NPR’s ‘Mutual Respect’ Claim Doesn’t Extend to Trump and the Birthers
NPR anchor Steve Inskeep denied NPR’s liberal bias in The Wall Street Journal in March: “Most listeners understand that we're all figuring out the world together, calmly and honestly, in an atmosphere of mutual respect. NPR's audience keeps expanding because Americans want more than toxic political attacks. They want news.” But that’s not really the case. On Tuesday, the Journal’s James Taranto cited an April 28 All Things Considered interview with former Washington Post reporter David Remnick, now editor of The New Yorker, where mutual respect wasn’t on the menu: Donald Trump, who wanted to make a name for himself yet again, and to – he's the kind of exhibitionist, a moral or immoral exhibitionist. And he was willing to play this really ugly game and he got exactly what he wanted — higher TV ratings, attention, lots of microphones in front of him. And he's a clown. Remnick sounded like a garden-variety left-wing radio talker like Randi Rhodes or Ed Schultz. He was furious that anyone would attempt to “delegitimate” his hero Obama. Taranto mined this interview for his theory that “The Left Needs Racism”: [W]e wouldn't say we “deny” that the birthers are racist. Some of them may be. Our position is simply that it is wrong to throw around such accusations without evidence. Yet prominent liberals have been doing just that. Last week in an interview with NPR, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and author of the Obama hagiography “The Bridge,” had this to say about Donald Trump's birtherian antics: He's race-baiting. He's hatemongering. It's very clear what he's doing. He's trying to arouse half-buried feelings in many people that are unfortunately still there….Just as everybody thinks that they have a sense of humor, no one ever thinks that they're a racist. But I–my concern here, my fiercest words are for the people who do the active arousing of these feelings, that there are latent racial anxieties or feelings about otherness, or whatever they may–we know that. “No one ever thinks they're a racist”–including, it is safe to surmise, David Remnick. For him, white guilt is directed outward; he is certain that other people are racist. His “evidence” is the assertion that they have “feelings” that are “half buried” and “latent.” Could we get The New Yorker's storied fact-checking department to confirm that, please? Baselessly accusing their political foes of racism is a way in which today's liberals attempt to incite fear and loathing of “the other.” As we argued last year, this serves a political purpose in that it helps persuade blacks not to consider voting Republican. But it serves a psychological purpose as well. It reinforces white liberals' sense of their own superiority. Yet that sense of superiority is not as secure as it once was. Here is Remnick's most telling quote from that interview: “Really, I'm not in the habit of screaming racist at every turn. I don't think you [interviewer Michele Norris] are and I don't think most people are.” It used to be that people expressing politically incorrect views about race felt compelled to preface their statements with a defensive denial: “I'm not a racist, but…” The editor of The New Yorker, speaking to an NPR audience, now has a similar compulsion to deny that he is “in the habit of screaming racist.” The tables have turned. Now it is the left that is on the defensive over “racism.” Their outdated attitudes about race put them in the absurd position of arguing that the most powerful man in the world is a victim of oppression because of the color of his skin. Men like David Remnick turn out to be the ones who aren't ready for a black president.
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on May 5, 2011. Filed under