Reply #15: I don't think things would change at NPR if Dems win Senate, House and/or [View All]

[1932]

Presidency.

When Clinton was president, NPR was a 24/7 promotional arm for stock brokers and executives with stock options and stocks they wanted to unload to an unsuspecting market place. Every story, every day was about how the market could get even higher and that there was nothing easier in the world than becoming a dot-com millionaire.

NPR spends most of its time today telling you what's for sale rather than how working people and middle class people can have more power and control over their lives. In other words, they spend most of their time greasing the skids for the flow of power to people who already have a great deal of wealth and power.

They did a story on credit ratings about a year and a half ago and the lesson was that if you have bad credit, you should buy a copy of your credit report. Guess who the only expert they interviewed was... It was the President of a company that sold credit reports.

That isn't a news story. That's and advertisement for shifting power to the powerful.

Their foreign reporting is the other side of the same coin.

I've never heard them criticize neoliberalism (if I ran NPR, Joe Stiglitz would be on all the time commenting on stuff and debating Jeff Sachs). In that vein, their coverage of Venezuela is reprehensible. They did a story on Chavez winning the recall election and they played sad, somber minor-key music after the story. During the story, they translated government officials using people with the most gruff sounding absurd, staccato, dictator-like accents imagineable, while the translation for the opposition was done by "actors" with thoughtful, academic, soft-spoken accents (and you could hear the speakers underneath the translation -- they didn't match the tone an inflection of the translators at all). That's called propaganda. And you know what kind of propaganda? Say it with me: the kind that shifts power to people who have a great deal of power already.

I don't see that changing unless there were a radical shift in their funding. No more boards populated by the executives of the corporations who donate huge sums of money to them.