NPR’s Problems Won’t Be Solved by “Viewpoint Diversity”

I’ve never liked NPR. Throughout its long and venerable half-century run, the public radio network has served as a seamless delivery system for lifestyle smugness. When my mother would reflexively flip it on during long car rides in my adolescence, I’d greet its confident dispatches from the East Coast citadels of cultural consensus in the same manner I did all parent-approved meditations on civic life: as an elite monopoly’s hostile declaration of war on my attention span. Everything about its programming was clearly branded as something serious people should care about, starting with the name of its flagship morning show, All Things Considered. Yet it operated in a state of chronic self-congratulation. It tirelessly served to flatter the preexisting sensibilities of its audience, placidly assuring them that their taste preferences and worldview need never be challenged or revised in any meaningful way.