A case study in the failure of American journalism was on full display this Friday when National Public Radio decided to provide a platform to white supremacist Jason Kessler, organizer of the (pathetic) “Unite The Right” rally that took place today in Washington D.C. Not only did NPR provide Kessler with a megaphone to reach millions, they allowed him to air his noxious views virtually unchallenged.
It’s hard to fathom the thinking that went into this. Here is an example of the sordid mess:
NOEL KING, HOST: You say that you're not a white supremacist, but you do think there are differences between races. What are the differences?
KESSLER: I'm not a human biologist. You can go and look into that. There's people like Charles Murray who study that. There are differences in mental life just like there are in physical life. I mean, it's ridiculous to say that, you know, there are no differences in height, let's say, between a Pygmy and a Scandinavian. So if we acknowledge that there are physical differences, obviously, there are differences in behavior, in levels of aggression, in intelligence, in, you know, bone density, et cetera, et cetera. But that's...
KING: Do you think that white people are smarter than black people?
KESSLER: There is enormous variation between individuals, but the IQ testing is pretty clear that it seems like Ashkenazi Jews rate the highest in intelligence, then Asians, then white people, then Hispanic people and black people. And that's - there's enormous variance. But just as a matter of science, that IQ testing is pretty clear.
KING: You don't sound like someone who wants to unite people when you say something like that.
Kessler’s is a philosophy rooted in lynching helpless African-Americans, starving, torturing and gassing Jewish people before burning their corpses in mass ovens, and tearing children from their mothers and fathers at our borders-- but what really matters is allowing these folks to explain themselves?
What NPR did was give air time to a Nazi. Worse than that, they gave air time to a Nazi without challenging him.
The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah, was appalled:
NPR didn’t do its job on Friday. When it comes to handling racist and white-supremacist subjects, the job of a responsible media outlet does not end at simply letting figures like Kessler speak unchallenged, in the name of neutrality and balance. It’s not that such people and views should absolutely, under no circumstances, ever be interrogated. Rather, what audiences deserve and have the right to demand is for national platforms to use their space responsibly, which means aggressively countering racist lies and propaganda with facts and truth. Like radioactive material, one-on-one interview formats with white nationalists, if they must be done, should be handled with the most extreme care.
NPR’s reaction was as infuriating as it was defensive:
“Interviewing the people in the news is part of NPR’s mission to inform the American public,” Isabel Lara, NPR’s senior director of media relations, said. “Our job is to present the facts and the voices that provide context on the day’s events, not to protect our audience from views that might offend them,” she continued
Sorry, but that’s crap. People have been and are being killed as a consequence of “facts and voices” like Kessler’s. There is no law of journalistic “objectivity” that requires an organization purporting to be a “national” news agency to provide a platform to proven hatred like this, especially when that “news” agency can’t be bothered to do the work necessary to challenge such hatred and put it in its proper context before its audience.
More from Attiah on what was wrong with this interview:
... Kessler started out the interview by stating that he believes he is a “civil and human rights advocate” for the “underrepresented Caucasian demographic” (ironic, considering that he is a white man being interviewed on national media, which has an overwhelmingly white workforce). Instead of refuting this lie by presenting facts about the domination of white people in almost all realms of American power and influence, King simply asks, “In what ways are white people in America underrepresented?” When Kessler claimed that his goal for the rally was peace, King never brought up the fact that a year ago in Charlottesville, Heather Heyer was murdered, allegedly by a white supremacist.
NPR further erred by following the Kessler interview with a response from Black Lives Matter of Greater New York official Hawk Newsome, who was asked why he declined an invitation to Kessler’s rally. This was a poor choice to contextualize the interview. For starters, it is extremely tone-deaf to put the onus on a person of color to defend why they would want no part in participating in a rally with white nationalists. More insidiously, such framing effectively positions Black Lives Matter as the ideological counterpart to white supremacists. Intentionally or not, it serves to reinforce the insidious notion that black people are extremists for demanding equal rights and freedom from police brutality.
As Attiah points out, the most charitable explanation here amounts to a false equivalency ethic gone insane:
All too often, well-meaning people in the liberal media think as long as racists get a chance to be racist in public, everyone will automatically reject their views. Unfortunately, history shows us otherwise. Platforming bad-faith actors who espouse white-supremacist ideologies lends credence to their views — elevating their ideologies of racial subordination and segregation as serious proposals.
But it is is frankly hard not to attribute this debacle to a deliberate thought process on the part of NPR. Over the past several years in the eyes of most progressives NPR’s reporting has become less and less focused on reality and more on bending backwards to provide “both sides” to stories which only really involve one true set of facts. Whether that is a result of being co-opted by a Republican Party that has held its funding hostage, whether it simply has caved to “normalizing” such rhetoric by following the example of the Trump Administration—whatever its reasons-- NPR crossed a dangerous bridge here—from reporting to enabling.
Also diaried by annieli here.