Few Things Considered Nothing Much Said About Them And Those Untrue In The End

IT WAS A MISTAKE in my time offline to think that listening to National Public Radio again was going to be anything but an exercise in disgusted disappointment.  I'd stopped listening when I came to rely more on sources found online though I'd increasingly found it was far from a reliable source of information decades ago.  

Listening to All Things Considered (yeah, right) last night and their alleged profile of the rich and connected Republican-Catho-fascist Leonard Leo, the guy behind the court capture scheme as worked out to put the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary into the hands of the fascists who largely control it, it was an exercise in the kind of even-handedness that lies on behalf of that very thing.  Balancing, for example, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's fact, document and reason based presentation of how the Courts were handed to fascists with the non-fact based denials of Leo and his buddies.  Neglecting to notice there is all the difference in the world between the struggle to abolish slavery (Leo the liar really did bring that up as the equivalent of the billionaire financed court capture program) and using the Supreme Court to nationalize Women's bodies and to destroy the Voting Rights Act.  Their reverent regard for how now, as Leo's wet dream of the nationalization of women's reproductive systems is about to happen, how that must make him feel after all these years was one of the most repulsive things I've ever heard on any alleged news program, and I did, once in a while, hear clips from FOX and ABC and CBS.  

I used to buy the lie that if we only got rid of all of those awful commercials that we could rely on those idealistic truth-seekers, the journalists, to produce at least radio news that was factual to the level of adequately informing voters of who will best represent them and rescue democracy.  Well, that was a pipe dream.  NPR and PBS are a pretty definitive demonstration that journalists without ads (allegedly) are not going to be those idealistic truth-seekers instead of self-interested mouthpieces of conservative convention.  They aren't any more likely to be that than any other group of people who get paid to do something.  There are better nationally financed news operations in places like Canada and Germany, thought the BBC is not like that anymore.  But we won't get that here, oddly, before the Republicans sank its reliability, the old Voice of America did about as good a job at that as has been done in American journalism. Though they were for exclusively foreign consumption, not broadcast to a domestic, American audience.  That is far less the case, today.

When I was growing up it was the conventional wisdom that the paper moving and producing white-collar class were morally superior to the grimy lower class, that was what we got in the media, the movies, TV, certainly the writers, for the most part, were invested in the idea that their like were on a higher moral level than the great unwashed.  Though, at least in our family, not from my parents.  

Journalists liked to present themselves as such as the profession went from an apprenticeship model to being a job that the lesser aspiring members of mid-level affluent families would go into.  The movie All The President's Men might be the dividing line between the two, showing that reporters could be pretty men.  Before that people even in the movies and on TV were quite cynical about journalists and many of those in journalism gave them good reason to be cynical about their profession.  Quite a bit of that cynicism came from those who worked the job.  It went from being a job to being a profession.  Those of today are probably far more cynical but they have better hygiene and use better grammar and might have a larger recognition vocabulary.  And they are cynical enough to keep the pretenses up in their work.  I think NPR is about as cynical an operation as there is other than the likes of FOX.  They know that the formula of other-sideism and how its rules rig the game to get things right where their sponsors want them to get.  

It's too bad that the thing continued after its big financial crisis in the late 1970s because it has been pretty bad for a very long time.  When it finally is ended it will probably not even be a bad thing, it will merely be an example of irrelevance, drive-time distraction that petered out.  It might make a good study in how what started out as an allegedly idealistic non-profit turned into such a both-sides sewer of dishonesty.