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06/02/2004 Archived Entry: "I love liberals!"

I LOVE LIBERALS. We need liberals. Liberals are good. Why? Because they're so damn entertaining in their sputtering righteousness. The latest left-wing Flapdoodle du Jour is this: National Public Radio and PBS television are becoming right wing! Yes, right wing.

Now, I confess, I listen to NPR regularly. Even faithfully. The local NPR affiliate is the only station I can get out here in the uber-boonies that has thoughtful talk on it. Never mind that it's often crazy-making talk. But right wing? From vast personal experience, I can assure you that the typical NPR story is still something along the lines of:

• Racial discrimination is depriving migrant Hispanic workers of their right to an Ivy-League education.
  
• Racial discrimination is causing black children to suffer from a lack of quality educational television programming, but in spite of that, plucky little Jamal, who is confined to a wheelchair and forced to care for his crack-addicted mother, has just won the local science fair with his project on the harmful effects of global warming on minority children.
  
• Racial discrimination is causing Sudanese immigrants in New York City to be deprived of their right to live performances of classical music, but a new bill in Congress will remedy that with a grant of $15 billion.
  
• Villagers in the high, snow-capped mountains of Quaintistan still make traditional handicrafts just as their neolithic ancestors did, despite the encroaching tide of racial discrimination and air pollution being brought to Quaintistan by right-wing capitalist entrepreneurs from America.
  

Listen long and hard as I might (and I do), I somehow fail to hear all those "right-wing" stories about how the government is too big, or how gun laws destroy peaceable people's lives, or how the income tax is immoral. I've never heard NPR use the terms "social security" and "Ponzi scheme" in the same sentence. NPR is perpetually mum on the fact that U.S. money is phony as a $3 bill and getting even more worthless. I don't even hear those other kind of "right wing" stories about how war is good or how big business is good for America.

So how could anybody imagine NPR has gone right wing on us?

Well, if you can bear the horror of it, the Bush administration is playing politics with the federal tax money funneled into the "public" airwaves by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Yes, a dastardly and impure administration is actually playing politics with government funding. Never in the history of the world has any pro-big-government left-wing administration dared to commit such an atrocity.

And besides that, the group FAIR just announced results of a study on what sort of commentators NPR relied on. They didn't study the content of the stories, mind you. Nor the slant of the stories. Just whether the commentators were "diverse" enough. FAIR discovered that vast numbers of those commentators come from 1) elite organizations, 2) the corporate world, and 3) the Bush administration.

Well, by golly, yes. NPR and elite go together like Quaintistani peasants and handicrafts, that's true. Doesn't matter whether they're from Brookings or Heritage; if they come from a think tank or a foundation, NPR loves 'em. Still, I'm mystified about how that makes NPR "right-wing."

And yes, NPR often does give corporate spokespeople a sentence or two to defend themselves in a five-minute report about how pollution from Evil Big Business is causing the demise of the Tierra del Fuegan six-legged tree frog. And -- alas! -- they also give corporate spokespeople time to make pitches for why they need more government subsidies to save them from the latest dire problem caused by unbridled cut-throat free-market competition. (I wish I knew where to find as much unbridled free-market business as NPR finds.)

And yes, NPR does get comments from members of the Bush administration regularly. Excuse me, FAIR, but that's the administration that's in power. What, do you expect NPR to seek its governmental news from Lyndon Baines Johnson? Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

Recently, somebody smarter than I am (and I wish I could remember who it was) remarked that the real bias in the media isn't "left" or "right." The real bias in the media -- and it applies equally to NPR an the Notorious Fox News -- is toward big government and centralized control by elites. Truer words were never spoken.

Well, you've gotta laugh at the liberal hysterics, if only to keep your eyes from crossing. But that's all I can say about the situation at the moment because it's now time for me to get in my truck and drive around catching the latest reports on how racial discrimination is keeping single Latina mothers in east L.A. from being able to afford to remove their gang tattoos so that they can go on to productive jobs in tax-funded social work, providing urgently needed assistance to illegal, but incredibly plucky, immigrants who've been driven out of their idyllic homes in Central America after water pollution produced by ruthless free-market profiteers from America destroyed the habitat of the spiny-beaked purple glub fish, which has been their tribe's source of food since neolithic times.

Posted by Claire @ 09:35 AM CST
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