In the past 10 days, one brave column, along with the lack of internal outrage over a separate, truly awful column, together speak volumes about the ethical rot infecting the liberal legacy media.
Let’s take the awful column first. On April 8, the New York Times published a “guest essay” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict called “Two-State Solution is an Unjust, Impossible Fantasy.” Written by Tareq Baconi, “the president of the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network,” the column clearly considers all of Israel to be “occupation of Palestinian territory” and calls for “a unity of struggle, built upon a unity of people and a unity of land,” meaning “a single state from the river to the sea” — under Palestinian control.
Repeating grievances stemming back not just to the founding of modern Israel in 1947 but to 1922 and even earlier, Baconi complains that “Zionist immigration” even back then should not have been allowed. In other words, there should be no Israel, and there should be (essentially) no Jews in the entire Levant except perhaps for ones willing to surrender their Jewishness itself.
In essence, this is a call for a form of Jewish genocide.
Indeed, Baconi is so radical that he spares not a single word of sorrow for the fact that “Israel Jews were killed on Oct. 7” by Hamas’s surprise, rape-inflicting, child-torturing attack. Instead, he writes that the attack was Israel’s own fault: “The fact that Israel and its allies were ill prepared for any kind of challenge to Israeli rule underscores just how invisible the Palestinians were and how sustainable their oppression was deemed to be on the global stage.”
Again, this essay, this thinly veiled call for genocide, ran in the New York Times, known in recent years for its legions of young “journalists” who consider themselves human rights activists rather than objective reporters. These same reporters earlier this decade forced the firing of the New York Times‘s editorial page editor merely for publishing a well-vetted guest column by a U.S. senator advocating use of a specific federal law against violent rioters, just as it had been used 28 years earlier with only a modicum of controversy. Somehow, the New York Times’s internal activist horde, in one of the biggest collective conniption fits in major media history, asserted through its union that such a column about protecting innocents from rioters represented “a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent.” (Huh?!?)
Yet now this same newspaper publishes a virtually genocidal call for wiping the nation of Israel entirely off the map, and none of the cultural Marxists in the New York Times newsroom appear to have batted any eyelashes about it. In their lunatic malevolence, it somehow threatens them if violent rioters are to be opposed, but there’s no reason to protest a column calling for the elimination of an entire, existing nation.
A semi-reasonable argument can be made for publishing Baconi’s column as an expression of the majority Palestinian viewpoint, but there is no morally justifiable universe of journalistic ethics whereby the anti-riot piece in 2020 by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) should be treated as a dangerous affront while Baconi’s genocidal argument is acceptable.
All of this serves as comparative backdrop for a courageous April 9 feature in The Free Press by Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at National Public Radio. Describing a situation at NPR remarkably similar to the New York Times’s radical zoo portrayed by deposed editorial page editor James Bennet, Berliner posits that the public radio behemoth has “lost America’s trust.” He explains that through a conscious decision by its top leadership ranks, NPR gave up its mission of “journalism that lets evidence lead the way” in favor of its staff deliberately becoming “agents of change.”
Thus, “race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.” Management encouraged “a burgeoning number of employee resource groups” that, just by listing them, reads like a Saturday Night Live parody:
“The included MGIPOC “Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).”
Yet just guess what sort of employees NPR does not have? Republicans. In the Washington, D.C., office of NPR, Berliner “found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans.”
The result is a radical-left “mindset [which] animates bizarre stories – on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic… [and others] justifying looting.” And “more recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war… through the ‘intersectional’ lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of [Hamas’ attack on] October 7.”
Berliner provides copious examples of how this radical-left mindset has completely undermined basic journalistic integrity. Again and again, NPR got the story flat-out wrong and then, worse, failed to make even the slightest effort to acknowledge (much less correct) their mistakes. “No mea culpas, no self-reflection.”
“When you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions,” Berliner writes, “but don’t practice those standards yourself, that’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.”
The result is that NPR’s public relations people literally bragged that 30% of its audience members consider NPR to be “trustworthy.” In an ordinary world, that’s a pathetic level of trustworthiness, but, hey, it’s a better number (literally) than CNN or the New York Times achieved.
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“Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded,” Berliner accurately laments, “would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about.”
Major liberal-legacy media outlets now have two choices: They can continue to be insular, grievance-filled rage emporiums, or they can start practicing real journalism again. If they keep doing the former, the funeral pyre they light will be their own.