Where are all the “brave” corporate media stars expressing their support for Uri Berliner? Where are all these noble, selfless, and fearless “firefighters?”
Berliner is a 25-year veteran of National Public Radio (NPR). His record as a journalist is spotless. In pursuit of journalistic ideals, he blew the whistle on NPR, and NPR retaliated by laying him off. On Wednesday, he was forced to resign, explaining that he “cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.”
Let’s have a little fun, shall we? Let’s imagine Christiane Amanpour, Bob Woodward, Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, Wolf Blitzer, Jake Tapper, Stephen Colbert, Erin Burnett, Jon Stewart, Ari Melber, Fareed Zakaria, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Savannah Guthrie, Brian Stelter, Maggie Haberman, Chuck Todd, Carl Bernstein, Joe Scarborough, Scarborough’s Harpy Wife, NPR, PBS, and all the rest of these serial liars if … Berliner worked for Fox News.
Berliner blows the whistle on Fox News.
Fox News suspends Berliner.
Berliner’s forced to resign.
The outrage, the sanctimony, the endless cable news segments and columns and tweets about the “death of democracy” and the “importance of whistleblowers” and “decency” and “capital-J journalism!”
For days, we would be buried in a smug avalanche of the sanctimonious corporate media at its most insufferable and, as it turns out, hypocritical.
But Berliner screwed up. He told the truth about a sacred cow, about a prized member of the left-wing plantation. He told the truth about NPR, and that cannot be allowed. He must be made an example of.
It doesn’t matter that Berliner lost his job for standing up in defense of journalism … It doesn’t matter that he was one man risking everything he’d built for 25 years to fight The System … It doesn’t matter that he stood alone against a massive and powerful multinational corporation funded by the federal government … None of that matters to the corporate media. Twenty-five years means nothing in the New McCarthyism era. And that’s why not a single one of the Berliner’s corporate media colleagues showed the moral courage to express even a little public support. Instead, they stood silent, covered in sweaty shame and oily cowardice.
Everyone in the corporate media knows he’s telling the truth about the partisan collapse of NPR into a dumpster fire of left-wing talking points and anti-Trump conspiracy theories.
Still, they said nothing.
Why?
Because status means more to them than their own credibility, self-respect, and sense of decency. Also, people like Colbert, Stewart, Tapper, and Stelter want NPR (and their own outlets) to remain a dumpster fire of left-wing talking points and anti-Trump conspiracy theories. They’re not journalists. They’re mercenary activists incapable of empathy. Personal status and the cause to organize the world into their own fascist image have long trumped their humanity.
Above all, what these people fear is another Berliner, and then another, and then a whole flock of Berliners inspired to stand up and speak out against the ongoing lunacy of this hopeless corruption. And the only way to ensure no more Berliners stand tall is to stand silent as one of their own is publicly destroyed as an apostate. Destroy the traitor, they think. He told the truth.
How many of these corporate media assholes do you think daydream about 1950s McCarthyism and then cast themselves as the hero who would’ve stood tall against that mob? I’ll tell you how many — all of them.
But when the time came to stand tall in real life…
Do they even know they’re the villains?
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available on Kindle and Audiobook.
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