Tea & Sympathy: NPR Newsbaggers

The post below shows the disproportionate and favorable coverage that a puny rally of 100-200 Tea Party rightwingers generates on NPR. So what happened when, this past March, hundreds of anti-war protesters showed up at the White House and over 100 were arrested - including Daniel Ellsberg? On NPR, the public news outlet for the Ministry of Truth, it never happened. And what about when 27 anti-SOA protesters are arrested after a march of 100-200. Want to guess where that one goes on NPR? Memory hole again. All right, so maybe hundreds just doesn't show up on the radar when you're busy bootlicking the far right; how about thousands marching against war? Are you ready? Yep, NPR goes 0 for 3 when it comes to antiwar activism, even when it includes very large numbers, committed civil disobedience and large arrests.

FAIR has just done a great job pointing this out and suggests that you sign their petition. I have to add that NPR takes the general media's blackout of antiwar activism to a truly perverse level - not only do they newsbag the important stories of antiwar activism - they have the gall to take their own erased-news as evidence of a dead antiwar movement and pass it off as journalism.

Where's the Beef?

(original graphic here)

(Update below)

Over the past week or so there were some very important stories that somehow just didn't make it into the main NPR news shows:

• Georgia inmates organized a historic, peaceful multi-institutional strike and the best NPR could muster was a segment on Talk of the Nation that discussed the general topic of jobs in prisons.
• Senate Republicans essentially told seriously ill 9/11 first responders to go die, but it just wasn't terribly important to NPR. There was someone who did cover it, though.
• There was protest at the White House with over 130 people getting arrested. Those arrested included nobodies such as Daniel Ellsberg, some alleged Pulitzer Prize winner, a former CIA analyst, and war veterans. NPR's on-air response - yawn... Wait, it did get a mention from Mara Liasson who got out her trusty FOX converter and turned these 135 arrested citizens and noteworthies into anonymous "dozens."

Maybe I'm being a bit hard on NPR, after all there is only so much time in a broadcast and it's important to touch on the finer things in life like cappuccino ala Milton Friedman, $60 a bottle wine tasting with Scott Simon, and exciting mail-order gourmet meats (click the graphic at the top of the post) that will help a Tea Party crooner give money to groups like Focus on the Family. Oh baby, life is good!

To their credit, the NPR "Two Way" bloggers did have posts on the anti-war protest and on Pat Boone's creepy creds, but those posts were brief, and don't begin to compare with the exposure of featured, on-air news stories. Furthermore, as readers of this blog have pointed out, the online snippets and AP-wire feeds allow NPR to claim that they are covering news that they are essentially ignoring.

Update (12-23-10)

On Thursday morning, NPR covers the passage of the reduced First Responders bill and essentially ignores the media criticism of John Stewart's scathing episode against the non-coverage of the Republican attempts to kill the original Zadroga bill. It's really a brazen piece of hypocrisy and I'd recommend people to visit the story and post comments...

Fair and Balanced

On Sunday afternoon's hourly news summary with Barbara Klein, she said, "Security is high in Denver....a wide range of protesters are preparing to demonstrate....This morning about a
thousand people showed up for an antiwar rally on the steps of the state capital. NPR's Jeff Brady is there."

Somehow, poor Jeff was a bit confused. Observing a thousand antiwar protesters and a handful of counter-demonstrators, he figured he'd even things out by sympathetically repeating the slogans and arguments of the counter-demonstrators so that we'd get a Fair and Balanced™ report:

"There were a few folks standing on one corner with "Support Our Troops" signs and mothers of servicemen who were killed in the wars, uh, kind of counter-protesting, saying that their sons had died for the freedoms of the protesters, but it was very peaceful as the march walked by, very respectful, both sides shouted their message and that was it."

Barbara Klein closes it with: "NPR's Jeff Brady reporting from Denver." That's generous.