MADNESS: The smell of napalm in the morning!

SATURDAY, APRIL 13, 2024

The NewsHour meets Berliner: Can Blue America's votaries be a tiny bit devious too?

If Stephanie Saul has it right today, so it might possibly seem. On the front page of today's New York Times print edition, her news report starts like this:

State Bans on D.E.I. Prompt Universities to Rebrand Their Efforts

At the University of Tennessee, the campus D.E.I. program is now called the Division of Access and Engagement.

Louisiana State University also rebranded its diversity office after Jeff Landry, a Trump-backed Republican, was elected governor last fall. Its Division of Inclusion, Civil Rights and Title IX is now called the Division of Engagement, Civil Rights and Title IX.

And at the University of Oklahoma, the diversity office is now the Division of Access and Opportunity.

In what appears to be an effort to placate or, even head fake, opponents of diversity and equity programs, university officials are relaunching their D.E.I. offices under different names, changing the titles of officials, and rewriting requirements to eliminate words like “diversity” and “equity.” In some cases, only the words have changed.

That sounds a bit dishonest to us. Online, the dual headlines say this:

With State Bans on D.E.I., Some Universities Find a Workaround: Rebranding
Welcome to the new “Office of Access and Engagement.” Schools are renaming departments and job titles to try to preserve diversity programs.

Education elites have played these kinds of games before. Sometimes, they've done so in ways which have encouraged black kids to stay in their lower-performing urban schools, avoiding the challenges and opportunities found in academic / admission high schools.

(Perhaps with the noblest of intentions, these games were devised so Blue America's education elites could skirt prevailing law.)

Elsewhere, Atlanta teachers and principals staged so-called "erasure parties," doctoring results of statewide testing programs. Fani Willis sent some of them to jail.

In Blus America, we can be devious too. It isn't just the termagant Gutfeld and them, though they are creating an art form.

That said, how about fairness and balance? On page A11 of today's same Times, we read about Kari Lake's flip on abortion rights in the state she loves. 

Online, the headlines read like this. We'd call those headlines accurate, though perhaps a bit soft and mild-mannered:

Kari Lake Backs G.O.P. Effort to Drop 1864 Abortion Law in Favor of 15-Week Ban
The Senate candidate and Donald Trump ally is supporting a handful of state Republicans who have backed away from a near-total ban that was upheld by the State Supreme Court this week.

After checking all the links, we would (almost) agree to let it be said that Lake is lying when she says that she never meant to say what she actually said about the "incredible law" she plainly endorsed all through her failed Senate campaign in 2022—the incredible law from 1864, the incredible law which allowed virtually zero abortions.

(We'd almost let that word be used. We might be more inclined to say that it's very, very, very hard to believe that Candidate Lake is telling the truth—and that you, the voters of Arizona, have to decide what you think about that.

As it turns out, we humans are sometimes inclined to be less than perfectly honest! In fact, we can even remember the time when Rachel Maddow swore, for the first half hour of a Monday night, that she had no idea why she'd been challenged, on Meet the Press about her (plainly inaccurate) statements about the gender wage gap.

As of 8 o'clock that Monday night, it was very, very, very hard to believe that she was telling the truth. It remains very hard to believe today—but in Blue America, we faithful votaries almost surely tended to gulp her denial down.

Are we humans also wired to love the smell of napalm in the morning? Perhaps to resort to our fighting words, eager to bring on our next wholly necessary war?

Are we possibly wired to march off to war? In his lengthy introduction to Robert Fagles' 1990 translation of the Iliad, the late Professor Knox speaks at some length about Hector, the upstanding hero of Troy.

As we'll note on Monday, Hector was a family man—though viewed from the modern perspective, perhaps just up to a point. That said, also this, Professor Knox observing:

[T]he Iliad is a poem that celebrates the heroic values war imposes on its votaries...And though the warriors of the Iliad often rail against their condition, they can also enjoy to the full war's intoxicating excitements. 

They revel in the exultation of victory as they taunt a fallen adversary with threats of exposure of his corpse, or with a bitter sarcasm, as when Patroclus mocks one of his victims, who, his face crushed by a stone, dives from his chariot: "Look what a springy man, a nimble, flashy tumbler!" (Book 16, verse 868). 

Even Hector, by far the most civilized of all the warriors at Troy, can list with pride and a kind of joy his credentials as a seasoned fighter.

"War—l know it well, and the butchery of men.
Well l know, shift to the left, shift to the right
my tough tanned shield. That's what the real drill,
defensive fighting means to me. l know it all,
how to charge in the rush of plunging horses,
l know how to stand and fight to the finish,
twist and lunge in the War-god's deadly dance." 

By far, he was the most civilized of all the warriors who fought on the plains outside Troy. But even he may have reveled in taunting his opponents with bitter sarcasm, as quite a few commenters did in response to Kevin Drum's recent post about the quality of work being done at NPR.

Go ahead—scroll through the comments! Right from the opening exchange, you can see the kinds of taunting and name-calling which come from our more self-assured and war-inclined players, even over here within our own blue tribe. 

They call NPR's Uri Berliner names. They direct bitter sarcasm at the honesty and the intellectual ability of those who don't agree with their own perfect views, right down to the commas and colons.

Our blue tribe loves its fighting words—our smell of napalm in the morning. In our view, this behavior tends to be ugly, stupid, counterproductive—and yet, as Ezra Pound once said, And yet, this is you.

In the essay under review, NPR's Uri Berliner said that he voted against Donald Trump twice. We can't say whether that statement is true, but our votaries hurried right past it.

Barely stopping to smell the flowers, they rushed ahead to call-and-response performances of this familiar type:

COMMENTER: Sounds like Berliner is just another right-winger whining about "liberal bias" in the media, which usually turns out to be a bias toward the truth. The fact that he's "business editor" at NPR supports my view.

RESPONSE: Agreed. He’s just another MAGA asshole whining about easily and previously debunked news. Maybe he would be happier working for Fox News. I know as someone who occasionally gives my local NPR station some money, I personally would be much happier if he worked someplace else.

Dumb and angry all the way down, as we all are at times. That said, they're very, very sure of themselves. They seem to be sure that know what they know, and they seem to be sure that what they know is automatically true.

They seem to know that what they know is always and everywhere true. Everyone else is an asshole. There's no such thing as a different perspective—possibly a mistaken or imperfect perspective, but a different perspective laid out in good faith.

We humans have always been wired this way. We continue to behave in such ways until we train ourselves not to. 

We start our wars in such pleasing ways. We love our "fighting words."

For ourselves, we found little to work with in Berliner's essay, other than a list of the gent's opinions about the coverage of several major specific topics over the past seven years. In our view, Berliner thoroughly glossed those various topics—for example, saying this:

BERLINER (4/9/24): Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency. 

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff. 

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming. 

There's a lot of hustle in that passage—flowery attempts at persuasion substituting for the tedium of  evidence. We refer to the verbal hustle about "catnip," and about "hitching our wagon" to an "ever-present muse" who created "the drumbeat" of the NPR's reporting.

It's hard to know what such language specifically means. In the meantime, riddle us this:

If Schiff was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, why wouldn't NPR have interviewed him on various occasions down through the many months or even perhaps through the years? 

Was something "wrong" with those interviews? Were other perspectives presented in other interviews—in other interviews which may then have been fact-checked and critiqued?

Schiff was interviewed 25 times? Over a period of how many years? Berliner tells an engaging tale, but he's sliding past information. He links to exactly one interview with Schiff—a total, complete nothingburger.

That passage, penned by Berliner himself, is an example of extremely weak journalism. Along the way, though, he did say this:

He did say that there were 87 Democrats on staff at central NPR—and exactly zero Republicans!

We can't verify that census, but those numbers do leap off the page. And according to the New York Times, this was the more general critique Berliner advanced in his essay:

NPR in Turmoil After It Is Accused of Liberal Bias

[...]

Uri Berliner, a senior business editor who has worked at NPR for 25 years, wrote in an essay published Tuesday by The Free Press, a popular Substack publication, that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.”

Mr. Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, castigated NPR for what he said was a litany of journalistic missteps around coverage of several major news events, including the origins of Covid-19 and the war in Gaza. He also said the internal culture at NPR had placed race and identity as “paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

Is it true? In the years after Trump came into our lives, did “people at every level of NPR coalesce around the progressive worldview?” 

More specifically, did the internal culture at NPR place race and identity as “paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace?"

Based on Berliner's essay, we can't answer those questions. He never makes a real attempt to support such claims in a specific way based on actual evidence concerning NPR's treatment of some specific topic.

That said, we'd been puzzled by a report on the PBS NewsHour dating back to late January. The report was broadcast by two journalists we're inclined to view quite favorably:

Trump deploys racist tactics as Biden rematch appears likely
Laura Barron-Lopez, Amna Nawaz. The PBS NewsHour, January 26, 2024.

We watched that broadcast in real time. To read the transcript or watch the tape, you can just click here.

We thought the journalism put on display that night was straight outta kindergarten. To our surprise and disappointment, the journalism seemed to have come from a Kindergarten Press Corps.

That said, the journalism served to advance the type of progressive, race-and-identity aligned cultural outlook to which that passage in the Times refers. Beyond that, it also tended to support our own Blue America's use of a world-famous fighting word.

In fairness, even Hector of the shining helmet loved the thrill of war! We'll return tomorrow to tell you what PBS said.

Spoiler alert! The assessments we offer tomorrow will be perfect, complete and true. All other assessments will be offered by assholes who are being dishonest and are liars, just as it ever has been.

Black kids were encouraged to stay in less challenging urban schools! We think of the contempt Willa Cather's narrator directed toward the Anglo men who refused to act on their attraction to the remarkably vibrant, good and decent, very beautiful immigrant girls. 

Tomorrow:  They found one man who said it!