Free Palestine / Anti-Israel protest, November 4, 2023 (Photo: Can Pac Swire/Flickr)
Consider This podcast pins 'Civil War' on conservatives
Journalists constantly believe their little scandals and dramas are of intense interest to those outside their profession. In fact, the failure to attract a broader audience of every single publication ever founded about the media—remember Inside.com? Brill’s Content? Or the more recent demise of the Daily Beast’s excellent Confider newsletter?—proves that the ability to make non-media people give a shit about the media pretty much died with David Carr.
But occasionally something breaks through.
The bombshell exposé by NPR senior editor Uri Berliner about the degree to which the news radio network has embraced even the extreme end of woke BS got the world talking. And then it got Berliner suspended and then he quit.
One would think that at least for these few moments where the scrutiny of outrage is trained on NPR, the network would be careful at least to pretend to value hearing from both sides.
But a quick listen to its premier podcast, Consider This, reveals no such balance.
On April 19, the show considered the new movie Civil War, the dystopian Alex Garland adventure about American Society in the very near future pulled asunder by competing social and political values.
To explore the legitimate question of whether real life America faces such a disastrous potential, the show brought in an expert: Amy Cooter, director of research at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
At this very moment, there is American violence raging on American TV screens every single night, provided by far left-wing activists protesting not just America’s position on the war in Gaza, but against America itself. Virtually every one of these rallies features chants of “Death to America” and burning American flags. Many rallies feature calls for the elimination not just of Israel, but of Jewish people. Anti-Semitic rhetoric has been constant and there have been several anti-Semitic assaults.
Just yesterday, a Jewish student at Yale University was stabbed in the eye with Palestinian flag; a rabbi at Columbia University today warned Jewish students to leave campus because of ‘extreme antisemitism.’ That’s going on right now in the spring of 2024.
So what does Dr. Cooter cite as the central threat to American law and order? The melee of January 6.
Of course she does.
Anybody who listens to NPR—progressive or conservative—could have predicted that. And that was Berliner’s whole point. In an 11-minute podcast, not a single word was uttered about the hundred or so days of violent riots that took place in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Including the establishment of so autonomous cities like the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle, where lawlessness led to several shootings and deaths. According to Property Claim Services, those riots were the most costly in American history, with damages totaling up to $2 billion.
To be clear, I don’t blame Dr. Cooter for this one-sidedness. She has a well-known point of view (her wounded public resignation from Vanderbilt is well worth the read) and it’s no surprise that someone who studies right-wing violence steers the conversation toward her expertise. But it’s the responsibility of NPR to present a variety of points of view. At least it should be. (The Media Globe reached out to Dr. Cooter and will update this story with her remarks if she chooses to respond.)
No, in this election year, the only threat that NPR can see is January 6, 2021. Those are the people who threaten the social order. Not the rioters of summer 2020. Not the environmental extremists who physically knocked a dozen people to the floor at an event honoring Sen. Lisa Murkowski this week or those who regularly vandalize great works of art and glue themselves to highways. Not the “Death to America” chanters of 2024.
The only threat NPR can see is a threat from the right. Because like NPR‘s new CEO, Katherine Maher, the experts tend to see disturbances by people with whom they agree as noble acts of resistance, not fabric-threatening violence. That’s why Mayer tweeted approvingly about the George Floyd rioters.
I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.
— Katherine Maher (@krmaher) May 31, 2020
It should come as a surprise to no one that in their heart of hearts, NPR sides with left-wing violence and shudders at right-wing violence. This only surprise is that during this week of heightened scrutiny, when even legislators are finally taking a look at the bias that is paid for in part by American taxpayers, NPR doesn’t even pretend to care about what half the country thinks. They don’t welcome an expert on left-wing violence to provide a counterpoint. Conservative thought and conservatives themselves are invisible to NPR. This is an unfixable problem.
I met Uri Berliner through a mutual friend decades ago. When I read of his suspension on my FB page, I didn’t know that he worked at NPR much less in media. But what’s interesting was The Free Press. Berliner was grand. He’d want his gripe somewhere with a name like The L.A. Times or The Boston Globe. But still, he used TFP to speak out against his employer using another media outlet without permission; which I read on another journo’s string, is common. It sounds from the cheap seats like NPR’s been looking for a reason to construct Berliner’s resignation and, naturally, he knew it.