U.S. Taxpayers Funding ‘Racist’ News Outlet?

By the AFP Staff

In the last year, National Public Radio (NPR) lost its top three “minority” commentators—Audie Cornish, who is black, Noel King, who is half black, and Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who is Euro-Hispanic. Cornish’s departure, announced in January, prompted longtime NPR radio host Ari Shapiro to publicly question whether the office culture there may be the reason why the media outlet is “hemorrhaging hosts from marginalized backgrounds.”

First off, it’s laughable to think that NPR is “racist.” According to the organization’s own demographics, it is run mostly by very liberal, middle-aged white women, but that is the state of leftist politics today.

At any other time in American history, if someone like Shapiro had accused his employer publicly of something so potentially catastrophic as racism, at the very least the accuser would have been forced to issue an apology and take a leave of absence. In today’s world, however, Shapiro was lauded for his bravery for standing up for “marginalized” people like Cornish, King, and Garcia-Navarro. Never mind that these three all have degrees from expensive private universities and make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. To the left, ironically, it doesn’t make a difference what you think. Only the color of your skin matters.

Once home to tolerable shows such as “This American Life,” “Car Talk,” and “A Prairie Home Companion,” NPR today is so caught up in the absurd culture of identity politics that even many of its listeners are growing tired of the constant handwringing and pearl-clutching over the issue of race in America.

Last July, left-of-center writer Matt Taibbi, citing a long list of actual stories, mocked the 50-year-old media outlet, writing:

Mixed in with [Critical Race Theory proponent] Ibram X. Kendi recommendations for children’s books, instructions on how to “decolonize your bookshelf” and “talk to your parents about racism” (even if your parents are an interracial couple), and important dispatches from the war on complacency like “Monuments and Teams Have Changed Names as America Reckons With Racism, Birds Are Next,” National Public Radio in the last year has committed itself to a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the most moralizing, tendentious, humor-deprived, jargon-obsessed segment of American society.

It didn’t matter to people like Shapiro that, in today’s America, being a minority in elite circles especially on the left is a commodity in high demand that can earn you huge sums of money. No one in the elite media will question the privileges that come with this out of fear of being cast as a racist themselves.

This explains why, for example, no one in the media cares that the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have all quietly disappeared with the tens of millions of dollars they raised during the height of the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020—and no one is even bothering to ask how that money is being used to help poor black Americans in inner cities.

Only a few brave conservative media outlets have mentioned what should be a huge story. “Like a giant ghost ship full of treasure drifting in the night with no captain, no discernible crew, and no clear direction,” CharityWatch Executive Director Laurie Styron told “The Washington Examiner” in an interview.

According to public filings, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation raised $90 million in 2020, but no one knows who is even running the organization after one of the two directors running it resigned following allegations of personal profiteering emerged in early 2021.

So what really caused Cornish, King and Garcia-Navarro to leave NPR? The honest answer is that they reaped the benefits of our capitalist society by taking better offers with better paychecks from other media companies.