I was sorely disappointed, no angry, to see Berliner sign up for this in his otherwise seemingly well intentioned effort to yank NPR's leadership and staff from its bubble while it's bleeding audience and donors. It's not necessary to have to concede "Russiagate" and "Hunter Biden's Laptop" to the Right to be able to acknowledge and stat…
I was sorely disappointed, no angry, to see Berliner sign up for this in his otherwise seemingly well intentioned effort to yank NPR's leadership and staff from its bubble while it's bleeding audience and donors. It's not necessary to have to concede "Russiagate" and "Hunter Biden's Laptop" to the Right to be able to acknowledge and state that a lot of NPR's programming and reporting slant is heavy left biased and sometimes absurdly "woke". There's got to be a lot more and less debatable examples if the problem is so prevalent without having to concede these topics on shaky grounds that discredits him with the very audience he needs to persuade, which.. is not the prototypical Right Wing Uncle on the Free Press comments board who was already convinced that NPR was filled with "communists" to begin with since the 1990s and who got a massive dopamine red meat hit with Berliner's piece confirming his priors ;P
The laptop story, look others have taken to this in this thread, and this is already getting too long, but my main beef with this take is that the NY Post reporting was about the Rudy Giuliani hard drive copy, which he refused to provide to any independent sources for verification at the time of the reporting. Leaving aside that supposed NPR reporter's comment about not wanting to help Trump's re-election (not great, but under what context was it said - a casual meeting comment or a decisive comment to kill the story? that matters I think! But I don't think that was what made or broke this story at the time), the circumstances of the story still lean towards most major news orgs (INCLUDING FOX NEWS AT THE TIME, let alone the actual NY Post that ran the story refused to let their own reporters headline the article, it was instead headlined by a Sean Hannity show staffer I believe as a "guest journalist" to protect them instead, now if the sourcing and veracity of the story was so solid why are we not criticizing the actual venue of the report to have taken such precautions that made it so easy to discredit??) making the right decision - to report skeptically, at best, about the findings because no one was able to verify or confirm the sourcing of the data, and it is irrelevant whether Hunter Biden at the time confirmed or denied the data was his (and not exactly "shady" of him not to do so either way, again if we're operating under the truthiness that he dropped his laptop off for repairs with a nearly blind Mac repairman who (perhaps unethically?) viewed and copied the drive's data to disseminate to highly partisan (and super convenient that he had such access to Giuliani!!), then Hunter Biden is actually a victim of a pretty big privacy invasion at the least?), the burden was on Giuliani to prove he had "real data" and that the data was not illegally or unethically sourced. He refused and news media outlets treated it accordingly, and you have to ask yourself why if Giuliani had the legitimate goods why he would have refused to open them up for scrutiny that would have certified his story rather than discredit it.
And as for the news media's credulity of the former intelligence officer's signed letter advising about this data, It's not like Giuliani wasn't out in public for the last couple years in Ukraine specifically meeting with actual Russian agents attempting to purchase such data (hell, he got Trump Impeached for the first time over his activities over there!), so the notion that when a set of former intelligence agents marked this as a probable disinformation attempt, was that really out of left field or "biased" to handle the reporting accordingly? It wasn't for almost a full year after the NY Post story ran that the FBI (under Biden's DOJ btw, it was Trump's DOJ that refused to confirm or deny Rudy's statements in October 2020, make of that as you will!) released public information that it did in fact possess the actual Hunter Biden laptop (and not a copy of a copy that had been second-third-etc hand modified after their possession of the actual laptop) - so a lot of the "mea culpa" and lashing of the media about its handling of the story *as the facts were known in October 2020* with the NY Post story sourced entirely from Rudy just sounds like a lot of Monday morning quater-backing based on facts that weren't known for a year or two after.
And after all that is said and done - not even the most dedicated Republicans to the Impeach Biden cause, now having access to the actual FBI investigation and verified sourced material, have been able to come up with any Impeachable crimes of Joe Biden in relation to. So the other notion that this was somehow some election deciding information *as was reported in October 2020 in the NY Post* also seems like the Right trying to justify the massive disappointment that all the build up about Hunter Biden and his Laptop produced little other than evidence of an already sort of known louche lifestyle of a politician's son, embarrassing for him, but who was not himself serving in his father's White House at any point in time... AHEM AHEM "Jarvanka"... and not this massive Biden Crime Family Conspiracy that somehow managed to operate covertly for the last, what, 40-50 years that Biden has served in public elected office, and has for all that time more or less maintained an image of a boring yet earnest dude. It's almost as if the right wanted Hunter Biden Laptop to be the "Trump-Russia Conspiracy" of the left, overshot the moon by a few clicks, and ended up with the actual "Russiagate" egg on their faces for real. A fuckton of projection, IMO. It's the Trump Administration with the most direct and egregious examples of nepotism and profiting from Office at the end of the day, of which I could write another 20000 words depicting lol, but I'll spare you that ;P
And yes - I do agree Berliner probably limited his audience and credibility by going to The Free Press rather than maybe NY Times or CJR or some other more "mainstream" outlet - but which begs the question whether he would have gotten the story and distribution (for all the slagging of the NY Times, I think they would have published his essay, and probably a much better one that didn't concede on some very debatable points in the offering). Again, I'm a subscriber to TFP, they do put out good stuff for the most part, but there is also an increasingly disturbing "audience capture" thing going on, their editorial slant is very biased towards their heavily right wing audience (and vocal commentariat) - which makes them a very odd place to be in to be calling out other organizations for editorial bias!
Berliner used the examples he did in part because of what he sees as their historical significance in the change he sees at NPR. The coverage of Russiagate and the laptop story aren't merely examples of bias, but part of a history and explanation of what happened to NPR in response to Trump. It moved NPR more to the left, in his view. I think he's right about that. In addition to natural bias of the personnel, there was enormous pressure from NPR's audience to move more left and be less neutral in response to Trump.
I don't know how much of what you say about the laptop story Berliner might agree with, but it's beyond his point, which was that NPR blew it in not covering the story, that their reasons are suspect, and that it was part of a shift in the wrong direction.
That NPR is losing audience is in part what moved him to come forward now. He's exposing what he sees as the reasons for that, and trying to wake up NPR and its supporters. I have no hope he'll succeed, but I admire the effort.
I was sorely disappointed, no angry, to see Berliner sign up for this in his otherwise seemingly well intentioned effort to yank NPR's leadership and staff from its bubble while it's bleeding audience and donors. It's not necessary to have to concede "Russiagate" and "Hunter Biden's Laptop" to the Right to be able to acknowledge and state that a lot of NPR's programming and reporting slant is heavy left biased and sometimes absurdly "woke". There's got to be a lot more and less debatable examples if the problem is so prevalent without having to concede these topics on shaky grounds that discredits him with the very audience he needs to persuade, which.. is not the prototypical Right Wing Uncle on the Free Press comments board who was already convinced that NPR was filled with "communists" to begin with since the 1990s and who got a massive dopamine red meat hit with Berliner's piece confirming his priors ;P
The laptop story, look others have taken to this in this thread, and this is already getting too long, but my main beef with this take is that the NY Post reporting was about the Rudy Giuliani hard drive copy, which he refused to provide to any independent sources for verification at the time of the reporting. Leaving aside that supposed NPR reporter's comment about not wanting to help Trump's re-election (not great, but under what context was it said - a casual meeting comment or a decisive comment to kill the story? that matters I think! But I don't think that was what made or broke this story at the time), the circumstances of the story still lean towards most major news orgs (INCLUDING FOX NEWS AT THE TIME, let alone the actual NY Post that ran the story refused to let their own reporters headline the article, it was instead headlined by a Sean Hannity show staffer I believe as a "guest journalist" to protect them instead, now if the sourcing and veracity of the story was so solid why are we not criticizing the actual venue of the report to have taken such precautions that made it so easy to discredit??) making the right decision - to report skeptically, at best, about the findings because no one was able to verify or confirm the sourcing of the data, and it is irrelevant whether Hunter Biden at the time confirmed or denied the data was his (and not exactly "shady" of him not to do so either way, again if we're operating under the truthiness that he dropped his laptop off for repairs with a nearly blind Mac repairman who (perhaps unethically?) viewed and copied the drive's data to disseminate to highly partisan (and super convenient that he had such access to Giuliani!!), then Hunter Biden is actually a victim of a pretty big privacy invasion at the least?), the burden was on Giuliani to prove he had "real data" and that the data was not illegally or unethically sourced. He refused and news media outlets treated it accordingly, and you have to ask yourself why if Giuliani had the legitimate goods why he would have refused to open them up for scrutiny that would have certified his story rather than discredit it.
And as for the news media's credulity of the former intelligence officer's signed letter advising about this data, It's not like Giuliani wasn't out in public for the last couple years in Ukraine specifically meeting with actual Russian agents attempting to purchase such data (hell, he got Trump Impeached for the first time over his activities over there!), so the notion that when a set of former intelligence agents marked this as a probable disinformation attempt, was that really out of left field or "biased" to handle the reporting accordingly? It wasn't for almost a full year after the NY Post story ran that the FBI (under Biden's DOJ btw, it was Trump's DOJ that refused to confirm or deny Rudy's statements in October 2020, make of that as you will!) released public information that it did in fact possess the actual Hunter Biden laptop (and not a copy of a copy that had been second-third-etc hand modified after their possession of the actual laptop) - so a lot of the "mea culpa" and lashing of the media about its handling of the story *as the facts were known in October 2020* with the NY Post story sourced entirely from Rudy just sounds like a lot of Monday morning quater-backing based on facts that weren't known for a year or two after.
And after all that is said and done - not even the most dedicated Republicans to the Impeach Biden cause, now having access to the actual FBI investigation and verified sourced material, have been able to come up with any Impeachable crimes of Joe Biden in relation to. So the other notion that this was somehow some election deciding information *as was reported in October 2020 in the NY Post* also seems like the Right trying to justify the massive disappointment that all the build up about Hunter Biden and his Laptop produced little other than evidence of an already sort of known louche lifestyle of a politician's son, embarrassing for him, but who was not himself serving in his father's White House at any point in time... AHEM AHEM "Jarvanka"... and not this massive Biden Crime Family Conspiracy that somehow managed to operate covertly for the last, what, 40-50 years that Biden has served in public elected office, and has for all that time more or less maintained an image of a boring yet earnest dude. It's almost as if the right wanted Hunter Biden Laptop to be the "Trump-Russia Conspiracy" of the left, overshot the moon by a few clicks, and ended up with the actual "Russiagate" egg on their faces for real. A fuckton of projection, IMO. It's the Trump Administration with the most direct and egregious examples of nepotism and profiting from Office at the end of the day, of which I could write another 20000 words depicting lol, but I'll spare you that ;P
And yes - I do agree Berliner probably limited his audience and credibility by going to The Free Press rather than maybe NY Times or CJR or some other more "mainstream" outlet - but which begs the question whether he would have gotten the story and distribution (for all the slagging of the NY Times, I think they would have published his essay, and probably a much better one that didn't concede on some very debatable points in the offering). Again, I'm a subscriber to TFP, they do put out good stuff for the most part, but there is also an increasingly disturbing "audience capture" thing going on, their editorial slant is very biased towards their heavily right wing audience (and vocal commentariat) - which makes them a very odd place to be in to be calling out other organizations for editorial bias!
Berliner used the examples he did in part because of what he sees as their historical significance in the change he sees at NPR. The coverage of Russiagate and the laptop story aren't merely examples of bias, but part of a history and explanation of what happened to NPR in response to Trump. It moved NPR more to the left, in his view. I think he's right about that. In addition to natural bias of the personnel, there was enormous pressure from NPR's audience to move more left and be less neutral in response to Trump.
I don't know how much of what you say about the laptop story Berliner might agree with, but it's beyond his point, which was that NPR blew it in not covering the story, that their reasons are suspect, and that it was part of a shift in the wrong direction.
That NPR is losing audience is in part what moved him to come forward now. He's exposing what he sees as the reasons for that, and trying to wake up NPR and its supporters. I have no hope he'll succeed, but I admire the effort.