NPR News, Huffington Post, GOP

NPR = GOP

Just When You Think You've Heard It All...







Hear the one about the right- wing takeover of NPR News? Too bad this one isn't meant as a joke, at least not intentionally.

Here at the Radio Equalizer, we're keeping an eye on our Huffington Post friends so you don't have to. That's quite a community service, don't you think?

Just in case you were wondering what passes for political discourse over there these days, this piece by Tony Hendra pretty much says it all:

National RePUBLICan Radio 2.0: NPPRR (National Pentagon Press Release Radio)


One thing you can say for our wondrous New-Broom-of-the-System Democrats. They may have folded like a two-dollar suitcase faced with the Caligula in the White House, but at least they got rid of Don Imus.

Well done Democrats!

Not to exhume the Imus issue. But whatever you thought of Imus there was one great thing about having him on the air: you had somewhere to escape from the appalling Steve Inskeep.

Inskreep (sorry can't resist), he who hath never met a progressive he didn't feel compelled to patronize or contradict, replaced the much lamented Bob Edwards a year and a half ago as Morning Edition's co-host, where his smug, condescending drone has become a daily reminder of the Republican drive to garrote the last independent voice in national news.

[excerpted]

But it's not really Inskreep I'm gunning for; rather an insidious phenomenon that's been occurring on his watch. As soon as the Dems took control in January, Morning Edition began to include an almost daily diet of 'behind-the-scenes' Iraq-related news stories (Feith-based perhaps?) so pro-war they made you wonder if there wasn't a Pentagon PR flack embedded with this particular NPR unit.

This is only getting worse. The 'stories' range all over the subject map from the logistical concerns of non-combat units (medical, infrastructure rebuilding, even chaplains) to heartwarming home-front stuff to the trials and lifestyles of Iraqis who work with US forces. There's nothing theoretically wrong with such topics, but the stories all have the pre-packaged uncritical feel of shameless plants. And two relentless messages: A. Iraq is a war like any other, dirty yes, but a just war, justified and justifiable; B. things are going much better than you think, if you'll just stop listening to those lefty naysayers.

Recently, alas, the disease seems to have spread to other NPR news shows I've listened to for years like the stalwart All Things Considered. Predictably on Memorial Day weekend, it went critical. Some coverage was as it should be: memorials of the men and women -- usually agonizingly young -- whose precious lives have been squandered by our latter-day Caligula and the moral sewage in Congress who enable him.

But some coverage did not memorialize. Notably the one place you'd never expect to encounter the plague: This American Life. On Saturday, my favorite NPR show ran what amounted to a 30-minute infomercial for something called the Center for Lessons Learned, a Kansas-based US-military outfit whose mission is to learn from previous conflicts how to 'do the job' better in this one.

[excerpted]


Now it's entirely possible that Cheryl Halpern (CPB's odious rightwing chairman and the likely source of all this pro-war drivel) stationed a Blackwater operative in the studio while Ira was recording, with a pair of high-voltage electrodes millimeters from his testicles. I certainly hope that's the explanation. But you have to wonder which NPR icon will succumb next

So how did these shadowy Republicans manage to take over NPR without anyone on the right noticing? Who knew conservatives could be so cunning? If only the media wars could be won that easily.


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