Tag: biases

There’s a relatively recent concept in media called “The Streisand Effect.” In short, whenever an entity tries to hide or distract from a major fuck up and it gets caught, it brings more attention to what the entity was trying to hide.

Guess who got a crash course in the Streisand Effect this week. If you guessed National Public Radio, you win…absolutely nothing, but you still got it right so there’s that!

It started with a piece written by long-time NPR staffer Uri Berliner where he laid out how NPR went from liberal-yet-respectable to batshit-insane due in part to the election of Donald Trump. After a week or so of NPR doing its best to disparage Berliner’s opinion (and in some cases the man himself) and to pretend nothing was wrong, NPR suspended Berliner and eventually he resigned.

But not before NPR got dragged into the spotlight for being partisan assholes.

And not before they earned a spot in the Lexicon.

National Public Radio

What the Left thinks it means – a trusted source of high quality journalism falsely accused of partisanship

What it really means – a publicly funded Leftist PR firm

That’s right, kids. We pay for the Leftist propaganda to the tune of almost $128 million through its parent entity, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for fiscal year 2024. Granted, it’s not much in the grand scheme of things both on the federal budget and percentage of NPR’s annual budget fronts, but it’s not insignificant.

Especially when this allegedly non-partisan group donates heavily to Democrats. Or at least as heavily as they can with the budget they have, which is still pretty extensive.

Maybe it’s me, but I’m thinking a news network shouldn’t be funding any political figures and still claim to be fair and honest. Something about a potential conflict of interest. And by “potential” I mean “huge fucking.”

When I started listening to NPR in the late 90s (since it was the only radio station I could pick up in the office building where I was working), I found it interesting and unique. They were covered stories from perspectives the mainstream news media didn’t and more in-depth. But even then, I knew there was a bias because I learned how to root it out. Now, I can turn on NPR at any time of the day and predict what angle they’re going to take or how they will frame a story. They really don’t even try to hide it anymore.

And therein lies the problem. No matter how accurate an NPR story is, it will always be subject to doubt because of the leadership’s political leanings. Depending on who’s listening, that’s going to either create an echo chamber that leads to the logical fallacy the kids like to call Appeal to Authority. After all, if NPR is so consistently accurate (check local listings for the level of accuracy), it must mean they’re right about whatever they cover.

Except, of course, when they’re not.

To be fair, some of the errors they make are misspellings which can be excused. But when you dig into some of the factual errors they make, it casts a long shadow of doubt over how accurate they are. If they get the small shit wrong (like, oh I don’t know…publishing an article that originally said Donald Trump plead guilty to 34 felonies, only to have to correct it after the fact), it’s not that hard to imagine they get the big stuff wrong from time to time. No media outlet is perfect and I don’t expect it to be. But there’s a pretty big fucking difference between pleading guilty and pleading not guilty.

And imagine how many Leftists paid attention to the original flawed reporting and never bothered to check the correction or even the basic facts before tweeting (or would that be Xing) out the wrong information. That’s not a minor “oopsie,” either. That’s a letting-Hunter-Biden-run-the-DEA level fuck-up.

By the way, if anyone from the President Brick Tamland Administration is reading this (or having it read to you slowly so you don’t get confused by all the multi-syllabic words), I don’t want you to make Hunter Biden run anything, let alone the DEA. It was a joke. Move along.

What isn’t a joke is how NPR handled the situation. Let’s just say the nuclear plant operators at Chernobyl were less incompetent, and a lot less radioactive. From an optics perspective, NPR and its fellow Leftists handled the criticism poorly. Instead of making a public spectacle of how non-biased they are (while simultaneously proving how biased they were through their actions), they could and should have taken a calmer approach. Accept the observations publicly and work on ways to address any concerns behind the scenes. You know, like mature adults?

Well, expecting Leftists to behave like mature adults is like expecting a Michael Bay movie to be good: it may happen, but the odds are heavily against it. What they did was act like Leftists. No matter how benign or harsh the criticism, the reaction is always to paint the critic as evil. Not just wrong. Fucking evil. And that’s exactly what NPR did to Berliner. It wasn’t that his essay was factually wrong, but rather that it put NPR in a bad light. And much like Gollum with the One Ring, Leftist had to protect their precious.

Which, surprise surprise, amplified what Berliner said. Thus, welcome to the Streisand Effect. Population: NPR.

There’s not much that can be done right now to salvage NPR’s credibility with people outside the Leftist hivemind. Even if you remove all taxpayer funds from their budget, do a top-to-bottom mass firing, and select someone who isn’t a lunatic to run it going forward, the stigma of what they did to Uri Berliner won’t easily be forgotten or forgiven. Especially among those on the Left who see what Berliner did and are sick of the bias.

Way to shoot yourselves in the foot with a Gatling gun, NPR!