I listen – as rarely as I can – to NPR’s “On the Media”. The show is basically an unthinking cheerleader for America’s “elite” media.
And their latest theme is participating in the war on “Nostalgia” – particularly, against the notion of looking to the past for lessons that might help with the present and the future.
The first segment was keynoted by a fellow – some sort of historian – who declaimed in an adenoidal ,mid-Atlantic voice no different than a thousand others on NPR “What does nostalgia for the fifties get you? It gets you dead, sooner! The life expectancy was 66 years! Now it’s 78!”
That’s right – if you think society could gain by returning to some of the social and moral stanards of the past, you also have to roll back science! And bring the Klan back too!
Not really exaggerating that last bit – because nostalgia isn’t just wanting to derive some wisdom from another time. Nosirreebob, it’s bringing Hitler back to life!
You’re not learning from the past. You’re begging to repeat it, all of it, especially the worst of it.
We can not defund NPR fast enough.
I listen to NPR pretty often. Mostly because there is a local college station that plays my favorite bluegrass and old timey music, but also because it’s the go-to source for information by leftists that style themselves as intelligent. I like to know what flavor of bullshit they’ve swallowed lately; it’s like opening a trout to see what they’re eating.
But don’t kid yourself. The feds could pull all their funding, and NPR would be fine. they get the majority of their funding from the likes of Bill Gates et. al.
They’re the degenerate’s Baghdad Bob.
We can not defund NPR fast enough.
As long as the Republican party offers up mediocrities like Bush, Dole, Bush, McCain, Romney, McConnell, and Paul Ryan NPR will only see its funding increase while the Republican party maintains its slow shuffle toward Permanent Minority Party status.
NPR will eventually be subsumed into TikTok but it will never be defunded by the Republican Party.
The thought that comes to me regarding NPR is, from the perspective of someone who enjoys classical music, longer pieces are hard to do with a commercial format. That noted, I’ve noticed recently that not only are the commercial stations doing 2-3 songs (say 10-15 minutes) between commercials, but NPR/PBS seems to be breaking in even on the classical stations….about that often.
So maybe it’s time to see if there’s a commercial market for classical music.
Regarding the possibility of ending subsidies, NPR gets about 25% of its money from government (but does not list that clearly in their annual reports, government is just another “corporate sponsorship”), so they would survive without them. The question that comes to mind is that if you did, would they get even further out there. Given how far they are already, I doubt it, but it’s worth asking.
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Defund NPR?
Are you kidding?
And never, ever, be invited to a dinner party again.