"In his spare time, Parks likes playing, reading and thinking about basketball. He wrote The Washington Post's obituary of legendary women's basketball coach Pat Summitt."
Posted on 07/20/2021 2:53:13 PM PDT by billorites
Yesterday’s NPR article, “Outrage As A Business Model: How Ben Shapiro Is Using Facebook To Build An Empire,” is among the more unintentionally funny efforts at media criticism in recent times.
The piece is about Ben Shapiro, but one doesn’t have to have ever followed Shapiro, or even once read the Daily Wire, to get the joke. The essence of NPR’s complaint is that a conservative media figure not only “has more followers than The Washington Post” but outperforms mainstream outlets in the digital arena, a fact that, “experts worry,” may be “furthering polarization” in America. NPR refers to polarizing media as if they’re making an anthropological discovery of a new and alien phenomenon.
The piece goes on to note that “other conservative outlets such as The Blaze, Breitbart News and The Western Journal” that “publish aggregated and opinion content” have also “generally been more successful… than legacy news outlets over the past year, according to NPR's analysis.” In other words, they’re doing better than us.
Is the complaint that Shapiro peddles misinformation? No: “The articles The Daily Wire publishes don't normally include falsehoods.” Are they worried about the stoking of Trumpism, or belief that the 2020 election was stolen? No, because Shapiro “publicly denounced the alt-right and other people in Trump's orbit,” as well as “the conspiracy theory that Trump is the rightful winner of the 2020 election.” Are they mad that the site is opinion disguised as news? No, because, “publicly the site does not purport to be a traditional news source.”
The main complaint, instead, is that:
By only covering specific stories that bolster the conservative agenda (such as… polarizing ones about race and sexuality issues)… readers still come away from The Daily Wire's content with the impression that Republican politicians can do little wrong and cancel culture is among the nation's greatest threats.
NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy. Moreover, much like the New York Times editorial page (but somehow worse), the public news leader’s monomaniacal focus on “race and sexuality issues” has become an industry in-joke. For at least a year especially, listening to NPR has been like being pinned in wrestling beyond the three-count. Everything is about race or gender, and you can’t make it stop.
Conservatives have always hated NPR, but in the last year I hear more and more politically progressive people, in the media, talking about the station as a kind of mass torture experiment, one that makes the most patient and sensible people want to drive off the road in anguish. A brief list of just a few recent NPR reports:
“Billie Eilish Says She Is Sorry After TikTok Video Shows Her Mouthing A Racist Slur.” Pop star caught on tape using the word “chink” when she was “13 or 14 years old” triggers international outrage and expenditure of U.S. national media funding.
“Black TikTok Creators Are On Strike To Protest A Lack Of Credit For Their Work.” White TikTok users dance to Nicky Minaj lyrics like, “I'm a f****** Black Barbie. Pretty face, perfect body,” kicking off “a debate about cultural appropriation on the app.”
“Geocaching While Black: Outdoor Pastime Reveals Racism And Bias.” Area man who plays GPS-based treasure hunt game requiring forays into remote places and private property describes “horrifying” experience of people asking what he’s doing.
“Broadway Is Reopening This Fall, And Every New Play Is By A Black Writer.” All seven new plays being written by black writers is “a step toward progress,” but critics “will be watching Broadway's next moves” to make sure “momentum” continues.
“She Struggled To Reclaim Her Indigenous Name. She Hopes Others Have It Easier.” It took Cold Lake First Nations member Danita Bilozaze nine whole months to change her name to reflect her Indigenous identity.
“Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It's Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist.” Tom Hanks pushing for more widespread teaching of the Tulsa massacre doesn’t change the fact that he’s built a career playing “white men ‘doing the right thing,’” NPR complains.
Mixed in with Ibram Kendi recommendations for children’s books, instructions on how to “decolonize your bookshelf” and “talk to your parents about racism” (even if your parents are an interracial couple), and important dispatches from the war on complacency like “Monuments And Teams Have Changed Names As America Reckons With Racism, Birds Are Next,” “National” Public Radio in the last year has committed itself to a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the most moralizing, tendentious, humor-deprived, jargon-obsessed segment of American society. Yet without any irony, yesterday’s piece still made deadpan complaint about Shapiro’s habit of “telling [people] what their opinions should be” and speaking in “buzzwords.”
This was functionally the same piece as the recent New York Times article, “Is the Rise of the Substack Economy Bad for Democracy?” which similarly blamed Substack for hurting “traditional news” — and, as the headline suggests, democracy itself — by being a) popular and b) financially successful, which in media terms means not losing money hand over fist. There, too, the reasons for the rise of an alternative media outlet were presented by critics as a frightening, unsolvable Scooby-Doo mystery.
It’s not. NPR sucks and is unlistenable, so people are going elsewhere. People like Shapiro are running their strategy in reverse and making fortunes doing it. One of these professional analysts has to figure this one out eventually, right?
Who listens to NPR?
Librarians, baristas and the gender questioning.
Written by Matt Taibbi, who will never be confused as a “conservative” writer.
This gives me some hope. The likes of Taibbi, Greenwald, Bari Weiss tells me that at least some liberal journos/columnists are not entirely brain-dead and still want to write about reality. I may hate their politics but on the issue of how bad lamestream media is right now, I’m on their side. I’ve just been on this side forever while they’re just coming around to this fact.
I understand from my son that Ben Shapiro is a meme for college age people. They all know who he is and what he is like, even if they are not conservative. NPR otoh… is not a cool meme.
“NPR refers to polarizing media as if they’re making an anthropological discovery of a new and alien phenomenon.”
I made the mistake of reading that while drinking a beverage. Almost lost a keyboard. LOL.
When I ran the President Trump Channel on DISQUS with 275k followers, I noticed that NPR dropped comments on their website. So I opened up the NPR channel on DISQUS.
For a few months, the owners of the NPR channel on DISQUS were conservatives. The libtards had a ton of trouble figuring it out. It was hilarious.
“Who listens to NPR?”
I suspect a lot of college-indoctrinated Karens and Pajama Boys, and otherwise sane men married to Karens.
I learned some acquaintances in their 40’s to 60’s do, when Election 2020 came up, that surprised me. I unfriended one, an old h.s. buddy, sadly.
Many feel they’re more intelligent for it, being trained by a Sesame Street youth. Baaaaaa baaaaaa baaaaaa.
We don’t need to be funding NPR. It’s like the government funding CNN or MSNBC. But I guess the government crossed the Rubicon in November.
That's a "when did you stop beating your wife?" statement.
I listen to National propaganda radio.
I like to know where they are going with their $hit
I listen to NPR all the time. It is the only station that I listen to. I usually have to turn it off when the news comes on because it is nothing but DNC and Woke narrative. Pathetic to the point that I can not torture my ears with it. I will not contribute to NPR for that exact reason. Might as well send a check to the DNC.
One thing to remember is that people respond to emotional levels. NPR broadcasts in a snarky, snobby, holier-than-thou manner and attracts such people. Fox is more in-your-face and even antagonistic so they get people who respond to that. CNN and MSNBC simply broad fear stories and so they get the fearful (demanding safety, cowards) portion of the populace.
Emotional signaling has a lot more to do with response than the content does with many people. Everyone I know that listens to NPR is a snob. That’s their public. The listeners just accept whatever they say on NPR because they dig the emotional level.
"In his spare time, Parks likes playing, reading and thinking about basketball. He wrote The Washington Post's obituary of legendary women's basketball coach Pat Summitt."
BWHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAAA... Hanks told nothing less than the New. York. Times. that he wanted to play ...
Wait for it.
JEFFERSON DAVIS, the President of the Confederate States.
"“I think the best examples of a bad guy that I would jump to be able to play would be Richard III or Iago. I get that.Richard III is this misshapen guy who’s sick of being treated like a dog and he’s got a shot at being the king of England, and Iago lost out on a promotion. But the vast majority of bad guys — what am I going to do, play Loki? No one wants to see me do that.
But I could play Jefferson Davis. The biggest thing I have to consider is: What’s my countenance? I don’t have a great deal of mystery.”
He has had the script for FOUR YEARS! And no one will finance it! LOFL.
I listened to national propaganda radio for decades.
About a year ago, I couldn’t take it anymore and haven’t returned.
But, good for you. It is worthwhile to know one’s enemy. The people who turn a blind eye today toward the hundreds of Jan 6 political prisoners will do the same when the numbers climb into the tens of thousands.
Sorry, but Ben Shapiro is, and has always been controlled opposition. If NPR is playing him up, it is because people have been catching on.
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