Thursday, September 29, 2011

Q Tips

NPR related comments welcomed and encouraged.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's my favorite lazy NPR template: "Person X says ____" even when any decent reporter should be able to verify the truth of the matter asserted.

Example from the other day: "this school, which Mr. Obama says was built over 40 years ago" ... Wait, David -- isn't the age of the school an easily verified fact? Or is he so lazy that he'll just take the speaker's word for it and cover his ass with the "Person X says..."

You hear this ALL of the time (in albeit less eggregious examples). It seems to free the reporter from doing any actual work by just relying on what someone else said.

Patrick Lynch said...

Glad to see the folks at Firedoglake have long seen through National Propaganda Radio. Looks like the diary writer has only more recently come to this conclusion.

The NPR I Knew Is Gone-Firedoglake

Anonymous said...

NPR was never really the "The NPR we knew".

from the very beginning, it was an ideal that only existed on paper.

of course, since its inception, it has moved further and further away from that ideal until now it bears no semblance whatseover to it.

In a way, it is very revealing that NPR management have recently been trying to get people to drop the National Public Radio moniker in favor of just NPR.

national public radio is a reminder of the NPR ideal.

And management certainly do not want people to be reminded o fthat.

Anonymous said...

once again, true to form, NPR has slanted their article on the Obama assassination or Awlaki.


"The requirements of the Constitution with respect to due process for killing an American are not clear," says John Bellinger, a lawyer in the State Department under President George W. Bush.

"Wherever they are in the world, they have a constitutional right to due process," Bellinger says. "But due process doesn't necessarily mean an adversarial judicial hearing."

So, Bellinger says, under his view of the law, a criminal trial or even an indictment doesn't have to happen to satisfy the Constitution.

Instead, a legal finding by the Justice Department and debate among lawyers from multiple government agencies might have satisfied Awlaki's rights under the Fifth Amendment."


This turns the whole idea of 'due process" on its head.

Due process as referred to in the 5th Amendment derives from the magna carta, which was written specifically to restrict the otherwise unlimited and essentially arbitrary powers of the King over his subjects.

The Fifth Amednment of the US Constitution
"No person shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"

derives from the Magna Carta

"No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned,...or in any other way destroyed...except by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to none will we deny or delay, right or justice."

So, which law of our land states that the President can kill anyone he pleases?

or, where is the judgement of peers that made this determination?

Let's see it?

Keeping it a secret would certainly seem to completely violate the intent of the magana carta, would it not?


That NPR allows a Bush lawyer to define "due process" with no input from a Constitutional scholar says it all.

More right wing propaganda.

Anonymous said...

Glenn greenwald provides a very eloquent elaboration on the subject of my above comment (due process).
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/30/awlaki/index.html

How are "We the people" ever supposed to be able to make a determination about the guilt or innocence of a person if there was no due process afforded? (or if our government claims due process was afforded but keeps the whole process secret, which essentially amounts to the same thing)

Guilt determinations and summary executions carried out in secret with no outside oversight were the very essence of the "justice" system of the former Soviet Union (eg, under Stalin)

Anonymous said...

when does a citizen become a subject? when the ruler can take their life on the word of the royal themselves. Tom Paine reserved special scorn for people that would willingly become subjects. Let's just say i agree.

edk

Anonymous said...

From NPR's David Folkenflik: "Over the past year, NPR has been roiled by a series of controversies — including the termination of the contract of news analyst Juan Williams last October, followed by an undercover video sting by the conservative provocateur James O'Keefe III in March. An edited version of the video released by O'Keefe APPEARED to show NPR's top fundraiser disparaging Republicans and Tea Party conservatives, though a closer review of the complete video showed many of those remarks were presented in a profoundly misleading way."

//end of Folkenflik quote

APPEARED to show?

Of course O'Keefe was "disparaging" Republicans.

Duh!

Only an idiot or pathological liar would claim anything different.

I can't say for sure which of the two Folkenflik is, but I do find it interesting that Folkenflik conveniently left out the part where O'Keefe said NPR would be better off without Federal funds.

It's interesting, of course because every time Republicans try to restrict the use of Federal funds by NPR and its member stations, NPR goes into a 24/7 blanket of the airwaves with requests for listeners to "contact congress" (for or against what NPR always calls "cuts", of course).

NPR CLAIMS that while they themselves could live without Federal funds, their poor member stations could not.

At best, this is a half truth -- and its actually closer to an outright lie because of the way NPR "frames" the issue.

What the Republicans actually proposed -- and tried and failed to pass in Congress -- was a plan that would have prevented member stations from using federal funds to pay NPR member dues or buy NPR programming.

If member stations wanted to do something ELSE with the Federal money -- eg, pay for local programming or pay for alternative news sources (alternative to NPR), they were free to do so.

So the idea that the Republican plan would have "devastated" local stations is simply an outright LIE on NPR's part.

Of course, the REAL issue is that if member stations can not use federal funds for NPR dues and programming, many of them will simply drop NPR as a "partner" (more of a parasite than a partner, actually). If enough member stations did that, NPR would simply shrivel up into a mere shell of its former Jabba The Hut self.

So, NPR is carrying out a ruse here and when Folkenflik conveneinelty "ignores" O'Keife's comment that NPR would be better off without the Federal funds he is playing along with that ruse (wittingly or not)

Anonymous said...

NPR: Jabber (of) The Nut

Anonymous said...

All,

More evidence that NPR took the money...

GMAC (now knows as Ally Bank) is not the public's ally. But it is an ally to public radio.

From eschatonblog
http://tinyurl.com/6ho4vh4

Don Q. Public