Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire is really, really popular on Facebook. It’s big and it’s conservative, so NPR had to do a hit piece on it, noting that even though “the site does not purport to be a traditional news source” and admits to being opinionated, “it’s not clear that the millions of people engaging with the site’s news stories every month recognize that.” In other words, the readership is too stupid to know they’re being fed “misinformation.” “If you’ve stripped enough context away,” said one egghead professor interviewed for the piece, “any piece of truth can become a piece of misinformation.”
Matt Taibbi has a great rebuttal to NPR’s piece on Substack, and it’s getting a lot of responses.
The rise of an alternative media outlet was presented as a frightening, unsolvable Scooby-Doo mystery. It’s not: NPR just sucks and is unlistenable, so people are going elsewhere. https://t.co/9gfwbicyKI
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) July 20, 2021
The alternative media he’s referring to is things like The Daily Wire. He writes:
NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy. Moreover, much like the New York Times editorial page (but somehow worse), the public news leader’s monomaniacal focus on “race and sexuality issues” has become an industry in-joke. For at least a year especially, listening to NPR has been like being pinned in wrestling beyond the three-count. Everything is about race or gender, and you can’t make it stop.
Conservatives have always hated NPR, but in the last year I hear more and more politically progressive people, in the media, talking about the station as a kind of mass torture experiment, one that makes the most patient and sensible people want to drive off the road in anguish.
“NPR sucks and is unlistenable, so people are going elsewhere,” he concludes. “People like Shapiro are running their strategy in reverse and making fortunes doing it.”
Hey!! Car Talk was nice!! 20 years ago…..
— FergieMac (@FergiMac) July 20, 2021
The amazing thing about National Panhandler Radio is the number of staffers they have for programs that stink on ice, compared to hundreds of local hosts that produce quality radio shows doing their own research…and often, sales.
— Terry_Jim (@Terry_Jim) July 20, 2021
I listened to NPR every morning for 12 years. It always had a left lean but at least tried to present both sides. It went off the rails during 2020 and never recovered. I’ve stopped listening and don’t plan to go back.
— Steve Gresko (@sgresko73) July 20, 2021
They've become unlistenable as the Code Switch generation has taken over. Literally every package has to have a race/trans/climate change angle
— George Purcell (@gpurcell) July 20, 2021
The time is ripe for NPR to have some competition; a station/stream featuring human interest stories that *don’t* fixate on racial/sexual identity. I feel this is a low bar to clear.
— Giovanni 🍎 (@Giovanni_c) July 20, 2021
As much as I enjoyed the bumper music duets of a didgeridoo and car horn and hot takes by 60 year old cat moms, I guess I'll have to move on.
— Baron von Tossington (@thetossing) July 20, 2021
I spent a lot of years listening to NPR from the 80’s until the late 2000’s. I can choose significantly better music or talk off my smart phone in seconds. If any news org should be centric it’s them, but in my opinion they are not at all.
— Barry Merritt (@barryamerritt) July 20, 2021
I used to listen before podcasts and all.
I remember in the 90’s when they started called the West Bank and Gaza occupied territories and that’s when I stopped listening. The tilt towards leftist ideology was profound.
— Steve (@Steve56666007) July 20, 2021
NPR is what happens when a victim mentality and identity politics make a virus-like entrance into someone’s belief system. They can’t even see they are responsible for their own decline. To do so would shatter their belief system… which is built on a foundation of bad ideas.
— Kristian Berger (@berger_kristian) July 20, 2021
Spot on. A longtime listener, it's now painful even for a few minutes. It's become solely a mouthpiece for clueless woke white women, equal parts virtue signaling, outrage, and emotional narcissism.
— Ulysses in SF (@VeloAsia) July 20, 2021
It really is a colossal blunder. Their biggest error (I'm working from a LONG list here) since last year's lengthy, wholly credulous interview with the author of "In Defense of Looting." By which NPR echoed the "it's just property" mantra of 2020 riot defenders.
— David L. Pelfrey (@DavidLPelfrey) July 20, 2021
Even NPR’s public editor said that interview with the author of “In Defense of Looting” “did not serve NPR’s audience.”
NPR has gone beyond just "the news with a soft spoken liberal bias" (which is completely fine to most listeners) to a household laughing stock. As a former lifelong listener it almost comes off as self parody now.
— Doctor Dan Dungus (@DungusDan) July 20, 2021
Same here… NPR is just worthless now. Stopped giving and stopped listening. Even if I happen to chance upon NPR, it takes less than a minute to be reminded why I don't listen anymore.
— Out for the day! (@Ragu2z) July 20, 2021
Post-2016 NPR has been a precipitous decline. Although I probably shouldn’t say “precipitous decline” because hiking is white supremacy.
— Problematic Tomatoes 🍅 (@ProblemTomatoes) July 20, 2021
What do you mean? I love that they only report on two things: Russian election interference and that time that somebody touched a black person's hair
— Stephen Tokarski 🍚 (@sftokarski) July 20, 2021
I tune in to NPR specifically for those stories you mentioned. Nothing is funnier than hearing these reporters/hosts tell these ridiculous stories about all the ism's their subject experienced, often with holocaust type music in the background which only makes me laugh harder.
— barfly (@2allmyfrnds) July 20, 2021
Legacy media is dying, NPR lashing out at competing media outlets doing better is another confirmation of that fact.
— JustThinking (@JustThi30117912) July 20, 2021
Once NPR did this: anyone with a brain should question everything they've said and done since
Undeniable censorship— Mad Pumpkin (@pumpkin_mad) July 20, 2021
— Mad Pumpkin (@pumpkin_mad) July 20, 2021
Yeah, remember when NPR came right out and said they wouldn’t touch the Hunter Biden laptop story?
@NPR. This one is for you and it is spot on.
— Frica Incl (@FricaIncl) July 20, 2021
It’s a great piece. Read the whole thing.
Related:
NPR comes for Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire in the name of combating ‘misinformation’ (and Shapiro has thoughts) https://t.co/jetVOxayj6
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) July 19, 2021
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