What happened to National Public Radio?

To infantilise your audience in a deadly serious world is a terrible thing for a media giant to do.

One of the biggest signs of my shift to the “right” came a few years ago, when I found I could no longer tolerate listening to National Public Radio for more than a few minutes. (For any non-American friends who may not be familiar, NPR is the American version of BBC Radio Four.)

For over a decade, NPR was the consistent background noise to my daily life. When I lived alone and without a TV, its reporters’ voices kept me company in the evenings. It was the only station I ever had on in my car, whether I was driving around New England as a suburban newspaper reporter or heading to and from work through Brooklyn traffic with my toddler in the backseat. Even when I moved across the Atlantic and into a different time zone, I would regularly catch up on their shows via internet radio a device which my ex-husband bought for me specifically so I could keep a steady flow of NPR in my life.

Why did I enjoy NPR so much? It was informative: both local and international news were well covered. It was highly varied — you could learn about Treasury notes on a weekday morning and car mechanics on a Saturday. It was whimsical, even a bit twee. But at the time, this was a welcome contrast to the extreme inauthenticity and bombast of television news. It was a comfortable, familiar presence: a place where the acute liberalism and a crunchy, wholesome vibe offered a respite from political rancour. 

I checked out for a few years, my attention taken up by big life changes. And when I checked back in again, it was unrecognisable. Well, I shouldn’t say unrecognisable. The tweeness, the nasally NPR voice, the informal, almost folksy cadence of its hosts — that was all still there. But where it had once been a haven of low-key bonhomie, underneath that still friendly-tone it was clear that its agenda was now being set by propagators of excessive liberal racial animus. It’s programming sounded like it was entirely focused on a social justice warrior narrative. The acute liberalism was no longer a respite. Masked as it was in NPR faux harmlessness, it seemed worse than even the most aggressive Fox News host. I moved on. More recently, no longer a listener but still following some of NPR’s social media, I noticed a weird and deeply irritating childishness to a lot of its content. Being childish in a deadly serious world is a terrible thing. And further proof of just how the adults have left the building when it comes to liberal intelligentsia. 

Judging from the first instalment of Peter Boghossian’s YouTube series “All Things Reconsidered”, I’m not alone. Boghossian is giving voice to the many people out there who, like me, are bewildered and dismayed by what’s become of our once beloved cultural touchstone.

Right in the first few minutes, a fellow former listener perfectly summed up the station’s new tone: 

 “They speak to you like they’re nursing you and reading you Good Night Moon.” He was referring to the show Shortwave Science, but it’s an observation equally applicable to NPR content generally.  

For example: a report from Ukraine, dated October 5. “How bout war clean up, but make it fun?” It featured a young female reporter standing in a pile of rubble as Ukrainian youths around her carry around buckets full of broken bricks, looking for all the world like the staff of your local hipster brew pub cleaning up after a busy Saturday night. There is something so oddly fake about it, I’m not sure if it’s the dude in the tight dungarees or the young woman dressed all in black who seems to be vibing to music on her phone — but it’s weird and unconvincing and even unprofessional. Standing in front of the shell of a building, the reporter says the kids are there to clean up a woman’s house that was hit with “not one, but many missiles during the war.” Many missiles? Exactly how many? How come the place isn’t just a burned stain on the ground? Where is this unfortunate woman’s house? What is the name of the group volunteering to clean up? No specifics were given. (The full version published on the NPR site includes a little more info, but I guess NPR’s nearly 6 million Instagram followers don’t need to bother with the details when there’s a fun hipster war clean-up to be had!)

The same reporter gave a similarly pointless update a few days ago, wandering amidst charred vehicles — waving her arms around making pronouncements like “we’re here surrounded by a bunch of ruined Russian equipment, you can see a tank right behind me…” before getting to the segment’s finale: “Pretty much everywhere the Ukrainian army has been making gains you can find equipment like this on the roads and big collection sites.” End of post. Marie Colvin she is not. 

Yesterday, NPR’s Instagram posted a reel of a shy, skinny, vaguely lost, man-baby talking about being tall, and how being tall is expensive. He awkwardly moves his lanky limbs, he pretends to bump his head on something — he’s trying hard to be cutesy in an indie movie kind of way. Which would be all well and good if he was making a comedy reel, or auditioning for Portlandia. But this was for Planet Money, a show that describes itself as “the economy explained.”  

The infantilisation of our media is an observable phenomenon. Batya Ungar Sargon, in her excellent book Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, writes of the generational battle in The New York Times newsroom that the Millennials decisively won. She writes:

“While at one time, the older journalists taught the younger ones how to think, after the buyouts this younger generation, armed with their judgments and accusations of racism and sexism, became the ones wielding immense influence over their older colleagues. Insiders at the Times describe an atmosphere in which an older generation of editors and staff has completely capitulated to a younger woke generation.”

I’ve heard similar stories about the newsrooms of the most venerated lefty-liberal British newspapers: young people who claim to be journalists, but who need in-work counselling because someone wrote or said something they didn’t agree with. 

To think NPR’s weird turn is just a generational shift is somewhat comforting. It allows me to be reassured that soon these Millennials will hit a wiser middle-age and see the error of their ways. They will have to confront reality sooner or later, right? 

But then I remembered something, from way back in the days before social media. A huge donation from the widow of the McDonald’s empire. In 2003, the height of my NPR listening days (which is why I remembered it), Joan Kroc left NPR $200 million dollars. Which, as far as I’m concerned anyway, means that NPR is just as corporate, just as capitalistic, just as much part of our toxic current hegemony as any other mega-corporation. So whose agenda is this bizarre content serving? Is it a genuine attempt to entertain and inform a younger audience? Or is it is something else? [For a pretty thorough breakdown of NPR’s various funding sources, including a list of the major non-profits who donate to the broadcaster, this page is helpful.]

As former NPR journalist Gina Gambony says in episode one of All Things Re-Considered, NPR has become “more preachy and emotional, more activist and more formulaic” — and she interestingly points out that NPR, the mothership, has an “outsized influence on your public radio station." I will be tuning in to the next episode to find out what she means.

I hope Boghossian’s series asks the following question: who benefits from this disconcerting trend?