Tag Archives: NPR

NPR Clarifies Disinformation Team’s Job Will Be To Spread More Disinformation

Posted on July 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

From The Babylon Bee:

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — National Public Radio faced criticism last week following the announcement of a Disinformation Reporting Team but was quick to clarify that its role is to spread more disinformation rather than prevent it.

“The job of a journalist is to root out disinformation and report only based on reliable sources, which we already pretend to do,” said NPR’s Chief National Editor Vickie Walton-James. “So we’ve decided to go in a new direction and muddy the waters completely.”

“Don’t worry!” she continued. “This isn’t some 1984 thing where we make ourselves out to be the arbiter of truth. Instead, we’ve hired chaos agents to sow discord and destabilize every institution that threatens our government benefactors.”

“So relax!” she added.

Critics have claimed this explanation does nothing to quell fears that NPR is working as an unofficial arm of the U.S. government to run interference for politicians and further undermine journalistic integrity.

“Why are we funding this organization again?” asked Sen Ted Cruz who was promptly booed by Democrats for speaking.

NPR’s disinformation team responded to Sen Ted Cruz with claims that he is a space dinosaur embroiled in a sordid love affair.

https://babylonbee.com/news/npr-clarifies-disinformation-teams-job-will-be-to-spread-more-disinformation

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NPR Trashes Free Speech. A Brief Response, by Matt Taibbi

Posted on August 31, 2021 | Leave a comment

Of course a government-funded media organ is going to have no fondness for free speech. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:

In an irony only public radio could miss, “On the Media” hosts an hour on the perils of “free speech absolutism” without interviewing a defender of free speech.
John Stuart Mill, who was apparently not available for a recent On The Media panel

The guests for NPR’s just-released On The Media episode about the dangers of free speech included Andrew Marantz, author of an article called, “Free Speech is Killing Us”; P.E. Moskowitz, author of “The Case Against Free Speech”; Susan Benesch, director of the “Dangerous Speech Project”; and Berkeley professor John Powell, whose contribution was to rip John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty as “wrong.”

That’s about right for NPR, which for years now has regularly congratulated itself for being a beacon of diversity while expunging every conceivable alternative point of view.

I always liked Brooke Gladstone, but this episode of On The Media was shockingly dishonest. The show was a compendium of every neo-authoritarian argument for speech control one finds on Twitter, beginning with the blanket labeling of censorship critics as “speech absolutists” (most are not) and continuing with shameless revisions of the history of episodes like the ACLU’s mid-seventies defense of Nazi marchers at Skokie, Illinois.

The essence of arguments made by all of NPR’s guests is that the modern conception of speech rights is based upon John Stuart Mill’s outdated conception of harm, which they summarized as saying, “My freedom to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.”

Because, they say, we now know that people can be harmed by something other than physical violence, Mill (whose thoughts NPR overlaid with harpsichord music, so we could be reminded how antiquated they are) was wrong, and we have to recalibrate our understanding of speech rights accordingly.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Media, Politics, Propaganda

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Will NPR Now Officially Change Its Name to National Propaganda Radio? by Edward Curtin

Posted on September 10, 2019 | 1 comment

Anybody who is surprised that government-owned media tout the government line probably doesn’t belong on this website. From Edward Curtin at antiwar.com:

Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to “court the compatible left.” He knew that drawing liberals and leftists into the CIA’s orbit was the key to efficient propaganda. Right-wing and left-wing collaborators were needed to create a powerful propaganda apparatus that would be capable of hypnotizing audiences into believing the myth of American exceptionalism and its divine right to rule the world. The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites.

Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively covers this in her 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters, and Joel Whitney followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, with particular emphasis on the complicity between the CIA and the famous literary journal, The Paris Review. By the mid-1970s, as a result of the Church Committee hearings, it seemed as if the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. had been caught in flagrante delicto and disgraced, confessed their sins, and resolved to go and sin no more. Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media (The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world. It seemed as if all would be hunky-dory now with the bad boys purged from the American “free” press. Seemed to the most naïve, that is, by which I mean the vast numbers of people who wanted to re-stick their heads in the sand and believe, as Ronald Reagan’s team of truthtellers would announce, that it was “Morning in America” again with the free press reigning and the neo-conservatives, many of whom had been “converted” from their leftist views, running things in Washington.

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