ in Chicago and other local NPR affiliates. Aside from their own bias to the left, they should be held directly accountable for what they broadcast, especially their primary content that comes from NPR.

Where is their condemnation of NPR or demands that it reform, from those affiliates or other journalists?

Nothing so far, with one exception. That’s a Chicago Tribune editorial praising Berliner. (The Tribune’s editorial side is far more balanced than its news side.)

Since Berliner’s article, NPR’s embarrassed itself further. It suspended Berliner – some answer to the charge that viewpoint diversity isn’t tolerated. Berliner responded by resigning. And NPR’s President and CEO, Katherine Maher, wrote a response to Berliner’s column that substituted whining for rebuttal. It was chiefly “how profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning” Berliner’s column was.

And NPR President Maher is now being outed as almost comically woke and censorious in many stories listing her previous comments, nicely summarized here by City Journal.

Questions must also be directed at the foundations that showered money on WBEZ — $61 million, which was put in less than two years ago to the nonprofit company that took ownership of WBEZ and the Sun-Times. The bias was entirely evident long before then. NPR had long ago openly admitted, for example, to its suppression of the Biden laptop story. Did that not concern those foundations? Are they demanding reforms now?

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Something is happening, and it’s good news. It’s subtle, but big.

It was described in another  recent column that got quite a bit of attention, before the NPR scandal broke, by an author I am not familiar with named Santiago Pliego. It was titled “The Vibe Shift”, which Pliego described as follows:

The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled.

Let the NPR debacle accelerate the Vibe Shift. Hurray for the Vibe Shift.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.