Is There More or Does He Just See It?

You might find this post by William Deresiewicz at UnHerd interesting:

“NPR,” I put it to a friend a few years later, “is my home in America.”

And that’s the way it was for over 30 years, through the advent of Talk of the Nation and This American Life, of On the Media and Here & Now. NPR became the soundtrack of my life — when I drove, cooked, ate, exercised, did laundry — three or four hours a day, every day.

That is, until around the beginning of last year. My discontent had been building since the previous summer, the summer of the George Floyd protests. It was clear from the beginning that the network would be covering the movement not like journalists but advocates. A particular line was being pushed. There was an epidemic of police violence against unarmed African-Americans; black people were in danger of being murdered by the state whenever they walked down the street. The protests were peaceful, and when they weren’t, the violence was minor, or it was justified, or it was exclusively initiated by the cops. Although we had been told for months to stay indoors, the gatherings did not endanger public health — indeed, they promoted it. I supported the protests; I just did not appreciate the fact that I was being lied to.

But it wasn’t just that story. Overnight, the network’s entire orientation had changed. Every segment was about race, and when it wasn’t about race, it was about gender. The stories were no longer reports but morality plays, with predictable bad guys and good guys. Scepticism was banished. Divergent opinions were banished. The pronouncements of activists, the arguments of ideologically motivated academics, were accepted without question. The tone became smug, certain, self-righteous. To turn on the network was to be subjected to a program of ideological force-feeding. I was used to the idiocies of the academic Left — I had been dealing with them ever since I started graduate school — but now they were leaking out of my radio.

Nor was it only NPR. One by one, the outlets that I counted on for reliable reporting and intelligent opinion — that I, in some measure, identified with — fell in line. The New York Times, which was already in an advanced state of decay, surrendered completely. Ditto The New Yorker. The Atlantic was drifting in the same direction. Inroads appeared in The New York Review of Books. Satirists whom I admired for their alert sense of irony, their ability to recognise the absurdity at all points of the political spectrum — Stephen Colbert, John Oliver — got the new religion, and started preaching sermons.

I’m not surprised nor do I disagree with his assessment. My question is how could the character of the coverage have escaped him for all these years? I’ve been aware of it for almost 70 years—since I first noticed the tremendous discrepancy between the history I was being taught and what I had learned to be true, both from my travels and other things I’d read. I’m not sure why Mr. Deresiewicz has just experienced his epiphany. To some degree it has the sound of an aging Gen Xer who has just noticed that he’s no longer one of the cool kids and the zeitgeist is leaving him behind.

It didn’t just start last year at NPR or in 2016 for the NYT. Back in the 1980s a friend of mine referred to NPR as “Radio Managua”. When they weren’t promoting the point-of-view of the Sandinistas, they were promoting the point-of-view of the NEA or the CTU. And, obviously, the propaganda didn’t start in the 1980s—a quick listen to a radio or television news broadcast from the 1960s should be enough to convince you of that.

While I don’t think that the high proportion of propaganda we’re getting just started, I do think it has ratcheted up to a new level over the last several years. I stopped being able to tolerate Fox News a dozen or so years ago and the NYT about the same time and things have just gotten worse since then. Once upon a time there was at least some attempt at journalistic integrity, fairness, and balance. Now such things are not only banished, they’re considered evil.

Seeking out resources that more closely reflect your views, as Mr. Deresiewicz found as his solution, is no solution. You’ve got to read and listen widely. Few have the time. So we’ll have ever smaller tribes and growing dissatisfaction.

As I’ve said before I think part of the solution is to change our libel laws to resemble those of Britain more closely. Then news outlets would stop telling flat-out lies that further their ideological bent out of self-preservation. Another part of the solution is for people to come to a better understanding of what they believe and why they believe it but few examine themselves so honestly.