Why NPR Matters

I have known and very occasionally worked with Juan Williams, and I don't want to say much about him. I think Andrew Sullivan is very astute in pointing out the difference between the complex way Williams wrote about racial stereotypes and racial differences early in his career (including in The Atlantic) and the blunt way he now talks about them on Fox News.

I have known and frequently worked with a variety of people at National Public Radio, and I do want to say something about them. The worst aspect of the Williams-NPR imbroglio is that it has allowed Fox and its political allies to position NPR as something it is not, and in the process to jeopardize a part of American journalism we can't afford to lose.

To get these out of the way: First, I think that the NPR leadership made a mistake in appearing to fire Williams in a snit, rather than not renewing his contract, at the next opportunity, because of longstanding differences in journalistic values*. NPR's Vivian Schiller was also wrong to crack that Williams should keep his views of Muslims to "his psychiatrist." Second, I am not a disinterested observer. From the mid 1980s through the mid 1990s, I did regular commentaries for NPR's Morning Edition. (I stopped when I signed on as editor of US News & World Report, a job that I thought made a commentator role inappropriate.) More recently I've made regular appearances on Weekend All Things Considered.

But I care about NPR not because of my minor role as a contributor but because of their major role in the American journalistic landscape. To hear the Fox/DeMint attack machine over the past week, NPR is simply a liberal counterpart to Fox -- a politically minded and opinion-driven organization that is only secondarily interested in gathering news. I believe that the mischaracterization is deliberate, and I know it is destructive and wrong.

The rest of the article is at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/why-npr-matters-long/65068/

all radio stations remaining are FAR more right-wing than NPR ever dreamed of being.

So one supports the so-so because there is no perfect.

I don't need to listen to either.

I find it to be mostly corporatist propaganda dressed up to look "liberal" and intellectual.

The uncritical and excessive coverage of the teabaggers with the narrative that they are a genuinely populist grassroots movement is sort of a dead giveaway.

card to illustrate why npr should not present a liberal viewpoint or criticize the government.

NPR suffers from the same disease that most democratic politicians do these days - trying to straddle the center and have it both ways. This leaves them open to criticism on both flanks. And we know who is going to win the media war. Fair and balanced infotainment and hate rhetoric - coming to a public radio station near you.

Kasich canceled! HA!