Mike Pesca: How NPR Lost Its Way

Former NPR and Slate fixture Mike Pesca discusses media meltdowns, objectivity vs. moral clarity, and whether we are better or worse off now that media gatekeepers have less influence.

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Mike Pesca: How NPR Lost Its Way

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Today's guest is Mike Pesca, who publishes The Gist podcast every weekday. The Gist, which launched in 2014, is a tight 30 minutes of news, interviews, and opinions on the biggest issues of the day. Pesca is a veteran of NPR and Slate—experiences that have made him an outspoken critic of legacy media, especially its willingness to overthrow longstanding commitments to objectivity and fairness in pursuit of progressive versions of "moral clarity."

Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with him about his controversial 2021 separation from Slate after he defended a New York Times reporter's use of a racial slur, why once-vaunted newspapers such as The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are rightly losing readers and money, and whether the old world of three broadcast TV networks and heavily gate-kept media had any value.

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• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

Comments

[Rick James]

I imagine Nick standing on the sideline waiting for the Melee to subside, repeatedly asking "is it safe yet? is it safe yet?" and then jumping out and sticking a microphone in some rando's face and asking, "So what do you think happened here?"

[mad.casual]

So sad.

[Quo Usque Tandem]

I think this sums it up:

https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust

[Rick James]

Yeah, NPR Editor says the quiet part out loud 12 years after anyone paying even moderate attention already knew with absolute certainty.

[Quo Usque Tandem]

I was a regular listener from the early 1980s until the 2016 [15] election. I knew they were getting bad, but then bias became ridiculous. And shortly after they were all in for the 1619 Project, and it was all about the "correct" narrative [as with virtually all MSM; they could care less about informing you, they just want to convince you].

[Zeb]

Same here pretty much. I used to see them as at least decent straight news.
I still tune in from time to time when I'm driving to see what things look like to people who get their information from the mainstream national news sources. It's pretty bad.

[mad.casual]

Same from about the 00s until 2016.

I remember the story and have mentioned it before. Essentially a Harvard Professor of Chinese ancestry laid out how the US, despite breaking the Paris Accord, met the aims better than any signatory *and* that the reductions were more than offset, or would be, by Chinese growth. The ultimate point being that American leadership was too erratic and that America and the world needed a steadier hand to tackle climate change. The story was run in collaboration with RFE-RL.

So, essentially, and I’m being far more brief than the original speaker was explicit, a media network set up to combat Soviet communist propaganda in the Eastern Bloc countries (and across America and Europe), which now touted itself as a hallmark of the intellectual cosmopolitan elite, was broadcasting fairly naked Chinese Communist propaganda to the same audience. Like a much more egregious antithetic version of "$500M is $1M for every American.", nobody involved in the making of this story, apparently, stopped and said "Hey, maybe we should include a disclaimer or somehow make it more clear that this isn't our position."?

[bill steigerwald]

Ditto to the aboves. Regular long-time listener, even noticing in early 1990s that they seemed institutionally disappointed that the Soviet Union had collapsed. When the Trump Monster arrived, NPR -- like the rest of the legacy liberal media -- lost its mind and the pathetic bias became too much to bear.

[LIBtranslator]

Ackshully, I too used to despise the Public Brainwashing System for pandering to soviet Freeze and Surrender defense hype, econazi Bozone Blabbering, Baby Seals and Ban EVERYTHING dinning. Problem was it was the only place outside of Canada to tune in to good music. Since then the Christianofascist media has become much, much more disgusting than Altruist Things Considered ever dared hope. So the ebbing tide has left PBS' boat stranded higher on the beach than all those others sucked into the Gee-Oh-Pee-testing ooze.

[Uncle Jay]

NPR and PBS lost their way when they allowed the far-left useful idiots to run the show.
Now would be a good time to defund both.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

National Peoples Radio
National Proletariat Radio (but really for people just fantasizing they belong to or support the proletariat)
Not Pertinent Radio
Nasty Prog Radio
Nationalize Property Radio
No Purpose Radio

[mad.casual]

No Pregunto/No Puedes Radio

[nicmart]

Now do, "How Reason lost its way."

[thollman]

Interesting comments on Slate. Trying to figure out what is happening with organizations like that as a reader is frustrating. This confirms what I saw as a one-time reader.

My usual irritant is comments like "modern liberal" when it is usually referring to "progressive light". If you are for cancel culture, you are not a liberal. Period. The 60s-liberal Alan Dershowitz just left the Democrat party because they had become completely Progressive.
Reason magazine is a big tent magazine that includes classical liberals, a more accurate definition of the word. A whole different meaning. Liberal vs conservative? Try having that discussion now versus 50 years ago. It all becomes intellectual goo. Liberalism does not equal progressivism. The intersectionality is minimal. AOC is a progressive democratic socialist. She regularly aims her fire at "liberalism". Progressives no longer try to equate themselves with liberals. It is time for conservatives and libertarians to stop doing that.

[LIBtranslator]

The Nolan diagram cut through all the looter expletives 50 years ago. Mystical fanatic looters who want to maximize deadly risk to females by banning birth control are Christian National Socialists. The phrase was German back when Catholic Adolf was their version of Billy Sunday, Father Coughlin and William Jennings Bryan: hates individual rights, worships government officiousness to exterminate voluntary transactions. Nazis is the exact technical term now in use these past 100 years. "Liberals" means libertarians everywhere George Wallace is unknown.