America’s authoritarian fourth estate
All National Public Radio hosts talk as if they are standing in a nursery, afraid to wake the baby up, or trying to pacify a distempered hound. Their soft tones, slow utterance and hushed breathlessness are meant to convey that NPR is a sanctum, a cathedral of reason and restraint, and that what comes via such delicately modulated, church-whisper voices must be true.
Nowhere was that voice so needed than in the extraordinary statement it put out about the Hunter Biden story, which has already been banned by Facebook and Twitter: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions. And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”
There’s a lot of “we” in that statement. Who are these “we” who are so certain of a story they won’t report on? Do they have soothsayers on call? Have they disinterred Nostradamus as NPR’S preferred fact- checker? Or is this the kind of certitude that only comes from being “woke” and terminally, adamantly anti-trump?
NPR, in this instance, is merely a camp follower of the much less austere Twitter, which has blocked the New York Post’s reports on Hunter and Joe Biden from the beginning. And when Twitter and public radio are of the same mind on anything, it is fair to observe how very little mind is involved.
NPR is also at one with the mainstream American media — broadcast and print — in choosing to disregard the revelations of the Biden family’s dealings, and most especially, any troubling revelations about Joe Biden himself. Such magisterial restraint by the free press, such scruple, such commanding integrity.
The paternalism of NPR’S edict is arrogance distilled. It is also cosmically inconsistent, for NPR is never so circumspect when the band is playing a tune it likes. It has feasted voraciously on the much uglier stories, with none of the substance of the Biden yarn, that were hurled at Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for example.
Recall all the hideous allegations that felon- lawyer Michael Avenatti threw during the Kavanaugh hearings. Did NPR tremble so virtuously then? Did its staff issue strident disclaimers about “pure distractions,” or “politically driven” stories” regarding that mud-encrusted slander?
CBC, an ideological cousin of NPR, to its shame, went all the way to California to interview Avenatti. There will not be any anchor safaris to check up on the current Biden scandal.
The contortions of the U. S. media and some of our own in declaring a cordon sanitaire around the massively dubious operations of the Biden family, in the last week of a presidential campaign, is, as Glenn Greenwald, who’s surely not a Donald Trump fan, has correctly argued, an appalling collapse of journalistic integrity, a woeful abandonment of that most hollow of boasts: that the press speaks truth to power.
Consider this statement from the pages of the Washington Post: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.” This is not a sentence from a three- follower Twitter account. This is a sentence from the pages of the paper that broke Watergate and is probably the second most influential journal in North America.
Is there anyone in the West who does not deplore the dictatorships of the world, past and present, that stomped on freedoms, controlled news and outlawed certain opinions? Within those sad countries, people are exposed to vicious penalties, sometimes torture and jail, for writing or speaking the truth.
Censorship is always a characteristic of authoritarian leaders, who know that truth, information and open debate are like Kryptonite to them. We pity people who live in these nightmare regimes.
Over here in the West — at least for the moment — we are relatively free to speak our minds and debate the issues. But we have this new practice, the willing censorship practised by the very institutions that were built on the ideas of openness and full disclosure.
Big Tech companies now deliberately ban stories they do not want made fully public. News agencies, like NPR, cancel all coverage. Big newspapers announce what they won’t cover. And then there are the witless cancel mobs that every business and news organization genuflect when they are blitzed by empty heads with a Twitter account.
Any news organization that declares that it will not cover a story, that it will not investigate significant claims about those in power, puts a cancellation mark on its own integrity.