Two high-profile news executives at the end of March demonstrated the extraordinary inability of their caste to see things other than through a distorted left-wing lens.
Both executives intended to defend their organizations but did so with arguments, and even more with attitudes, that underscored rather than erased the legacy media’s dishonesty, blindness, or bias about which conservatives complain and with which the public is heartily sick.
Katherine Maher, chief executive of NPR, testified at a congressional oversight hearing and could not, even if she’d tried, have made a stronger implicit case for cutting federal financial support for her organization.
In her evasions, she conceded that her past public commentary was inappropriate, such as calling President Donald Trump a “fascist” and “deranged racist sociopath” and saying America was “addicted to white supremacy” and believes in “black plunder and white democracy.”
But her evasions and claim that her views have “evolved” added new force to the case against her. Her comment about black plunder and white democracy was in a 2020 tweet about The Case for Reparations, a book mentioned to her by Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX).
Maher: “I don’t think I’ve ever read that book, sir.”
Gill: “You tweeted about it. You said you took a day off to fully read The Case for Reparations.”
This reveals not merely that Maher keenly adopted an extreme, dishonest, disparaging, and divisive analysis of America and boasted her opinion online. She also either lied in March in saying she didn’t know the book or lied five years ago in saying she took the day off to read it.
One might say this just means she is not a proper person to run a publicly funded news organization. That’s true, but she nevertheless perfectly represents NPR, which employs 87 registered Democrats and not one Republican and routinely pushes extreme leftist ideology with a soothing educated voice. The logic is that NPR shouldn’t be publicly funded. It is Maher’s natural home; it just shouldn’t get a single cent of your money or mine.
Julie Pace, executive editor of the Associated Press, meanwhile, wrote in the Wall Street Journal on March 27 to support her organization’s lawsuit against Trump, which it hopes will restore its privileged access to presidential events. Part of Pace’s argument is that the Associated Press’s customers “trust [it] to get the facts right, to be nonpartisan, and to cover the news independently.”
Not so. People are abandoning the Associated Press precisely because its ideological bias is egregious and obvious. Or customers retain it because of the privileged access it was granted for years until recently on the basis of a level of objectivity that is now a distant memory.
MAKING WOMEN’S SPORTS FAIR AGAIN
The Associated Press was once admirable and, in the old media world, also a necessary news source because it was often the only one, or one of a few, at any given event. But new sources have multiplied, and the Associated Press has lost its advantages. Connectedly, it sacrificed credibility to pursue an ideological agenda.
The Associated Press told a judge on March 27 that Trump’s “abject retaliation” has a “chilling effect on the entire journalism industry.” Nonsense. The industry is growing in size and self-confidence. The Associated Press just fears becoming more irrelevant than ever because it is no longer placed, as it automatically was in the past, in a position to get news that others could not.