function (NPR) {
var propagandaRate=parseLies(
alert(”Create Feeling of Limerence and Acceptence in the Public for B**lcrap”)
}
repeat function

Your criticism is not justified at all. Why, just the other day, I heard a wonderful story on…um…something sweet and nice. It wasn’t like real information but I did feel warm after hearing it.

Nicely done. I think Ed Murrow would approve of your parody. I know no one here predicted, could have predicted, that a Republican Congress’ constant threats and parsing of PBS’ budget could have produced any effect on its coverage of the news. Nope. None at all.

N P R,
Purveyors of World’s Finest Word Goo
since 1982.

NPR and PBS are cautionary tales about how easily alternatives to the status quo can become mouthpieces for the status quo. We actually should keep their example in mind in the blogosphere. We could become them.

As Upton Sinclair wrote,

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it

At my house we call Scot Simon’s Weekend Edition Saturday the “Holocaust Show” because it invariably features a segment with some tale of heroism and endurance by survivors of the Nazi persecutions.
I do not to make light of this history, but, really, every show?

Truer words never spoken. There are a few so called progressive blogs that are engaged in censorship of certain subjects. No doubt that has something to do with ad money.

Just when one thinks that NPR/PBS can be a refuge for the cable news war weary…I listened to Scott Simon’s bit with Williams on 6/13 and it made me retch. But then Scott did a nice, warm contrary view of the story of the Holocaust shooting praising the guard who lost his life and I thought, yes, I prefer this to the constant finger pointing back and forth between right wing and left wing proponents. With neither approach did I become INFORMED! And, as I read other diaries posted here, apparently I should not expect that from our “paid for media”…with newspapers dying everywhere and blogs not the always the best sources for accuracy and verifiable information…what is someone interested in “handling the truth” to do?

do you watch (or listen or read) democracy now!?

it’s only an hour a day, M-F, but it’s far and away the best daily news program i’ve been able to find.

and blogs not the always the best sources for accuracy and verifiable information…what is someone interested in “handling the truth” to do?

Newspapers and television programs are, also, “not always the best sources for accuracy and verifiable information”. So what do you do about that? I’d like to think that you seek out newspapers and television programs that are more likely to be more accurate and verifiable. I doubt that you have done that, though, because your broad brush stroke about blogs tells me that you have an undue bias against them. One has only to do their homework to discover and decide which blogs are most often accurate and verifiable. This blog, for example, Glenn Greenwald’s blog, for another example provide much accuracy and are loaded with links to help you decide whether or not the information provided is accurate and verifiable.

(thanks for the recs, all)

I’ve called NPR the National Publicists for Republicans since the Gingrich years. Their formula of having 4 or 5 conservative Republicans dither for minutes for every 15-second soundbite they play from a Democrat got old years ago. Nice diary!

Agree re NPR (national), but check out some of local programming, which you can listen to online (past programs too) or download as a podcast on itunes or elsewhere for free. I highly recommend Worldview with Jerome McDonald on WBEZ – Chicago. He tackles all kinds of international news and stories, including Gaza.

Three Comments

1) Stars & stripes ‘new Englander’ Ken Burns, with his simpering, syrupy cultural nationalism, had his drivel originally financed under the influence of none other than Lynne Cheney.

2) The NewsHour’s main advertiser these days is the Chevron Oil Co.

3) NPR is simply pathetic in terms of its reporting independence and quality when compared with any respectable public news service. It is not even in the same league with BBC in the UK, or ARD in Germany; and unlike these it is, despite the unbearable lightness, much more prone to folding into the arms of the governing US administration. It has no public financed system of reporting independence.

Such a Tass Lite is as much a part of the post-modern Orwellian state as ’simulated drowning’ and stateless Uighurs who are called ‘guest workers’ in Bermuda…structural parts of an unstable monopolar arrangement of global power.

…trying to listen NPR after our breakup over their Iraq Invasion cheer leading
…… heard this piece Sat morning.

……turned the damn radio right off. Friggin’ Pathetic! Just Pathetic!