The Hedge Fund Manager Shall Lie Down with the Miner

I generally only listen to NPR when I'm driving, and since I only drive when I rent a car to travel, that's not all that often.  Yesterday was one of those times, and I was reminded why.

A fund-raising spot on the Indianapolis affiliate I was tuned to featured a young woman (some managerial person at some other station) who gushed that NPR includes everybody, hedge-fund managers and miners!  It reminds us that we're all in this together! ... A laudable sentiment, but how often do miners appear on NPR?  Not very often.  NPR has at least one program devoted to "business," but none, as far as I know, to Labor.  That would be showing favoritism to special interests, I suppose.

It was easy for me to think of this, because I'd been listening for more than an hour to one of NPR's main morning news programs, 1A, which I'd heard before on other trips.  Not only were no miners on hand for the discussion, all of the discussants were from commercial media: the New York Times was well-represented, and one was a former Olympic Gold Medalist who's now an "ESPN analyst."  I always thought that one purpose of public broadcasting was to provide an alternative to the Usual Media Suspects; instead the corporate media have been colonizing the alternative.  FAIR has documented this repeatedly over the years.  News sources like Democracy Now and The Intercept aren't perfect, but they do provide alternative viewpoints and voices, with DN especially hosting people who'd never be given space on NPR.

1A let me know from its opening seconds that Charlottesville would be discussed, but aside from the Times reporter, who'd actually been present at the violence, no one had much of substance to say about it.  One guy, an NPR White House correspondent named Geoff Bennett, was the only person who addressed the historical issue, that the Confederate memorials were erected as part of a campaign to rewrite the history of the war and as propaganda for white supremacy after Reconstruction.  There was no followup to his remarks, though: mostly the discussion was about how the controversy would affect President Trump.  There was a brief bit about Heather Heyer's mother, Susan Bro, and her denunciation of Trump.  Good for Trump?  Bad for Trump?  You decide.

A surprising amount of time was devoted to the two police pilots who died when their helicopter crashed as they returned to headquarters after the rally.  According to one report, the helicopter had been damaged years before, and this was thought to have some bearing on its failure.  There doesn't seem to be any connection beyond the chronological between the Nazi rally and the policemen's deaths, but the framing seemed to be intended to cast them, along with Heather Heyer, as victims of white nationalism.  Typical journalistic balance, I guess.  But while their deaths were tragic for themselves, their families, and their colleagues, the pilots were not martyrs, except perhaps to cost-cutting measures.

The second, international, hour of 1A was more of the same.  It was the morning after the terrorist attack in Barcelona, which also involved driving a vehicle into a crowd, so that was the lead story.  Once again the aim seemed to be to fill time, with relatively little substance, and the substance revealed the usual tunnel vision. The Washington Bureau Chief of Al-Arabiya rightly spoke of the horror of families being targeted while they were just out enjoying a summer evening.  It wouldn't have done, I suppose, to notice parallels to families in other parts of the world being killed by US missiles and drones while they were celebrating a wedding, or children killed by drones while they gathered firewood on a cold day.  It's one thing to compare the Barcelona attack to the Charlottesville attack, and quite another to notice that killing innocent families living their day-to-day lives is standard operating procedure for the American imperium and its allies and clients.

There was also a disapproving reference to Trump's fondness for dictators.  There was no acknowledgment of President Obama's fondness for dictators and military coups, let alone the long history of Washington's fondness for dictators and military coups.  It wouldn't do to notice that; NPR never has.