National Public Radio is not an oasis of civility. It's a nasty left-wing bubble. On Friday's All Things Considered, they aired a positive story on black artist Amy Sherald, best known for painting a portrait of Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery.
When reporter Olivia Hampton noted the Smithsonian is now subject to an executive order by President Trump seeking to correct government-funded museums who are "under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology," Sherald's response was divisive and race-centered:
SHERALD: We're talking about erasure every day. And so now I feel like every portrait that I make is a counterterrorist attack to counter some kind of attack on American history and on Black American history and on Black Americans.
Hampton didn't object at all. That's how NPR ended the story, with a boom. Earlier, Hampton championed her woke works. There’s the transgender Statue of Liberty with bright pink hair. There’s the 10-foot canvas the iconic World War II photo of a white male sailor kissing a white nurse in Times Square are recast as two black men kissing. Whitney Museum curator Rujeko Hockley gushes “It's a very kind of quietly subversive but very impactful act to reimagine this image that people really have burned into their minds.”
It's not "quietly subversive" to call anti-DEI conservatives "terrorists" trying to "erase" black Americans.
There are other outrages. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik slammed Trump's media policy: "you’re seeing the effort to delegitimize, and also the effort to block out and the effort to knock the economic pillars out from a number of different kinds of media outlets. And I think it’s actually part of a larger effort to control the flow of information."
NPR is part of a larger effort to "control the flow of information." Folkenflik crusades against Fox News and energetically backs woke caucuses inside newspapers engaged in ideological turmoil with their owners, including the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.
Folkenflik's pose ignores that Trump has granted broad access to the press, which isn't "controlling the flow of information" in any way resembling President Biden's aerobic avoidance of engagement with the press. Last year, Folkenflik admitted Biden had few press conferences and never granted an interview to his friends at The New York Times. But he offered no criticism of that, just that it made him "vulnerable" when people accused him of cognitive decline.
We close by reviewing other recent NewsBusters items on NPR -- the Fresh Air interview with author Chris Whipple on Biden's decline, conservative Christopher Rufo getting a platform on the New York Times podcast The Daily (which airs on NPR stations), and leftist hack economist Paul Krugman's Trump-bashing appearance on the chat show Here & Now. There's also NPR lamentations of "pro-Palestinian" student protesters fearful of speaking out, and how "unbiased" NPR and PBS won awards from the leftist Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).
Enjoy the podcast below.
