The world is the verge of global conflict, America is splintered into angry factions and New York is sliding into hell.
On the other hand, the newsrooms of the New York Times and National Public Radio are in turmoil.
OK, that’s hardly as important as the widespread surge of violence and disorder, but we have to take good news where we find it.
And these internal media battles are good news because the lefty outlets are getting a taste of their own medicine.
Although the details differ, the common denominator is that insiders at both places are accusing management of bias and bigotry.
The intense battles have gone public, magnifying the stakes.
To be clear, these are not uprisings of conservatives against their progressive masters.
If either institution has significant numbers of conservatives, they’re in hiding.
Instead, the fights essentially pit the demonic left against the even more demonic far left.
Naturally, much of the rancor revolves around Donald Trump.
Relentlessly negative coverage of him remains standard fare at both NPR and the Times, but, as I predicted would happen, the lack of basic fairness that polluted coverage of Trump in 2016 has spread to virtually every topic under the sun.
Fair-minded stories have disappeared as leftist opinion dominates.
Media critics have warned for years that the lack of standards would erode public trust.
But the warnings were ignored, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
US trust has cratered
Just 32% of Americans say they trust the media “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” according to Gallup, which says the number matches a historic low.
The eruption at NPR has been especially dramatic, thanks to a brave long-time reporter and editor who is torching the partisanship.
Meanwhile, the Gray Lady is finding that no matter how far left it goes, it’s never far enough to satisfy the staff radicals who demand that the paper embrace their agenda.
They want to rip away any pretense of neutrality and become hard-core advocates on behalf of extreme policies.
The NPR battle went public when veteran journalist Uri Berliner wrote an essay condemning what he called the “lack of viewpoint diversity” in his workplace.
He checked the political registrations of editorial colleagues in Washington, DC, and found 87 were registered Democrats, and none were registered Republicans.
Bingo.
The result of that built-in bias is a one-sided view of America, he writes for the Free Press:
“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”
He cites “bizarre stories” about how “bird names are racially problematic,” others justifying looting and claims that “fears about crime are racist.”
He skewers the race-conscious staff by noting the demographics of the audience do not reflect the nation as a whole, saying “It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.”
Berliner, making it clear he’s not a conservative, writes that he voted against Trump in both 2016 and 2020.
Yet he cites the way the media, including NPR, immediately dismissed The Post’s initial coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop as an example of biased groupthink.
Antisemitism blind eye
Similarly, he believes the outlet views the Israel-Hamas war “through the ‘intersectional’ lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed.”
He faults what he calls NPR’s “highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of Oct. 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.”
Berliner says he is going public only after failing to get any attention — or even a meeting — with top management, and is distraught at its refusal to address the shortcomings.
“People are polite,” he writes.
“But nothing changes. So I’ve become a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking.”
The Times’ situation is more complex in that the editors who produce the lopsided paper are battling against what they see as a new generation of staffers who want it to be even more lopsided.
In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, they blamed young tech engineers and data specialists who have little or no background in journalism.
Executive editor Joe Kahn also faulted campus cancel culture, telling the Journal: “Young adults who are coming up through the education system are less accustomed to this sort of open debate, this sort of robust exchange of views around issues they feel strongly about.”
There is truth to his claims, but the fundamental problem is that Kahn’s predecessor, Dean Baquet, opened the floodgates for rampant bias during the 2016 campaign.
Citing a column by media reporter Jim Rutenberg about the difficulty of covering Trump if you thought he was unfit to be president, Baquet said that column “nailed” his worry.
His solution was for key reporters to be freed of rules against giving their opinions, and the paper soon began disparaging Trump relentlessly.
No Russian redressing
It’s no coincidence that the Times led the charge in misleading Americans about the Russia collusion fiasco. To this day, it has never admitted the errors.
Worse, the pattern persists. Kahn, after telling the Journal he wants coverage of Trump to be emotion-free, cited a recent piece in his paper as an example of fact-based, fair coverage.
Yet the story, headlined “Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First,” begins by resurrecting a remark Trump made in 1990 about how China’s leaders crushed the Tiananmen Square protest a year earlier.
After noting Trump said the Communist leaders were “horrible” and “vicious,” but “they put it down with strength,” the Times concluded that “his exaltation of the ruthless crushing of democratic protesters is steeped in foreshadowing.”
If using a 34-year-old ambiguous quotation to justify that sweeping conclusion is fair coverage, fairness has no meaning.
Especially when the Times never acknowledges the unprecedented ruthlessness of Democrats trying to lock up Trump, bankrupt him and keep him off presidential ballots.
Regarding the in-house revolt, a flashpoint came when someone leaked information about a Times plan for a podcast on how Hamas weaponized rape on Oct. 7.
A long article on the subject drew staff criticism, and the pushback led to the podcast being put off.
The Times’ launched an investigation of the leak, which led to claims it is singling out African and Arab employees.
The accusations that Kahn and other editors are bigots amounts to their reaping what they sowed.
The paper routinely accuses Trump and most Republicans of racism and Islamophobia, so perhaps being falsely accused will lead the editors to return to standards of fairness in their coverage of others.
Fat chance, which is why we should enjoy their comeuppance while it lasts.
