NPR got something very right and wrong or just very very wrong.

But if you go to the link now, you get this:

Is this what Justice Thomas was so jovial about yesterday?

Does "We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status" = "he is stripping Harvard University of its tax-exempt status"?

I'm reading the NY Post:

"President Trump said Friday he is stripping Harvard University of its tax-exempt status.

“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” he said in a Truth Social post.

I think the post is losing something in the paraphrase. Trump's post speaks of doing something in the future. The NY Post portrays him as in the process of doing it now.

In any event, this is a big deal. Also a big deal in the news this morning: "Trump orders end to federal funding for NPR and PBS" (NPR). 

President Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's board of directors to "cease federal funding for NPR and PBS," the nation's primary public broadcasters. Trump contends that news coverage by NPR and PBS contains a left-wing bias. The federal funding for NPR and PBS is appropriated by Congress....

"Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter," the executive order says. "What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens."

Katherine Maher — NPR CEO — was caught in a trap of her own design.

It really is amazing watching people like Katherine Maher hear things she’s said and posted, and be so stunned at how absurd and ridiculous they sound that they deny saying what they’ve already said
pic.twitter.com/nP2IKv3VtN

— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) March 26, 2025

I'm glad to see NPR is giving us:

I love those 2 pictures together. So expressive! Both women seem to be earnestly accessing some ideal that is positioned upward and to her left. Here's the link if you need NPR to hand you "4 takeaways."

Here's Maher's bio at NPR. A very interesting fact: "Maher is the Chair of the Board of Signal Foundation, responsible for the secure, private Signal Messenger app...."

"You studied semiotics in college. I’m curious if that also shapes the way you think of narrative...."

Sarah Larson asks Ira Glass, in "Ira Glass Hears It All/Three decades into 'This American Life,' the host thinks the show is doing some of its best work yet—even if he’s still jealous of 'The Daily'" (The New. Yorker).

Glass answers:

For me, the most important book was “S/Z,” by Roland Barthes, where he takes apart a short story by Balzac phrase by phrase, paragraph by paragraph. What he’s interested in is, How does this story get its hooks into you? Why do you read to the next paragraph? Why do you care? And that feeling that you get at the end of a really good story, where you just feel, like, Ahh!—what produces that? And he names a bunch of mechanisms that, once you know them, you can create yourself.

Sitting within good information.

EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher doesn't just want to "stamp out bad information" on the internet. She wants to replace it with "good information"—i.e., left-wing narratives—and force the public to "sit within that good information" as "a collective."

Big Sister has arrived. pic.twitter.com/7kfq8VYHfj

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 18, 2024

I like the plants in the background, because she really is visualizing the people as plants. Watch for her snarky snicker when she knows she's characterizing NPR's news as manure for us to take root in and grow in the direction that pleases her.

"Having rarely missed a Morning Edition or All Things Considered every day every week for every year between 1984 and 2013, by 2014 NPR became less and less tolerable to this centrist..."

"... until by 2020 I just stopped caring and certainly stopped listening. I doubt I am alone in having concluded NPR had become something of a joke. And a really sad one."

That's the second highest-rated comment on the NYT article, "NPR Editor Who Accused Broadcaster of Liberal Bias Resigns/Uri Berliner, who has worked at NPR for 25 years, said in an essay last week that the nonprofit had allowed progressive bias to taint its coverage."

Highest rated: "Kudos to Berliner for having the backbone to write the essay he did. Weren’t we all thinking it anyway and he just voiced the reason many of us stopped listening to NPR on a regular basis?"

Third-highest: "Mr. Berliner was on suspension not for working for outside organizations but for truthfully criticizing NPR's bias."

Fourth: "I've been listening to NPR my entire life. Things took wild turn after 2016. And now I am finding myself disjoint from almost all conversation happening on NPR.

Remember, these are NYT readers. These are most likely liberals who are put off by the left-wing slant. I was going to write What happened in 2016? I had to laugh at myself.

"NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had 'lost America's trust' by..."

"... approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset. Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported. Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner's essay for the online news site The Free Press.... In an interview...."

From "NPR suspends veteran editor as it grapples with his public criticism" (NPR).

The narrative that Asian-American students were just used by white people who wanted to end affirmative action.

NPR airs a piece about how the Asians weren’t actually being discriminated against by Harvard etc and were just being used by white people who wanted to end Affirmative Action while interviewing exactly zero people who dissent from that view https://t.co/KnN3Ik77r2

— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) July 2, 2023

NPR's prissy headline: "Weighing the pros and cons of Beto O'Rourke dropping an f-bomb on a heckler."

Here. 

Dropped an f-bomb. Give me a break. Saying "fuck" isn't the equivalent of violence. It's not a bomb. Say "f-word" if you're somewhere — where?! — where you can't say "fuck." But in this case it wasn't the f-word. It was the M-WORD.

Beto O'Rourke called a guy in the crowd "motherfucker." "Motherfucker" is a lot worse than "fuck." It has a separate entry on George Carlin's 1972 list of "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." As you can see at that last link, to Wikipedia, Carlin later spoke of some guy criticizing him saying "motherfucker is a duplication of the word fuck, technically, because fuck is the root form, motherfucker being derivative; therefore, it constitutes duplication. And I said, 'Hey, motherfucker, how did you get my phone number, anyway?'"

Anyway, what does NPR have to say about the pros and cons of Beto calling a guy in the crowd "motherfucker"?

I'm stuck in a marijuana-addled cycle of doom.

Here's what I've been spending time on. Let me quote from the bottom of a post of mine from August 5, 2017, "A corporation buys a whole town in California, and the plan is to make it all about marijuana," which, at the moment, "does not exist":

UPDATE: Blogger unpublished this post and told me "Your content has violated our Illegal activities policy." This post is about a news item that appeared in NPR. Reports about crime are not illegal! 

UPDATE 2: Blogger reevaluated this post and sent me email that said:

"There are a lot of things that are too cowy to run on National Public Radio, like talking about cow poop too much. For example, I can have someone slip in poop, but not have someone slapped in the face with it."

Said Baxter Black, quoted in "Baxter Black, Who Elevated Cowboy Poetry to Folk Art, Dies at 77/His wide-ranging work, including books, speeches and regular appearances on NPR, celebrated cowpokes, feed lots and life on the range" (NYT).

"Tampons, a necessity for many, are becoming harder and harder to find. People who menstruate are saying it's hard to find tampons on store shelves across the U.S. right now...."

Tweeted NPR, quoted in "NPR mocked for tweet warning tampon shortage a problem for 'people who menstruate' Twitter users blasted NPR for avoiding use of the word 'women' in the tweet" (Fox News).

NPR followed up with a tweet that leaned into the problematic concept "women":

It's yet another supply chain problem where women are bearing the brunt of the cost, as mothers struggle to feed their babies during the baby formula shortage.https://t.co/p5mAPlSwPM

— NPR (@NPR) June 13, 2022

David Crosby has questions and gets answers.

I’m not sure what band that is. I did send NPR a cassette of my music a few weeks back. I am a solo tambourinest and my songs promote positive thinking. You might not have heard of me because I mostly play in nursing homes and campgrounds with a gazebo.

— Marvin Phillips (@FlipsMarvin) April 10, 2022

"Breathe.... Get moving.... Nourish yourself.... Stay connected.... Or sign off...."

= "5 ways to cope with the stressful news cycle" (NPR).

Does that help?!

It seems lame. Yes. But, really, do you think, when you are watching the news from Ukraine, you are somehow helping? Do you think have a duty to rubberneck, to pay attention, to cry tears from afar, to construct arguments blaming the other side [Biden/Trump] for doing/not doing things that wouldn't have made a difference? What are you doing?

"Oh! The Nobel Prize in Literature! Who is it? Look, this is NPR. It doesn't say, just observes it's a black guy."

I say out loud as I read the NPR home page. My screen grab:

 

So disrespectful! 

Who is he? "Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah wins the Nobel Prize in literature." 

He's from Zanzibar and is honored "For his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."

"It's hard to believe that the hole President Trump dug for himself could get deeper, but it has."

Exclaims NPR in "2020 Electoral Map Ratings: Trump Slides, Biden Advantage Expands Over 270 Votes."

And yet it's still not reassurance enough — even this unfathomably deep abyss! — after what happened in 2016.

The hole is so deep that Biden is expected to win 297 electoral votes. That's 27 more than are needed to win. You have to imagine Florida going for Trump to see a way for him to get out of that hole.

"NPR Radio Ratings Collapse As Pandemic Ends Listeners' Commutes."

NPR reports.

NPR's research revealed recommencing commutes would boost back audience the most. Yet a significant minority of public radio listeners said they would tune in more often if NPR shows offered a greater variety of news coverage, beyond the coronavirus, recent protests for social justice and the election....

NPR has been planning for the migration of listeners away from traditional radio for years....

The lack of commuting is just accelerating the decline of news radio. People were already moving away from it. NPR has its website and podcasts to get its share of the audience as radio becomes less important to people. I remember when I didn't have satellite radio in my car. I would have the radio on my local NPR station nearly all the time. If I was in the car, I listened to whatever was on NPR. But it's been 20 years since I did that.

NPR people are way too jazzed up about a "transcranial direct current stimulation" device.

This is a very cutesy video that sort of acts like these characters are doing a scientific test, while also admitting — twice — that it's "unscientific":



What is NPR for? This seems like a 10 minute ad for a dicey product. The NPR reporter, Elise Hu, purports to want to know how an actual athlete would respond to the product, and then we get to hear from an athlete who is sponsored by the manufacturer! The athlete says, "To me, like, all of a sudden, it was just like everything was a lot easier for me." Later, Hu interviews the co-founder of the company, who, we're told, thinks his product could "actually increase our life span." She invites us to worry about the inequities that might emerge if humans get "upgraded too much."

I watched this so you don't have to. It's 9 minutes, so I'm not recommending it. Maybe scroll to the part I think is most ridiculous, the interview with the co-founder, which begins at 5:50.

This style of ultra-perky video is just atrocious, but it must work on someone. And I'm sending hits their way, so I'm probably encouraging it.

"For 40 years, [NPR's 'Morning Edition' has] basically had the same theme song..."

"... though it has gone through many changes... Since then, the news has been different every day. But the song has stayed the same until now. Can you hear it? The classic melody is intact, but the feel - the whole vibe - has been given an update."

Listen to the old and the new in this 2-minute clip:

The existence of women still a fascinating oddity at NPR.

That's how the NPR front page looks this morning.

That's either embarrassing or downright insulting to women.