Viable Truth
Veteran National Public Radio editor, Uri Berliner, recently wrote about his 25 year stint at the government-funded institution. At The Free Press, he conceded that while NPR has always had a liberal bent, now it has been totally taken over by a progressive agenda. Citing the publication’s reporting (or lack of) on the Hunter Biden laptop story and the lab leak theory of covid’s origin, he laments that NPR is too one-sided and has squandered the nation’s trust.
Berliner says he spoke with superiors at times to try to highlight the lack of ideological diversity, but his concerns were dismissed. NPR suspended Berliner for failing to get approval before writing for another publication and he has since quit. He wants NPR to regain the trust of all Americans but with the new radical CEO Katherine Maher doubling down on her woke speak, that’s unlikely.
Issues, Etc dissected a presentation Maher gave for a TedTalk. Her ideas about truth and objectivity reveal she has no idea about how human nature operates. She is confident that people don’t really need truth to solve humanity’s problems, just a lowest common denominator of agreement. In fact, she says it is divisive to bring “your truth” to collective discussions, since you are then arguing over “values and identity”. Maher advocates for “minimal viable truth” – getting it right enough, enough of the time, to be useful enough, to enough people. Sounds like a recipe for paralysis or tyranny.
The problem with so much of our corporate media is not really that they report from a progressive worldview – even journalists have presuppostions about how the world works! The problem is that they truly believe they’re neutral.