NPR “wokeness debate” shows Gamergate never ended

story that I would probably be tuning out. But it's been kind of a one two punch with this NPR story that dovetails with some of the issues that we've talked a lot about here on There are No Girls on the Internet, and I also want to connect them to some larger tech lessons that folks clearly have not learned.

So let's get into it. Yuri Berliner, who had been NPR's senior business editor up until recently, published a piece in Free Press basically calling out the fact that audiences have lost trust in National Public Radio or NPR as an institution, and basically, Berliner blames wokeness and DEI for this larger distrust in journalism. More broadly, in his piece, he argues that NPR used to be really balanced and fair and curious, but, as he puts it, quote in

recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different, the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the US population. If you're conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it's always been this way, but it hasn't. So Berliner paints twenty eleven as this rosy golden age of trust at NPR, you know, before things like DEI and wokeness

ruined everything. He writes, an open minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America. So Berlinard argues that Trump really changed a lot of NPR's culture and trust and standards. He uses things like NPR not really reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story and not reporting more on the COVID lab leak theory. He uses these as examples that show that since the rise of Trump, NPR is basically

like in the bag for the Democratic Party. He also talks about how in twenty twenty, when many of us were having like a national conversation about race, NPR's former CEO, John Lansing published a piece that prompted staffers to really do some self analysis in their own roles in things like systemic racial issues. So apparently NPR's CEO writing a piece suggesting that NPR staff you know, think critically about their own biases and the way they might impact their reporting.

Rather than that being just like thoughtful guidance for anyone whose job it is to help people understand the world around them. Berliner acts like this was a terrible sign of wokeness run amok quote, and we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language, the CEO said that leaders of public media, starting with me, must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from

white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias you bring to our work and interactions, and we must commit ourselves, body and soul to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions. He declared that diversity on our staff and in our audience was the overriding mission. The quote north star of the organization. Phrases like that's part of the north Star became part of meetings and more

casual conversation. Now, y'all, do not really believe that the former CEO of NPR said that diversity was now the most important mission of NPR, more important than any other part of NPR. Y'all don't actually believe that, do you? You obviously don't because he didn't say it. I actually went back and read the piece that Berliner is referring to. It never even suggests anything of the sort. It is the most basic, toothless, like we care about diversity, ya

diversity message that you can imagine. But Berliner says that the CEO basically said that diversity now matters more than our journalism, which he just flat out never said that, just like doesn't appear in that piece. Berlinard goes on to complain about what our frankly pretty fairly humdrum inclusion efforts that NPR enacted in twenty twenty, things like tracking the makeup of their podcast listenership and guests. Honestly, these are things that I kind of can't believe that NPR

did not have in place before twenty twenty. That is how standard these practices are like even the Shoe String startup podcast that I work for do and always have done this. It is a very common thing. Berliner in his piece he makes it sound like this is like the identity police, grilling everybody about their race and ethnicity and identity, rather than just having it be something that makes sure that your guests aren't like, oops, all white

men talking about different issues. Right. So NPR also got some funding to do work highlighting specific underrepresented groups through things like affinity groups for staff like Jewish NPR staffers, or women, gender expansive and transgender people in technology throughout public media. Right, And what Berliner does in his piece is basically just assume that all of this is like progressivist, all of this is like synonymous with the Democratic Party.

And this is a big gripe quote. And this I believe is the most damaging development at NPR, the absence of viewpoint diversity. He says that he doesn't think there are enough Republicans working at NPR, and apparently he tried to actually get a meeting with NPR's former CEO to discuss all of this, but that meeting ever happened, which is why he is breaking NPR's rules and publishing this piece in free Press. So one quick note that I feel like I have to add for context is that

he published this piece in free Press. I don't really enjoy talking about this particular subset of like soft media grifter types, because I think it quickly gets into like a who's who of who's the worst, And these people are all so boring that I just cannot stand to

think about them. But basically, all you need to know about Free Press is that it is a substack media publication run by Barry Weiss, and it's one of those places where like nobody has principles or cares about free speech but us, and you know, everybody who is writing is like just asking questions. We honestly could do an entire episode on Bari Weiss, But basically, you know the type.

These are not people that I would say are operating in good faith, and their entire thing is branding themselves as these brave free speech truth tellers who are the only ones who think for themselves and are being punished for it. And they continue to say that as they get these huge platforms and lots of money to demonstrate just how unlistened to they are. Again I'm being glib,

but you know the type. So it is really hard for me to see Berliner publishing this piece in free press as anything other than this really calculated move to turn himself into a martyr person who is canceled for telling the truth about whoa like be real? Had you ever heard of the name Yuri Berliner before he published this piece and everybody started talking about it exactly, So the exact right wing conservative voices in media that you

would expect are completely lapping this piece up. And remember, he is not sharing this piece in a vacuum. It is being used as yet another data point in the ongoing conversation about defunding NPR and sowing distrust in our public institutions in general, like Senator Ted Cruz is renewing calls to defund PR. And again, I think a reason why he published this piece was to tap into that

particular ongoing conservative argument. So to me, this entire thing reads like Berliner's kind of coming out party to curry favor with a particular kind of conservative media circle. I mean, why just retire when you can do this whole thing? So Berliner was suspended from NPR for five days for publishing this piece without NPR's permission, which is pretty clearly

against the rules at NPR, and then he resigned. He blasted NPR's new CEO on the way out, saying, quote, I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR that I cite and my free press essay. And honestly, I'm sure that he probably will get a nice little booth in recognition from all the right people.

Right wing outlets are already calling him a quote whistleblower, which as the host of a podcast where we talk to real whistleblowers, women who have risked their livelihoods and their actual safety and sometimes even their actual lives to speak up about wrongdoing, to actually speak truth to power, that is so offensive to me to see this white man like white man, irked by DEI and woke, being painted as a whistleblower.

even seem worth it. Like Berliner suggesting that it is DEI efforts in media that have run amok and that is the reason why media and institutional trust is suffering, is just ridiculous, and at some level it gets really exhausting and repetitive to keep pushing it back against this stuff. When I was putting together the segment, I was like, Yeah, this is just me repeating the same things I've said already about this kind of stuff, and almost doesn't seem

worth it to keep pushing back against this stuff. You know, it's like, why are planes falling out of the sky black people? Why can't my kid get into Harvard black people? Why don't people trust journalism black people? So after a while, it does get a little tiring. So I'm not gonna include the bit where I really pushed back on his claims, but I'll just cut to the chase and tell you what I actually think, you know that meme tweet where it's a bird saying I feel uncomfortable when we are

not about me. I think that's kind of what's going on here. I think that what Berliner is actually saying, if you read between the lions, is I liked it better when journalism was about white men like me. I think he's somebody who's been in this business a long time. He's been in this business for twenty five years. I think in that time he has seen journalism go from mostly white to fairly white, and I don't think he

likes it. I think that what he's actually saying reading between the lines is we need to go back to the times when this whole thing was about white men like me. I don't want to have to compete with the talents and interests and audience of people who are

not white men, and that is the problem. I honestly don't think it is really that deep, and I'm kind of surprised to see so many media outlets responding as if he like did raise some very deep existential issues and questions beyond, like why is everything no longer exclusively

about me? Like the fact that as a business editor he clearly felt some kind of a way that the big boss boss at NPR, like the CEO the main guy, did not feel the need to meet with him to discuss the gripes that he was trying to get on this guy's calendar. And this guy was like, no, I'm good. That tells me a lot, like what kind of person feels entitled that they can just meet with the CEO to discuss whatever their gripe is as opposed to meeting

with their direct manager or whatever. On top of Berlin are probably not liking the fact that the CEO did not feel the need to make time for his complaints. When that CEO left NPR then goes and hires a young woman to replace him, and I bet berlinerd didn't like that and saw a young woman getting hired as

yet another sign of wokeness run amuck at NPR. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to come off like I am defending NPR here, because I do think that they have some issues that are impact in audience trust much like media and journalism, just as an institution broadly does. Media trust is down and people are feeling

disillusioned with journalism as an institution. Last year, a Gallup poll found that the thirty two percent of Americans who say that they trust mass media quote a great deal or a fair amount to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way Tide Gallup's lowest historical reading, which was previously recorded in twenty sixteen. So this distrust thing is real and NPR absolutely should be grappling with it, But blaming wokeness as the culprit just does not hold water.

Alicia Montgomery, a black woman who worked at NPR since before Berliner worked there. She joined in nineteen ninety seven and he joined in ninety nine, published an excellent piece in Slate, where she now works, called the Real Story behind NPR's Current Problems. The entire piece is worth a read. We will put it in the show notes, but basically she throws cold water on this idea that the problems that NPR is having with audience trust is because of

black people and like too much diversity and woke. She writes, it did take a kind of courage for Uri to publicly criticize the organization, but it also took a lot of the wrong type of nerve. His argument is a demonstration of contemporary journalism at its worst, in which inconvenient facts and obvious questions were ignored and the facts that could be shaped to serve the preferred argument were inflated

in importance. So I mentioned that Berliner talks about twenty eleven as a kind of golden age of NPR trust, you know, the good old days before Race and Woke and DEI were sort of runn am up. Alicia is like wrong. She points out how this nostalgic view really is revisionist and completely self serve on his part, She writes, take a step into the way back machine into twenty eleven Fury's so called golden age. That's the year when senior members of the development team fell for a scam

set up by professional provocateur James O'Keefe. The aftermath took them out and toppled the then CEO and President, Vivian Schiller. It came months after the ill timed, clumsy firing of Juan Williams, which led to senior Vice president of News Ellen Weiss residing under pressure. Fury also leaped frogs over a long list of contemporary fuck ups and questionable calls that could explain the growing public distrust that concerns him.

There are questions about NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Tottenberg's personal relationship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg compromising her reporting, the departure of news chief Mike Orecis and other prominent men in the newsroom after a wave of sexual harassment charges, the exposure of systemic exploitation of NPR's temporary workforce, and

those are just the public problems. So Berlinard also claims that a big part of NPR's down fall with the rise of Trump, and that NPR did not or could not fairly cover Trump because like they were in the bag for the Democratic Party. But unsurprisingly, Alicia remembers it very differently. She writes URI's account of the deliberate effort to undermine Trump up to and after his election is

also bewilderingly incomplete, inaccurate, and skewed. For most of twenty sixteen, many NPR journalists wore newsroom leadership that they weren't taking Trump and the possibility of him winning seriously enough, but top editors dismissed the chance of a Trump win, repeatedly declaring that Americans would be revolted by this or that

outrageous thing he'd said or done. I remember one editorial meeting where a white newsroom leader said that Trump's strong poll numbers wouldn't survive his being exposed as a racist. When a journalist of color asked whether his numbers could be rising because of his racism, the comment was met with silence. In another meeting, I and a couple of other editorial leaders were encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story

about a lie from Hillary Clinton. Another colleague asked what to do if one candidate just lied more than the other,

another silent response. And again I feel like Berliner's claims here about media, particularly NPR, like being too hard or unfair on Trump, is a historical to the point of being like a little bit gas lighting, Like when Trump won, how many interviews did we all have to watch with like economically anxious rural Trump voters that we were told that we all needed to be listening to, to the point where it almost became a bit of a media cliche, right, like big city reporter goes to a rural diner to

find out what's what? Like did that not happen? Did we dream it because I remember it, Alisha writes, when I came back to work on Morning Edition, I saw no trace of the anti Trump editorial machine that URI references. On the contrary, people were at pains to find a way to cover Trump's voters and his administration fairly. We went full bore on diner guide, a trucker hat coverage, and adopted the right label to describe people who could

accurately be called racists. The network haud our flexive need to stay on good terms of people in power, and journalists who had contacts within the administration were encouraged to pursue those bookings. We regularly set up interviews with Republican officials and Trump surrogate, but it was tough because NPR always loved guests who would be insightful, honest, and perhaps

above all, polite. There were plenty of people who for years fit that description across the partisan divide in official Washington, but they were scarce in the Trump administration. We changed the format of live political interviews, adding what we called a level set that would be a three ish minute after a conversation with a political operative or that's an official, when a host and NPR reporter would try to fact

check what had just been said. So this claim that Berliner was making that NPR was in the bag for the Democrats and they did not fairly cover Trump voters just seems wildly out of step with what somebody who worked there said happened and what we all saw happened. Like if you were a during that time, I don't think you need to tell me that a lot of media outlets were bending over backward to provide fair and balanced coverage of Trump's campaign, And I do think it's

worth looking at how that decision impacted media trust. I'd be willing to bet that coverage of Trump that was trying so hard to stay neutral instead of presenting the truth about what he was actually saying and doing probably did impact audience trust and journalism. And it's not just that Berliner doesn't think that that specific kind of bias is worth talking about. It's that he's presenting a version where that bias does not even exist and then telling

people that that is objective reality. More after a quick.

But this was while the gang was like murdering people in DC, pretty close to NPR's headquarters, just miles from where many of the staffers actually lived. She writes, I think a lot of critics would consider that wokeness pussyfooting around an issue because it might offend people of color. I saw it as a low key racial bias because MS thirteen's victims were mostly poor Central American immigrants, the kind of people we didn't think our affluent white listenership

would pay attention to. So, if you want to talk about times where politics or quote wokeness was actually dictating coverage in a concerning way, this sounds like it would be like a fruitful conversation to have, right, But that is very different from what Berliner is doing calling MPR out for, which is just like too much diversity. It is such a lazy easy accusation that gets us away from the issues that might actually be meaty or substantive.

Another example along those lines is when we were having a national conversation about police killings, there was a sort of side question about like, oh, well, police also kill white people under shady circumstances too, what about that? And Alicia writes that it seemed like nobody at NPR really wanted to talk about that. She talks about how the team at the race focused podcast Code Switch, which is one of my favorite podcasts, was the only team with n NPR to cover a police killing of an unarmed

white teenager named Zachary Hammond. She suspects the reason why none of the other units within NPR covered it is kind of political in a sense because it would have complicated this dynamic of getting to smugly think of themselves as being on the correct side of the issue. Her entire piece is worth reading, but ultimately she gets at this point that I want to highlight, she writes, and that's what the core editorial problem at NPR is, and frankly has long been an abundance of caution that often

crossed the border to cowardice. NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there and calling it objectivity. That would more than explain the lack of follow up on Hunter Biden's laptop and the lab leak theory, going full white guilt after George Floyd's murder and shifting

to indignant white impatience with racial justice now. And I think anybody who reads mainstream reporting or media knows exactly what she is referring to, right, this kind of safe, middle of the road reporting that is going out of its way to not give any whiff of bias, to the point that it's not actually useful in terms of

informing an audience anymore. Like I remember, when I was working in news media, we had to walk back calling things that were objectively obviously racist racist, Like you couldn't just call something racist. We had to bend over backward to use these weird phrases that like evoked race but were not the word racist. And I remember there was a story where it was some frat and there was a video of these members of the frat on a bus where they were singing this chant about how there

would never be an N word in their frat. And so we were writing up that story and I called it a racist chant, and my editor was like, no, no, we can't say it's racist, and we had to walk it back to I think the phrase that we used was like racially tinged, which like, what does that mean if somebody is on camera singing about how they'll ever be an N word in their frat. I feel comfortably comfortable calling that objectively racist, but we had to be like, ooh,

it's like racially infused. Like we're not talking about chili oil here, we're talking about race. So Berliner's free press piece calling out NPR for being too woke is one piece of it. But now enter our old friend, enemy of the show, Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, who openly manufactures disingenuous right wing panics using the New York Times.

He's the man that brought us the critical race theory panic, the DEI panic, the Claudine Gay is a plagiarist panic, And I guess now it's the CEO of NPR is bad panic. And of course guess who is helping him do this? The New York Times. So Catherine Marr was named CEO of NPR recently. She does not have a journalism background. She was most recently the head of Wikimedia Foundation. So after Berliner's piece, old tweets of hers were resurfaced

by Chris Rutho. Now keep in mind these tweets were things that she tweeted before she ever worked at NPR. She wasn't a journalist when she tweeted them. It's things like quote Donald Trump is a racist, which she tweeted in twenty eighteen. She was photographed wearing a Biden hat in twenty twenty, and she tweeted about this dream that she had where she went on a road trip with Vice President Kamala Harris and they both got nuts together as a snack. Honestly, that is really it like pretty

shocking stuff, I know. So now people are coming out of the woodwork close reading every public talk, every panel that she's ever given, even in the years before her tenure at NPR, to paint her in a bad light. And this is such a familiar strategy here, to make Catherine Mahr look foolish and embarrassing and to try to make any kind of association with her look like it's

toxic because she is that foolish and that embarrassing. They want people to be embarrassed to stick up for her, to make sure that none of her allies publicly come to her defense. They want NPR's leadership and board to think that she is somebody who is too risky to be associated with, just like Claudine Gay and crt Rufo is very explicit that the point here is to make her toxic and synonymous with negativity, even though she didn't do anything wrong and the articles are already pouring in

helping Rufo do exactly that. Here's one headline NPR's new CEO, Catherine Marr haunted by woke anti Trump tweets as veteran editor claims bias. The New York Post even published a piece today with the headline NPR's new CEO, who was called out by whistleblower over pervasive left wing biased recently purchased a two point seven million dollar NYC townhouse. The piece talks about how she bought a three bedroom townhouse.

It is almost two thousand square feet, which like, yes, okay, as someone who lives in a one bedroom shithole, that sounds like a palace, But like, how is it news that the CEO of NPR, who was formerly the CEO of Wikimedia Foundation, who was married to somebody who was formerly a lawyer at Lyft, How is it news that she has a nice house? Like It's just so ridiculous

and disingenuous. In response to all this, an NPR spokesperson said that Mar was quote not working in journalism at the time and was exercising her First Amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen. NPR also said that she has upheld the network's code of ethics since she was appointed, saying since stepping into the role, she has upheld and is fully committed to NPR's code of ethics and the independence of NPR's newsroom. The CEO is

not involved in editorial decisions. So listen to how The New York Times writes about how mars old tweets came to be in the news quote. Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the Conservative Manhattan Institute, called attention to many of miss Marr's posts on x and shared a response from Tesla's CEO Elon Musk, who had responded to one of miss Marr's posts that mister Rufo highlighted saying this person

is a crazy racist. If NPR wants to truly be national Public Radio, it can't pander to the furthest left elements in the United States. Rufos headed an interview to do so. NPR should part ways with Catherine Marr. And now he has gone from oh, she should be fired to calling on NPR to be defunded and for the staff to have masked layoffs. So here's my question. So the NPR piece makes it sound like Christopher Rufo is just this random person that we should care what he thinks.

Don't you think it might be useful for readers to know who this guy is, Like, why should this random guy from the Manhattan Institute, Why should anybody care what he thinks about this lady's old tweets? Or maybe it'd

be great context for readers to have that. The New York Times has actually mentioned Christopher Rufo quite a few times during their breathless recent coverage of Clauding Gay's tenure at Harvard University, which led to their coverage, or the fact that Christopher Rufo specifically said that it would be important for him to get pick up on that story from the New York Times, specifically to launder the fact that it was an attack coming from the right wing,

to make it seem like a more left wing or moderate attack. Again, I don't know this because I'm some media savvy person. I know this because I can read and Christopher Rufo says it over and over and over again in plain, unambiguous terms, And The New York Times just pretends that that is not the case, when Rufo is not even pretending. Just yesterday, he tweeted out the New York Times story about the NPR CEO Catherine Marr, saying, the New York Times is directly quoting the NPR tweets

I dug up over the last twenty four hours. We are driving the narrative. If you dream about sampling nuts with Kamala Harris, we will make sure America hears about it. So he's not even pretending that he's not trying to drive this narrative. And my question is, why is the New York Times allowing this? Why is the New York Times decided that this one person gets to dictate their editorial coverage. And Neil dash put it very well on Threads.

He wrote, The New York Times exuplicitly lets its editorial decisions be made by Chris Rufo, even as he admits it's an intentional, bad faith campaign. The story here is nothing to do with NPR. It's The Times not caring that it's getting gamed with what it chooses to emphasize an exercise. Find media executive faces criticism over supporting fascist causes in their coverage. You won't because they think it's news when Rufo says it, not when you are. I do.

Now I absolutely agree with him for the most part. But here's the thing. I don't know if I would say that The New York Times is getting gamed here. You know, you get gamed once or twice. Maybe you got gamed, but you get gamed three, four, five times like the New York Times. Maybe you weren't getting gamed. Maybe you're teammates in the same game. I don't know. And you'll notice that so far it's been Claudie Gay,

a black woman, and Catherine Marr, a white woman. Isn't it interesting that Rufo keeps choosing people who are traditionally marginalized women and black women as his targets. And you know what that reminds me of Gamergate. So here's the

reason that I want to talk about this. If you listen to our series Internet Hate Machine that we did with the Cool Zone Media, you know that we talk and think a lot about gamer Gate and the online harassment campaigns against black women that predated Gamergate, and how

they were really weaponized for specific political gain. It is one of my deepest angers that the powers that be evidently learned nothing from any of that, And I would argue that it is in part because the original targets were black women, so everybody was just sort of like, oh, who cares, and we missed the window to actually learn anything or take anything away from it. But this is Gamergate. This is disingenuously whipping people up into a frenzy and

weaponizing that to meet some political end. It is making existence in civic and public life impossible for women and then counting on media to write about it neutrally as opposed to honestly, these are the exact same tactics. You know, Gamergate was ten years ago, and people with power and

institutions have not learned a thing from it. Nobody is served by the Internet becoming a never ending barrage of Gamergate tactics, except the reactionaries and extremists who use those tactics to ensure that they and they alone get to determine who gets to be in public in civic and political life. We deserve so much better, and we deserve a media that has the balls to tell the truth about it instead of just helping them along. In twenty twenty four, you need to understand how to write about

it when actors are not working in good faith. You cannot let provocateurs write the playbook. You need to be helping the public understand the landscape and the players, which I acknowledge that can be hard, can be complicated. Public radio veteran and civic tech professional in North Carolina, Melody Kramer actually has built tools to do this at a hyper local level. She writes publics, radios, libraries, institutions, governments, nonprofit websites need a strategy for when people are not

acting in good faith. We've been testing out various ways to approach this at the hyperlocal civic blog I help run. One is we call people out. Two is we provide a ton of context for bad actors. Three we use humor, stickers and all sorts of in person stuff. In short, we're priming people to understand the contexts and players. Almost constantly, we aren't neutral. Neutrality gives a platform to people who don't operate in good faith, and they wep and eyes

objectivity and neutrality. We make clear what our point of view is and we back it up with loads of evidence. I've been using it as my testing ground over the past two years, and it seems to be working in all the ways we measure. We're all volunteers who care a lot about North Carolina, and I just got to say, like, if I sound tired and over this, it's because I am. I am so sick of this. And like I said already, Senator Ted Cruz is renewing calls for NPR to be defunded.

Senator Marsha Blackburn has already said that she's planning to propose new legislative action that would threaten to cut national public radios federal funding. We're spending all of this energy, time and oxygen on this disingenuous panic over nothing, when we could be working on any number of the real

issues facing us as a country. Heck, we could be working seriously and meaningfully toward having people have more faith and trust in journalism, but we aren't doing any of that because we're too busy talking about this whipped up panic over nothing. And it just feels like for the women and the black women in particular, who went through

Gamergate as targets, they just did so for nothing. If institutions have not learned by now how to respond to this kind of thing when it happened, and honestly, we should not have to be collateral damage to extremists gunning for more political influence over our civic and public institutions. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our merch store at tenggodi dot com slash store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi, You can reach us at

Hello at tengody dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Toad. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative edited by Joey pat Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amado is our contributing producer, I'm your host, bridget Toad. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple podcasts.

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