The revolution NPR incubated has at last come for NPR.
Like so many media ventures, National Public Radio has fallen on hard times, and it’s had to make some difficult decisions. To make up for what the New York Times reported was a staggering “$30 million gap in its budget,” the broadcasting company recently cut 10 percent of its workforce and ceased production on four of its podcast offerings.
The podcasts that will meet the chopping block include Invisibilia, a popular show about the “unseen forces” that “control human behavior”; a program that explores “racism, misogyny,” and “marginalization in hip-hop,” Louder Than a Riot; and the comedy news quiz show Everyone & Their Mom.
Rather than accept the cold logic of budgetary shortfalls, NPR’s put-out staffers are not taking their superiors’ verdicts lying down. As Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman reported, one of the “multiple all-hands meetings” NPR hosted amid growing outrage over the firm’s staffing decisions descended into chaos. There, disgruntled employees deployed what they’ve learned is the most devastating weapon on their arsenals: allegations of racism.
During the meeting featured in Bloomberg’s dispatch, employees reportedly probed their bosses for the precise demographic details of the employees who were laid off so they could perform an identitarian audit of NPR’s remaining staff. The meeting “boiled over” when a former employee alleged that the company had conspicuously withheld financial support from some of its podcasts and demanded “accountability” of some NPR executives by name. CEO John Lansing objected to the former employee’s behavior, at which point all hell broke loose:
Some employees interpreted this as tone-policing and felt uncomfortable.
A few questions later someone referenced the earlier exchange and asked how attendees could be as specific as possible without using people’s names. Lansing re-committed to his answer and said that the conversation should have been more civil, which some employees interpreted as a direct attack on the earlier employee.
They immediately took to Zoom and called Lansing’s response “racist” and out-of-line. Another staff member dropped a link to a segment from NPR’s Code Switch titled, “When Civility Is Used As A Cudgel Against People Of Color.”
“Civility is a weapon wielded by the powerful,” one person wrote, according to screenshots of the chat viewed by Bloomberg.
“This meeting has made me more afraid for the future of public media than any conversation I have had in a very long time,” wrote another.
What NPR’s executives see as baseless allegations of racial hostility are, in fact, supported and reinforced by the tools fashioned into existence by NPR. Given how much this company has devoted itself to broadcasting content that purports to divine racial hostility in unremarkable banalities, its listeners would probably agree with NPR’s disgruntled former employees.
In recent years, NPR has played frequent host to pop-academic fixtures such as White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, who lectures white listeners on their need to experience discomfort while interrogating their own internalized white supremacy because “‘nice white people’ can still be complicit in a racist society.” It lectures young listeners on the most effective ways “non-black folks” can “talk to your parents about racism.” It diagnoses acute medical ailments that are directly attributable to the existence of racism and poverty.
Applying a secret logic that uncovers “covert racism” in everyday life dominates NPR’s coverage of just about everything. The January 6 hearings were actually all about racism. Banal crime-blotter journalism is rife with racism. Climate-change activism is, in fact, an anti-racist crusade. Philanthropy and charity are tainted by racism. Homebuyers navigate a minefield of racial hostilities. The “food world” is, consciously or otherwise, racist. Birdwatching’s racist legacy pervades the practice even today. The same could be said of conservationism in general. Mundane turns-of-phrase such as “sold down the river,” “grandfathering in,” “master bedroom,” and “cake walk” expose their users as, if not racist themselves, white-supremacist-adjacent.
NPR finds evidence of “systemic racism” in seemingly every legacy institution in the United States, a category that surely includes storied venues such as NPR. By lending undue credence to nearly any allegation of white racial bigotry, the broadcaster was writing the instructions through which the disgruntled can bring down the successful. Did NPR’s executives expect their employees not to notice?
In my book, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun, I describe the psychological incentives associated with the impulse to impose progressive political themes on otherwise apolitical cultural stimuli — “a power play reserved almost exclusively for the successful”:
Beyond honestly believing they’re doing the Lord’s work, the New Puritans must also find it gratifying to think of themselves as uniquely perceptive. If you are so worldly and astute that you can see the hideous hidden workings of the world, you’re a member of an exclusive club. And once you get a taste of that comprehensive vision—a theory of everything that reveals to you the secret, seedy underbelly of society—it can become intoxicating. Those who are attracted to this psychological orientation are likely to find that its applications are limitless. And when they apply this framework to just about everything, they find that just about everything is a problem.
NPR made this intoxicating philosophy into a business model. Their employees over-imbibed and became understandably besotted with it. The only surprise in the news that the revolution NPR incubated has at last come for NPR is that it took this long.