in the mid seventies when i first began to listen to npr it seemed quite neutral to me. these days i call it nancy pelosi radio and only have their 'news' segments open when i'm in the mood to be entertained by hubris and fictions;

It takes a truly staggering amount of narcissistic delusion to believe you not only know everything worth knowing but know everything about knowledge worth knowing. When NPR reporter Uri Berliner came forward last month to blow the whistle on his employer’s descent from beloved American institution into froth-mouthed partisanship and was quickly attacked and suspended by the organization he’d given 25 years of his life to, he unwittingly brushed up against a towering institutional hypocrisy that has come to saturate even the most trusted sources of information, a hypocrisy that threatens the very concept of “truth” in the western world. 

While the Berliner affair at NPR may have been the general public’s first exposure to its new CEO Katherine Maher, her hire earlier this year was the culmination of decades of grooming by the ruling class political establishment, which raised her on the warm fuzzy feelings of American Exceptionalism via a who’s-who of western “civil society” - from the UN and the World Bank through the US State Department’s one-step-removed tentacles of plausible deniability pulling the levers of the Arab Spring to the helm of Wikipedia, one of the most powerful propaganda tools on the planet.

Maher’s intimacy with the Empire’s consent factories has long been a matter of public record: she is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a fellow of neoliberal-neocon think tank the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and only just recently stepped down from her membership on the US State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, presumably due to the flaming conflict of interest such a role might pose with her NPR appointment. After an internship with the Council on Foreign Relations, she worked for the World Bank, the National Democratic Institute, and UNICEF, using her linguistic skills (she majored in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University following a year in the American University in Cairo’s Arabic Language Intensive Program specializing in “colloquial Egyptian Arabic”) to carry out Washington’s directives in the Middle East in such a way that the locals thus targeted felt like the changes taking place were organic and coming from their peers.........more......