Here we are on the third day already. Times flies when you’re writing thank you notes — about which you’ll hear more later.
When we first settled on a week for our fundraiser, the news about NPR was all over the place. And a lovely comeuppance it was. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving entity. At the time we considered making the whole week a NOT-NPR bash. It would’ve been a slam-dunk as more and more of the underbelly of the elitist National PoliticallyCorrect Radio was exposed. Ugly flesh, that underbelly.
For those readers in Europe, and any aliens who have landed in the US since the villainy of National Public Radio was revealed, here are the basics of the original incident:
Juan Williams is a centrist Democrat journalist. He is also black. In that role as a black liberal reporter he worked for the taxpayer-supported leftist organ, National Public Radio. But in addition to his day job, Williams also had a gig with Fox News, serving as part of their “fair-and-balanced” claim. This side job was derided by other liberals. How could he sully himself by appearing with those reprobates at the criminally irresponsible Fox News. For shame! Given the split in world views and the fearfulness of the Left, it was only a matter of time before Williams would’ve been fired. But first they had to come up with righteous outrage and it had to be fueled by some moral turpitude on Williams’ part. Let me amend that. The righteous outrage was already present due to Williams’ daring to appear on Fox; what they needed was proof of his unfitness for public service.
So Mr. Williams himself gave our government-supported “public” radio enterprise the perfect excuse to boot his gluteus maximus into next year. In an interview with Fox’s Bill O’Reilly program (O’R is loved or reviled with great fervor depending on where you stand in the political spectrum), Williams admitted that when he gets on an airplane and sees that other passengers are in Muslim costumes, it makes him nervous. The average person’s reaction to this statement was a relieved echo: “yeah, me too”.
But National Public Radio doesn’t live in the real world. In fact, it has been evolving into a mouthpiece for the Utopian Left for many years. The ‘coverage’ of news is more overtly slanted every year. Most folks even slightly to the right politically find the reportage on NPR either laughable or painful, depending on their own reaction to slanted stories or outright ugly statements about their foes.
Back when I bothered listening on the way home from work, there must have been a Republican in the Oval Office. I know this to be the case because the stories about homelessness were nightly features. You could almost speak the dialogue along with the interviewer. Same thing for the news from the Middle East. Can you say “Poor Palestinians” vs. “Evil Israel”? That was the extent of the coverage. It was then that my middle son began to call “Morning Edition” — their three-hour program broadcast on local FM stations — “Morning Sedition”. The evening news, “All Things Considered”, he dubbed “All The Things We Care to Consider”.NPR became more and more offensive. In fact, it was partly responsible for driving many of its (now-former) listeners into a more conservative point of view as their obvious slant on the happenings of the day grew more and more strident. Think of Obama on steroids and you have the flavor. Stale and predictable news offered up with clichés. Talking points from the Democrat National Committee would have seemed centrist by comparison. Their hatred of us regular folks became palpable.
Looking back on it, I can see they had a captive audience. AM stations can be hard to tune accurately in the car. Nor did AM radio offer, back before the advent of Rush Limbaugh, anything of substance to counter NPR’s “Leftist views on the news”. Thus many people were more or less ‘forced’ to listen in that long commute from home to work and back or listen to music or sit in silence. Surely the growth of The Teaching Company, with their tapes of college-level educational courses, had much to do with people’s desire to fill that time with something more useful and less predictably arrogant than NPR’s offerings. The courses provided information; they filled in gaps in areas people had missed during their college years with engaging lectures. They made the dead time of that commute more lively. I intuit that the Teaching Company’s products plus the eventual advent of talk radio has caused a dip in NPR’s audience.
This may have driven them further left, who knows? The Ruling Class, the chattering classes inside the Beltway where NPR is located, have been moving left for a while but the country hasn’t been following. Until now, the Beltway hadn’t noticed. All those loyal government bureaucrats were loyal NPR listeners in a vast echo chamber. None of them personally knew any of those icky conservatives or bitter clingers (thank you, Mr. Obama) who complained about government-sponsored arts and taxpayer-supported media. The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy ignored the Beltway denizens in ever larger numbers.
So the firing of Juan Williams for uttering a commonplace reality in public was simply another logical step in the growing marginalization of NPR. As the economy dwindles, so will government subsidies for such frippery. NPR already has pots of left-wing foundation money, plus lots of support for expansion from George Soros. He hates America even more than does NPR; they make a perfect team.
For lots of sleazy information on NPR, their funding, their biased reporting, their ugly statements about people they disagree with, etc., just google the search terms NPR Juan Williams or NPR government fundingor the sure-fire NPR sucks. You can put that last term on any search string and find what you need.
In one way, however, we are like NPR: we do fund-raising. Unfortunately, not being stashed with cash from Pew Trust or George Soros we don’t have any prizes to offer our donors. No “Save the Whales” T-shirts, no autographed books by Garrison Keillor. Nope, all our readers get is our regard and affection for their support. And we get to keep the Gates open for another quarter.
I finished all the thank you notes for Day One an hour ago. If you sent a donation the first day and haven’t heard from me, then let me hear from you.
Day Two’s donations were heavy so it may take me some days to get to everyone who hit the tip jar today. Since my energy level is so uncertain, let’s say if you haven’t received an acknowledgement in a week, something went wrong. Again, the solution is an email query.
As you all know, we like to show the places our donors hail from. As always, people came from far and wide, both new donors and repeat givers.
According to the Baron, here are the locations for today’s givers:
Stateside:
Alabama, California, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania
Near Abroad:
Canada
Far Abroad:
Australia, Denmark, India, Ireland, Sweden, and the UK
The tip jar in the text above is just for decoration. To donate, click the tin cup on our sidebar, or the “donate” button. If you prefer a monthly subscription, click the “subscribe” button above the image of the cup.
