So @NPR @nprpolitics, I have some feelings about this I'd like to pass along...
Though, given the fact that you've allowed this reprehensible "exercise" to go on for days now, I doubt you'll care. But this is Twitter, so, hey, I don't really expect anyone to be listening.
For most of my adult life, @NPR has been my main news source. That's a time period that stretches 30+ years. And I've been proud of that fact.
While the airwave--both on TV and especially on radio--have been fill with dreck and audio/visual clickbait, NPR has represented a serious presentation of so many of the issues facing us all, nationally and internationally.
I've lived in four different states in different parts of the country, and I've been happy give my money as a kind of vote in the integrity of @NPR's coverage. I haven't loved all of it, but I've trusted its intentions.
And as someone who began his work life in journalism, I've appreciated the difficulty of covering news thoughtfully and with consideration, and @NPR has been the place mainstream media that's done that best in my view.
But my belief in @NPR diminished somewhat during the past few years as I perceived more of a "horserace" approach to politics in particular and "both sides are equivalent" approach to issues in general.
But even at my most cynical, at my most fearful about the direction @NPR was going, I never imagined the kind of content that @DomenicoNPR presents here. I never imagined it being approved in the 1st place, let alone allowed to continue.
At a time when people are being feel emotionally battered and fearful, at a time when people are literally dying from political violence, at a time when our democratic institutions hang in the balance, you choose to turn this trash fire of a historical moment into a "game."
The threat to people's health, the threats to the constitution and the courts, the losses of life from Charlottlesville to Niger, the normalizing of bigotry, threats to our environment. These are not fodder for games or experiments.
That I need to type these words to a major news organization funded *in the public interest*--I really don't have the words to express the sickness I feel, the anger, and the sense of betrayal of your mission.
I've come of age looking to @NPR's news coverage to enlighten, to call to account, to reveal the hidden perspectives, to demand truth and clarity, to demand better both of the powerful and of the rest of us.
But this exercise in "news judgment" is juvenile, trivial, and demeaning of real suffering *at the precise moment* when what we need is the opposite.
I always believed that the function of good journalism was to get us to see *more* and care *more* and do *more,* not desensitize us to the real harm that's happening around us. I thought @NPR saw that as the function of good journalism too, but I see now that I was wrong.
This game will no doubt draw followers; it will no doubt provide lighthearted entertainment to those who are so inclined. That it won't provide an iota of clarity about how we got into this mess or how to get out of it is apparently of secondary (tertiary?) interest to you.
That this game gives us *nothing* we need to help the poor, people of color, women dealing w/misogyny, Muslims facing bigotry, people threatened by white supremacist violence, people struggling w/healthcare, apparently none of that matters to you.
Because, hey, *clicks.*
And, as I said at the outset, @NPR, I doubt that you care what someone like me thinks. But I decided to have my say anyway because there is a single silver lining.
And that silver lining is related to something fundamentally wrong in this country: a smugness among the privileged and the powerful that only their own perspectives matter. A willingness of the privileged and powerful to see themselves as above reproach.
An arrogant belief in their own unassailable goodness to the point that they're incapable of being tone deaf and mean-spirited and hurtful because they're clever or ironic or "all in good fun."
As a side note, I can't help but wonder whether it's exactly this attitude toward the perspectives and pain and struggle of others that fed the sexual harassment problems at your own organization.
I can't help but wonder whether it's exactly this kind of arrogance and blindness that kept you from seeing the rot at the very top of @NPR itself.
But this much I can say: *We* see you now, @NPR. We see beyond an erudite and clever veneer, we hear beneath the mellifluous voices, that you are capable of the same level of ugliness and sneering insensitivity, and that you're capable of justifying and defending it.
And we end the year with another sad moment of clarity about who we can count on and who we can't. /Fin
