Obituary for NPR?

I'm sick of the right wing media machine getting to determine whether liberals are in trouble. What a little relay race of subterfuge: the notorious scumbag James O'Keefe runs his little bad theatre scam to entrap some institution beloved on the left--NPR or Acorn or whatever--into saying something which can be used as an example of unsavory leftism (would that the bar were not so low), and Murdoch's boys take whatever he throws out and runs with it. That's standard wingnut practice. But then, as if on cue, the rest of the media trots along and covers the whole business as though it were news, as if it wasn't from the outset a concerted attempt to control the narrative.

Fuck that whole Rube Goldberg noise machine. Ron Schiller said that the Republican Party has been overrun by anti-intellectual and racist Tea-Baggers. Shocking! What's next, that the Earth is spherical? Every single on-air personality of Faux News and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman and the hallucinating Glenn Beck all say things 100 times as outrageous and inflammatory as this tepid remark every single day and if they're challenged about their views they reiterate them and even double down. Obama is a Communist! Obama is not an American! Health care is Nazi! Liberals hate families! If NPR had embraced anything even remotely analogous to these they would have had to board the place up. But nobody's boarding up Faux: Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes are multi-millionaires. Murdoch is one of the richest people on the planet.

Fighting fire with fire in this case only plays to the packed anti-rational gallery. But we certainly won't fight the fire by helping those on the right fan the flames. There are already so few institutional places left which have not been polluted by Rupert Murdoch's relentless rightward shifting of the nation's Overton Window, and it pains me to see NPR cower to this intellectual terrorism. This tactic only works because we let it.

Let this be a wakeup call to NPR: stop being led around by your nose ring. If an executive calling Tea-Baggers idiots and racists off the record--which is after all no more than the straight truth--is grounds for the top brass to resign then I begin to wonder what I'm supporting. What's next? NPR apologizing for its coverage of evolution? Or global warming? I've already abandoned television for being almost universally incapable of telling a straight story. I will mourn the loss of NPR if conservatives manage to pollute this last broadcast stronghold.