NPR used to accompany me on all my drives. But I stopped listening a few years ago as it became… well, unlistenable. I know many others share that experience. I’m sure I’ve missed good reporting and interesting interviews that undoubtedly still trickle through. But I’ve saved myself from pounding my forehead to bits against the steering wheel.
Same, it’s agony now. They succumbed to pressure to start pushing activist viewpoints, lost tons of listeners, and now I guess they feel like they have to pander even more feverishly to the only audience they have left, which likes that stuff.
OTM was my very favorite podcast for years, and during the Trump years it seemed to shift increasingly to activism, and I found myself no longer listening. I do wonder whether it always had some issues, I remember them turning to the SLPC frequently as an authoritative source on who's a baddy - so maybe it's part their slipping standards, and part me becoming more aware of the risk of activist capture... In any case, I really appreciate the coverage on this.
Ditto myself. Was absolutely a top podcast for me from like 07-13 or so, and I listened to it on radio syndication before that I believe.
It got worse and worse and more myopic and Brooklyn liberal worldview focused over the years IMO, where sometime a bit before Trump I had just had enough of it. It became the very thing it claimed to dislike (bad journalism). These days when I catch even a little bit of it it is like nails on a chalkboard unles it is just the right segment.
Gladstone should be ashamed of herself. If she is not willing to find the courage to push back anymore against activist propaganda, she should probably at least have the decency to retire.
It's a catastrophe to see so much of the establishment media shred its credibility. No wonder the percentage of the public who trusts them is at historic lows, and "journalists" are ever more in favor of censoring dissent from their preferrred narratives. The "misinformation" is coming from inside the house.
As usual I do want to point out something, which is likely just nitpicking on language, but I do have a problem with as written:
" If you are an LGBT organization, it is beneficial to treat ambiguous cases as homophobic hate crimes rather than something else. This is not due to anything nefarious on the part of LGBT activists per se; it is, at the risk of repeating myself, what activists of all stripes are supposed to do."
This is nefarious and a major problem. Not only in the cases of ambiguity, or in this case just a lack of information at all, not conflicting or hard to interpret information. This is like saying any interracial crime is motivated by racism. This type of thinking and action by the media and activist orgs is actively contributing to the inflated sense that people are persecuted, which is bad for those groups whom they seek to protect, not to mention the division it sows.
In this specific case, there was actually good evidence to the contrary, and the group still went forward with their claims basically knowing they were false.
The reason I think this might just be a language nitpick, is you say it's not nefarious, (which I think is inaccurate) but I think what you mean is that it isn't particularly unexpected with this org or this type of advocacy group, which I agree with.
Agreed. I would quibble not just with “not nefarious” but also with the assertion that this is what these groups “are supposed to”do. I would just strike out those three words: This is what they do (many but not all of them). ”Supposed to” suggests that activists *should* do this. But perhaps Jesse meant something more like this is what their followers expect of them.
Jesse, your acceptance of the trans cult's pronoun diktat is extremely disappointing.
Aldritch is a man. Singular male pronouns should be used for men, full stop.
It's similar to your continued use of the phrase "trans kids" (not in this post), a type of person that does not exist, since there is no diagnostic for distinguishing childhood gender dysphoria that will persist into adulthood and childhood gender dysphoria that will not.
The trans cult is extremely good at modifying language to bend perceived reality towards their cult fantasies, and it is imperative that it be resisted at all times.
Absolutely. The abomination of the "singular they" should not be coddled. No one owns the pronouns. We use them to communicate. Allowing persons to force others to use incorrect language is simply a degenerate and confused response.
We get to choose our names. We do not choose our pronouns. They are defined by our sex. Period.
I thought this one nailed it: https://twitter.com/mmcdonaldlewis/status/1597848442419957760?s=46&t=U59XvdAaNQHFzpKFoR9JQg. Certainly encapsulates how I feel. Still have NPR as one of my presets on my car radio, but finally had to drop my sustaining membership because I couldn’t stomach financially supporting a station that aired people saying that anyone with concerns about biological males competing in women’s sports is on the “anti-trans hate train.”
I didn’t think much could surprise me, but the excerpt of Gladstone suddenly painting the Pulse shooting as an anti-LGBTQ crime again genuinely made me just sit there and blink at the screen for a minute. That’s... eerie, honestly. I don’t know a better word.
If you are an LGBT organization, it is beneficial to treat ambiguous cases as homophobic hate crimes rather than something else. This is not due to anything nefarious on the part of LGBT activists per se; it is, at the risk of repeating myself, what activists of all stripes are supposed to do. Anti-immigration activists overhype stories that support immigration restriction, anti-abortion activists overhype stories about the horrors of abortion, and on and on.
I disagree pretty strongly with this take. Over-hyping has fairly deleterious consequences in my view - if everything is [insertphobic], nothing is. Furthermore, if you are trying to gain supporters, especially from among those who may be truly open to your cause, you need to be honest, otherwise you are burning credibility before you have earned it. Further still, you are giving fuel to your opponents. Maybe it's just me but if I see someone make a wildly exaggerated and ultimately unfounded claim about anything and there is no retraction/apology, I simply write that person off as a credible source for anything.
I thoroughly enjoy reading your media criticism. It evokes a lot of interesting personal feelings. I'm a journalism graduate who never really worked professionally as a journalist. From my time at the student newspaper, and the environment I came up in there (just under 10 years ago), I'm fairly certain that I would have become an activist journalist of sorts. I can remember the newsroom reveling in that progressive mantra of "speak truth to power." Heterodox opinions were extremely rare, and calling out "dangerous and harmful ideas" was picking up steam. (Quick aside: I don't blame my school or instructors for this culture. I blame the student newsroom where most of the learning was happening.)
It took me until late 2020, early 2021, to see the folly in the contemporary journalism industry. Reading The Quick Fix and subsequently tuning into BaRPod (and others like the great Coleman Hughes) were instrumental steps in hearing new opinions that illuminated this folly. But had I not lived with someone whose heterodox opinions consistently clashed (respectfully) with mine in the months leading up to finding these heterodox voices, I'm not sure I would have been open to them. I likely would have treated them the same way I treated all "conservative" talking points as a student journalist (as pesky barriers to progress and equality).
All this to say, I think a lot of the activists in journalism today don't even realize they're activists. They're fully bought into the "words as violence" mantra because I doubt anyone they respect has challenged them on it. And, if the other side's words are violence, they don't see an issue with cutting corners to "refute" those words. Plus, there's this looming reassurance: readers will applaud it.
Likening it to my situation, I believe the only way this gets reversed is through offline conversations with respected peers. But we all know how difficult those conversations are to have. And it wasn't just one conversation for me. It was dozens. It was a whole year-long, slow unraveling of ideology.
I've gone on long enough, and this comment isn't all that specific to this post. But, keep up the good work. Who knows how many people you might be helping to jolt from a deep intellectual sleep.
Journalism is in a degraded state in America. Often enough, it isn't even journalism, it is Activism Inc. All of the time, stories are being treated like Rorschach blots by MSM journos, they imprint their preferred narratives on complex stories. I have never seen anything like this in my life.
No wonder people are running from the MSM to Substack and Rumble and Patreon. Journalism at its best used to be represented by Woodward and Bernstein. Now journalism's public face is the likes of Taylor Lorenz.
Great piece as usual. Count me as a third comment that "this is what activists are supposed to do" needs some unpacking.
I can imagine considering activists, such as they are, a part of a de facto adversarial system analogous to the legal system. In a healthy version of that system, with a healthy media, the public-as-jury can decide. But: who sees it that way, whether in journalism or more broadly? And not just since the beginning of this period of awful journalistic decline: I havent seen much to suggest people in and out of media have ever, on the whole, had a healthy and mature understanding of the reality of what activists are for and how they operate. But maybe I missed that civics class (I'm in Canada). Or maybe activists don't like you to see them this way and never really have, so the problem is more laden with deception and "wickedness." And harder for the average journalist much less normie to properly account for.
A big eye opener for me that pushed me more towards the center politically was working for an actvist non-profit from age ~28-32 and seeing how while they were tremendous at pointing out deceptions and exaggerations and lies of people on the right, they absolutely used exactly those same tools for their own publications and "research". And this was an influential place that our state's widely listened to public radio station basically cited as *the authority* on the issue we focused on.
Seeing that what I viewed as this very honest well meaning organization give zero fucks about the truth when the truth conflicted with its activism really shook my trust in it and in a lot of the infromation I was getting from public raido and other similar organizations.
Did a child sleep for 1 night on their aunt's couch as their mother was between leases? Well that is another *homeless child sleeping in the gutters each night* we can count to make the problem seem worse than it is.
Is your apartment not up to yuppie upper middle class living conditions? You must live in *substandard blighted housing* At times it literally seemed our policy that the median US living situation was "unsafe and unacceptable". Talk about being blinded by ideology.
And that isn't even getting into how the board was chock-full of executives from entities that depended on additional public spending on the issues we were working on. No conflict of interest there...
I don't have anything useful to add, other than to point out that Jesse said OTM "jumped the gun" on reporting about the motive in the Colorado Springs shooting.
That would not be funny at all if it was intentional. Since I'm positive it was unintentional, however...
Was following a conversation which was pretty serious and someone said "The stats on suicide blew my mind". Nobody else caught it in the moment, and it was completely unintentional, but it was comedy gold to me.
Jesse - I agree with most of your analysis here but feel like Brooke’s mention of the Pulse massacre was sufficiently vague that you’d have to impose your own meaning on her words to say she thought Pulse was a homophobic attack.
Also I think it’s useful to remember that OTM did honest reporting about Pulse *after* someone did the work for them.
I feel these articles were written out of the fear that Signal’s excellent pieces about trans care are being used by MAGA to justify anti-LGBTQ policies. This shooter 100% targeted this bar b/c it’s a gay bar. How many bars are there in Colorado Springs? It was in a random strip mall. He did it for that reason
NPR used to accompany me on all my drives. But I stopped listening a few years ago as it became… well, unlistenable. I know many others share that experience. I’m sure I’ve missed good reporting and interesting interviews that undoubtedly still trickle through. But I’ve saved myself from pounding my forehead to bits against the steering wheel.
Same, it’s agony now. They succumbed to pressure to start pushing activist viewpoints, lost tons of listeners, and now I guess they feel like they have to pander even more feverishly to the only audience they have left, which likes that stuff.
OTM was my very favorite podcast for years, and during the Trump years it seemed to shift increasingly to activism, and I found myself no longer listening. I do wonder whether it always had some issues, I remember them turning to the SLPC frequently as an authoritative source on who's a baddy - so maybe it's part their slipping standards, and part me becoming more aware of the risk of activist capture... In any case, I really appreciate the coverage on this.
Ditto myself. Was absolutely a top podcast for me from like 07-13 or so, and I listened to it on radio syndication before that I believe.
It got worse and worse and more myopic and Brooklyn liberal worldview focused over the years IMO, where sometime a bit before Trump I had just had enough of it. It became the very thing it claimed to dislike (bad journalism). These days when I catch even a little bit of it it is like nails on a chalkboard unles it is just the right segment.
Gladstone should be ashamed of herself. If she is not willing to find the courage to push back anymore against activist propaganda, she should probably at least have the decency to retire.
It's a catastrophe to see so much of the establishment media shred its credibility. No wonder the percentage of the public who trusts them is at historic lows, and "journalists" are ever more in favor of censoring dissent from their preferrred narratives. The "misinformation" is coming from inside the house.
It’s been really disheartening to find that for every Bob Garfield there are 15-20 Brooke Gladstones.
These are some of my favs Jesse, ty.
As usual I do want to point out something, which is likely just nitpicking on language, but I do have a problem with as written:
" If you are an LGBT organization, it is beneficial to treat ambiguous cases as homophobic hate crimes rather than something else. This is not due to anything nefarious on the part of LGBT activists per se; it is, at the risk of repeating myself, what activists of all stripes are supposed to do."
This is nefarious and a major problem. Not only in the cases of ambiguity, or in this case just a lack of information at all, not conflicting or hard to interpret information. This is like saying any interracial crime is motivated by racism. This type of thinking and action by the media and activist orgs is actively contributing to the inflated sense that people are persecuted, which is bad for those groups whom they seek to protect, not to mention the division it sows.
In this specific case, there was actually good evidence to the contrary, and the group still went forward with their claims basically knowing they were false.
The reason I think this might just be a language nitpick, is you say it's not nefarious, (which I think is inaccurate) but I think what you mean is that it isn't particularly unexpected with this org or this type of advocacy group, which I agree with.
Agreed. I would quibble not just with “not nefarious” but also with the assertion that this is what these groups “are supposed to”do. I would just strike out those three words: This is what they do (many but not all of them). ”Supposed to” suggests that activists *should* do this. But perhaps Jesse meant something more like this is what their followers expect of them.
Jesse, your acceptance of the trans cult's pronoun diktat is extremely disappointing.
Aldritch is a man. Singular male pronouns should be used for men, full stop.
It's similar to your continued use of the phrase "trans kids" (not in this post), a type of person that does not exist, since there is no diagnostic for distinguishing childhood gender dysphoria that will persist into adulthood and childhood gender dysphoria that will not.
The trans cult is extremely good at modifying language to bend perceived reality towards their cult fantasies, and it is imperative that it be resisted at all times.
Absolutely. The abomination of the "singular they" should not be coddled. No one owns the pronouns. We use them to communicate. Allowing persons to force others to use incorrect language is simply a degenerate and confused response.
We get to choose our names. We do not choose our pronouns. They are defined by our sex. Period.
I think everyone will enjoy this:
https://mobile.twitter.com/NPR/status/1597745999262392321
Hilarious that there are so few positive comments.
Oh my god… reading this one I literally heard the Mortal Kombat announcer say “fatality:”
https://twitter.com/HominemDad/status/1597854831255105536?s=20&t=qGCc1eorE4TWW_ps2nBKaA
I thought this one nailed it: https://twitter.com/mmcdonaldlewis/status/1597848442419957760?s=46&t=U59XvdAaNQHFzpKFoR9JQg. Certainly encapsulates how I feel. Still have NPR as one of my presets on my car radio, but finally had to drop my sustaining membership because I couldn’t stomach financially supporting a station that aired people saying that anyone with concerns about biological males competing in women’s sports is on the “anti-trans hate train.”
That made my day.
I didn’t think much could surprise me, but the excerpt of Gladstone suddenly painting the Pulse shooting as an anti-LGBTQ crime again genuinely made me just sit there and blink at the screen for a minute. That’s... eerie, honestly. I don’t know a better word.
I agree. We have NOT always been at war with Oceania.
Terrific piece Jesse. But I question this claim:
If you are an LGBT organization, it is beneficial to treat ambiguous cases as homophobic hate crimes rather than something else. This is not due to anything nefarious on the part of LGBT activists per se; it is, at the risk of repeating myself, what activists of all stripes are supposed to do. Anti-immigration activists overhype stories that support immigration restriction, anti-abortion activists overhype stories about the horrors of abortion, and on and on.
I disagree pretty strongly with this take. Over-hyping has fairly deleterious consequences in my view - if everything is [insertphobic], nothing is. Furthermore, if you are trying to gain supporters, especially from among those who may be truly open to your cause, you need to be honest, otherwise you are burning credibility before you have earned it. Further still, you are giving fuel to your opponents. Maybe it's just me but if I see someone make a wildly exaggerated and ultimately unfounded claim about anything and there is no retraction/apology, I simply write that person off as a credible source for anything.
I thoroughly enjoy reading your media criticism. It evokes a lot of interesting personal feelings. I'm a journalism graduate who never really worked professionally as a journalist. From my time at the student newspaper, and the environment I came up in there (just under 10 years ago), I'm fairly certain that I would have become an activist journalist of sorts. I can remember the newsroom reveling in that progressive mantra of "speak truth to power." Heterodox opinions were extremely rare, and calling out "dangerous and harmful ideas" was picking up steam. (Quick aside: I don't blame my school or instructors for this culture. I blame the student newsroom where most of the learning was happening.)
It took me until late 2020, early 2021, to see the folly in the contemporary journalism industry. Reading The Quick Fix and subsequently tuning into BaRPod (and others like the great Coleman Hughes) were instrumental steps in hearing new opinions that illuminated this folly. But had I not lived with someone whose heterodox opinions consistently clashed (respectfully) with mine in the months leading up to finding these heterodox voices, I'm not sure I would have been open to them. I likely would have treated them the same way I treated all "conservative" talking points as a student journalist (as pesky barriers to progress and equality).
All this to say, I think a lot of the activists in journalism today don't even realize they're activists. They're fully bought into the "words as violence" mantra because I doubt anyone they respect has challenged them on it. And, if the other side's words are violence, they don't see an issue with cutting corners to "refute" those words. Plus, there's this looming reassurance: readers will applaud it.
Likening it to my situation, I believe the only way this gets reversed is through offline conversations with respected peers. But we all know how difficult those conversations are to have. And it wasn't just one conversation for me. It was dozens. It was a whole year-long, slow unraveling of ideology.
I've gone on long enough, and this comment isn't all that specific to this post. But, keep up the good work. Who knows how many people you might be helping to jolt from a deep intellectual sleep.
Journalism is in a degraded state in America. Often enough, it isn't even journalism, it is Activism Inc. All of the time, stories are being treated like Rorschach blots by MSM journos, they imprint their preferred narratives on complex stories. I have never seen anything like this in my life.
No wonder people are running from the MSM to Substack and Rumble and Patreon. Journalism at its best used to be represented by Woodward and Bernstein. Now journalism's public face is the likes of Taylor Lorenz.
I really miss old NPR.
I stopped listening to OTM several years ago due to the self congratulatory tone the reporters took. Insufferable
Same.
Great piece as usual. Count me as a third comment that "this is what activists are supposed to do" needs some unpacking.
I can imagine considering activists, such as they are, a part of a de facto adversarial system analogous to the legal system. In a healthy version of that system, with a healthy media, the public-as-jury can decide. But: who sees it that way, whether in journalism or more broadly? And not just since the beginning of this period of awful journalistic decline: I havent seen much to suggest people in and out of media have ever, on the whole, had a healthy and mature understanding of the reality of what activists are for and how they operate. But maybe I missed that civics class (I'm in Canada). Or maybe activists don't like you to see them this way and never really have, so the problem is more laden with deception and "wickedness." And harder for the average journalist much less normie to properly account for.
But this seems like a fairly big deal.
A big eye opener for me that pushed me more towards the center politically was working for an actvist non-profit from age ~28-32 and seeing how while they were tremendous at pointing out deceptions and exaggerations and lies of people on the right, they absolutely used exactly those same tools for their own publications and "research". And this was an influential place that our state's widely listened to public radio station basically cited as *the authority* on the issue we focused on.
Seeing that what I viewed as this very honest well meaning organization give zero fucks about the truth when the truth conflicted with its activism really shook my trust in it and in a lot of the infromation I was getting from public raido and other similar organizations.
Did a child sleep for 1 night on their aunt's couch as their mother was between leases? Well that is another *homeless child sleeping in the gutters each night* we can count to make the problem seem worse than it is.
Is your apartment not up to yuppie upper middle class living conditions? You must live in *substandard blighted housing* At times it literally seemed our policy that the median US living situation was "unsafe and unacceptable". Talk about being blinded by ideology.
And that isn't even getting into how the board was chock-full of executives from entities that depended on additional public spending on the issues we were working on. No conflict of interest there...
I don't have anything useful to add, other than to point out that Jesse said OTM "jumped the gun" on reporting about the motive in the Colorado Springs shooting.
That would not be funny at all if it was intentional. Since I'm positive it was unintentional, however...
Was following a conversation which was pretty serious and someone said "The stats on suicide blew my mind". Nobody else caught it in the moment, and it was completely unintentional, but it was comedy gold to me.
Entirely inappropriate, and if there’s a hell, we’re going there, but it’s definitely a Jim Halpert moment.
Jesse - I agree with most of your analysis here but feel like Brooke’s mention of the Pulse massacre was sufficiently vague that you’d have to impose your own meaning on her words to say she thought Pulse was a homophobic attack.
Also I think it’s useful to remember that OTM did honest reporting about Pulse *after* someone did the work for them.
I feel these articles were written out of the fear that Signal’s excellent pieces about trans care are being used by MAGA to justify anti-LGBTQ policies. This shooter 100% targeted this bar b/c it’s a gay bar. How many bars are there in Colorado Springs? It was in a random strip mall. He did it for that reason