Last week, a half-wit crank who works for NPR wrote an attack on the outlet and shopped it to transphobe Bari Weiss. Maybe because his roll dog Bari published it, media gadfly Glenneth Greenwald was immediately all up in the Kool-Aid.
Glenneth pimped the article the way he does. It's all he has to do now. He writes and speaks opinion. The only time he ever did journalism was when it was dropped in his lap -- Ed Snowden's leaks. And he didn't even do that right. To this day, Glenneth has never reported on the majority of what Ed obtained. It's disappeared now in the bitch-fest that was the slap-fight leading to Glenneth leaving THE INTERCEPT.
Self-employed and desperate to Laverne & Shirley it on his own (he's going to do it his way! yes, his way!), Glenneth now chats a lot and hopes people will be forgiving of the fact that he now clearly dyes his own hair at home and has made the strange decision to stick with that bizarre color. All that hair does is signify him as another middle-aged failure.
Heidi Boghosian co-wrote a column last week that was a full on mess, but it seemed to suggest the need for truth telling. That's not going to result from praising and linking to racists in Australia who make it their daily job to call out the US while staying silent about their own government. That's called chicken s**t, for one thing. For another, the easiest thing in the world is to slam another government and its leaders. If you can't hold your own accountable, just admit you're worthless.
And the Australian is worthless. But she's not the only one.
How long is the left going to let Glenneth lie?
Glenneth wants you to know that the NPR employee is a "liberal" -- you can hear Glenneth coughing up his fur ball as he spits out the term.
Really? We've read the entire dull article. It's entitled "I've been at NPR for 25 years, here's how we lost America's trust" -- Google it if you want to read it, we don't link to transphobes.
We never see him apply the term liberal to himself.
He didn't vote for Donald Trump -- he says that -- not in 2016 and not in 2020.
So?
We know Liz Cheney didn't vote for Trump either election nor did the Bush family. And they're not liberals.
Glenneth remains one of the ugliest drama queens online. He screeches, he finger points and he never gets his facts right and he never cops to the reality that he's just a self-hating gay man trying to cozy up to the right-wing.
There is nothing to praise in Uri Berliner's long whine.
He wants to tell you a lie. All was great at NPR and then came mean old Donald Trump and NPR lost its mind and threw away journalistic standards.
Now NPR should have reported on the laptop. That's the Hunter Biden laptop. In 2024, Uri wants to whine about it. About how NPR elected to ignore it and to back up his point? He links to THE HILL. We covered the story repeatedly in real time -- here we are writing about it October 27, 2020 in "Media: NPR doesn't trust its listeners:"
He goes on to note NPR ombudsperson Kelly McBride's Tweet and we're going to ignore the Tweet -- it just links to the NPR newsletter -- and instead quote from the NPR newsletter she linked to where she writes:
Responding to the New York Post
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But the biggest reason you haven’t heard much on NPR about the Post story is that the assertions don’t amount to much.
“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,” NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel told me. “And quite frankly, that's where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”
The handful of stories that NPR has produced about the NY Post investigation have been limited to how Facebook and Twitter are restricting distribution of the story or how families of those seeking treatment for addiction are impacted by the portrayal of Hunter Biden's struggle. — Kelly McBride
What a load of garbage but that is all Kelly McBride is really. She's supposed to be about ethics. That's why she's the ombudsperson. But reading her nonsense about Nina Totenberg and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it was clear that Kelly didn't get Nina's job or her own. In the column, she repeats Nina's claim that her long friendship with RBG didn't influence her coverage. Guess what? That's not Nina's call. Nina cannot both conceal the friendship in news reports and then be the one who determines that there was no conflict. Listeners should have known, in every report in which she mentioned Ginsburg, that Nina was close friends with her. They should have had that knowledge so they could evaluate the report.
Circle Jerk. Remember it, will be circling back later.
As noted in the excerpt above, we linked to the NPR newsletter. For the same information,, Uri goes with THE HILL.
Uri's been working at NPR for 25 years. It's 2024. That means he started in 1999 (as even our math skills can process).
And America loses its trust in NPR because of the treatment of Donald Trump and things in that era?
Not because of the Iraq War which NPR pimped and promoted. They were not raising doubts in the lead up the war. They parroted officials and treated assertions as facts.
And that is the problem with NPR.
Uri wants to pretend this is a recent development.
Hmm.
Our infamous NPR foe Alicia Shephard insisted that waterboarding was not torture. And she said it was not torture because the Bush administration didn't consider it to be. That was long before Trump ran for president the first time.
There's a whole host of journalistic crimes that exist and that took place and Uri ignores them because he's one of those butt-hurt babies who can't stand the world around him. There are pronouns being used!!!!! Pronouns!!! And it's too much for Uri!!!
Do you know that NPR is now requiring reporters to document who they interview for stories! And to document their race, gender, etc!!!!
It's a horror according to Uri (and has Glenneth crossing his legs tightly).
Grow the hell up, Uri.
We've got a body of work here where we document the sexism and racism at play at NPR.
That includes rushing to fawn over Barbra Streisand and speak with her about an album of . . . rejects she didn't think worthy of release in real time but now that the voice is gone and she still has to deliver product to COLUMBIA, she's releasing it. Meanwhile, Diana Ross also releases an album of new material. NPR doesn't even mention the album on air -- not even in their weekly music program that covers new albums -- let alone bother to interview Diana. In fact, it doesn't appear NPR has ever interviewed Diana. Not even on FRESH AIR. This is the kind of bias that needs to be called out (and we have). THANK YOU, Diana's album, went on to garner a Grammy nomination.
Alicia Shephard got very angry with us in the '00s repeatedly. At one point, she was mad that we stuck up for Steve Inskeep. Alicia had fudged some numbers to pretend that NPR was out of balance with whom they interviewed. (That's why they are now tracking data on who makes it onto their morning news shows in 'reports' -- we can tell you that but Uri can't.) Now Alicia could have made the point she pretended to. But not with interview segments from MORNING EDITION, etc. She could have done it with FRESH AIR and THE DIANE REHM SHOW. They brought on guests daily. And while Alicia looked the other way, Terry Gross and Diane Rehm brought on twice as many men as they did women. There were Fridays that Diane's two hour broadcast would have nothing but male journalists pontificating.
And NPR has historically under-served the Black community in the US. That's another reality that Uri wants to ignore. Diversity, he argues is only about partisan views. Diversity isn't about diverse lived experiences, not in his shuttered world.
The sooner Uri dies, the quicker the world moves on.
But to Glenneth, he's a whistle-blower.
The circle jerk. That was, is and probably always will be NPR's biggest problem. Who gets on air is who they know.
This is the site that exposed the circle jerk that created the blogosphere and how CJR bloggers plugged their friends blogs daily without ever noting to their boss or to their readers that these were personal friends. Time for a 'blog report'? Well Candy Perfume Boy's going to do a roundup of what his friends wrote and not tell anyone he selected these bloggers because they were his friends offline, they got in hot tubs together, they got drunk together. And then they just 'accidentally' show up being promoted on CJR's website.
None of this is new to us. And to read Uri's half-truths and full on lies is asking way too much.
We also find it telling that when a group of writers at THE NEW YORK TIMES rightly objected to the transphobic coverage the paper was churning out, Glenneth mocked the writers, attacked them and belittled them but he wants to pretend Uri's a whistle-blower.
Uri's a half-wit and a disgruntled employee. (Disclosure, we've advocated for his firing in our conversations with 12 NPR friends leading up to writing this article.)
But Glenneth promotes him -- and promotes other crazies like ZNO -- who is all over Glenn's Twitter feed claiming the 2000 election was stolen.
This is why the circle jerk is so bad. Glenneth and people like him need to be cut off. Instead, he and Matt Taibbi and other con artists (most of whom are also transphobes) are platformed by so-called leftist media. Heidi Boghosian and her co-writer feel Americans are too immature or uneducated or both to know the difference between opinion writing and reporting. Well if you feel that way, Heidi, why are you linking to an opinion writer in Australia who has applauded The Proud Boys. Do you really think that link's going to play with those of us on the left -- let alone in The People's Republic of Brooklyn?
We need to be asking more of ourselves and we need to be asking more of others. You can start by asking who did you platform this week?
That's Kat Blaque with an astute critique of how Christian Nationalism is trying to subvert our democracy. Her work should have earned her a seat at the table. But for some reasons, two left radicals write an article about the media for COMMON DREAMS last week and don't seem to notice that all their references are White. Before the two write again, they need to ask themselves how, in their writing, they've welcomed anyone to the table that wasn't already invited? As Alice Walker has always said, she creates the world she wants in her writing.