A Rare Glimpse Inside NPR "News"

Thanks goes to Democracy Now! which yesterday interviewed former NPR correspondent Sarah Chayes. I posted about Chayes being interviewed on NPR back in August and was left then with more questions than answers. The interview on Democracy Now! answers many of my questions. Consider the following excerpt of the interview where Chayes has just described an event in 2002 where US special forces backed a thuggish warlord's takeover of Kandahar from the governor appointed by Pres. Hamid Kharzai (also backed by the US):

• Amy Goodman: "So why didn't this story end up on Morning Edition or All Things Considered?"

• Sarah Chayes: "I was told that it wasn't important now, that we would have plenty of time later to talk about inter-Afghan squabbling, and that what was really interesting now was to look at, you know, what a bad fellow Mullah Omar had been. And in my own view at that time, that story ought to have been done in 1996 or 1997. We already knew by this point how terrible the Taliban were. But now, I thought what was important was to look forward, at how is this experiment in nation building going to work. And it was kind of flattering our own, you know, sensibilities to continue telling ourselves how terrible the Taliban were."

Telling, isn't it?