Will (4:27)

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Mike Pesca (4:35)

That's not the itinerary we're following.

Will (4:38)

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.

Mike Pesca (4:51)

Bon voyage.

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Will (5:18)

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Brian Mackey (5:52)

We're going to roll right into the rest of our program today. I want to share a couple more text messages from listeners. Jane and Pawnee said in part I challenge CPB and especially NPR to address charges of political bias, create staff and support a traditional beat. Just as the network is focused on climate change, race relations, immigration and other major issues, NPR should seek out reporters and commentators, explore moderate and conservative causes. Jane continues. Too often in NPR reports I hear that subject of news reports declined to comment, failed to return calls, or at best provided an anodyne written response. Perhaps those adherents fear that they will face a hostile interviewer and be unfairly edited or quoted out of context. You can let us know what you what you think about all this at 800-222-9455. That's 800-222-9445. I want to introduce now Mike Pesca, former reporter and producer for npr. He left more than a decade ago to found the Gist podcast, which he also hosts first at Slate now independently. He also writes a substack newsletter. I am a subscriber to both. Mike, welcome Back to the 21st show.

Mike Pesca (7:06)

Thanks for having me.

Brian Mackey (7:08)

So you've got a piece this morning on your substack called NPR's Death by a Thousand Decolonizations. It's a headline I imagine some are going to find funny, others are going to roll their eyes. At least people who do not live online might find it confusing.

Mike Pesca (7:21)

What's it about exactly? Why? So what I wanted to do was to give a fair hearing to critics, prominent critics of npr. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana was at the gave a long speech on the floor of the Senate where He talked about 32 examples of NPR bias. And then he adeptly on Twitter rift off the NPR CEO Catherine Mahars statement that as far as accusations that were biased, I'd stand up to say, please show me a story that concerns You. So Kennedy did. I went through all those stories and kind of asked the question, are they biased? And of course I'm biased. So I used chat GPT with a prompt to imagine itself in the mold of a newspaper editor who wants to be perceived as unbiased or a dean of a journalism school and assess these stories for bias. And I have to tell you, some of them are fine. Some, but many of them were in fact quite biased. There was the story that arguments that trans athletes have an unfair advantage don't hold up to scrutiny. This framed the debate as settled, but it certainly is not. There was the country music is racist story, which was not NPR's headline. But having listened to this story, it's not far off from the sentiment of the story. And then Kennedy was talking about a couple of local stories from his Louisiana station. One was how illegitimate CRT concerns shaped Louisiana's new social studies standards. And I was curious. Well, as opposed to the legitimate CRT concerns? No, the story very much editorializes and just takes as a given that CRT concerns are illegitimate. And another story from the state is mom's education superintendent to speak at extremist Moms for Liberty chapter meeting. And this just takes as fact that Moms for Liberty is extremist. And they might be, they may well be. But I think in a story like that, you have to at least let someone from the Moms for Liberty state their view. And that wasn't done. So rather than go through all 32. And then there were a whole bunch of other stories that I looked at. There are in fact plenty of examples of stories that are either eye rolly or just biased or something that a good journalism school you would say, you would hope would say, yes, we need to do better than this.

Brian Mackey (9:43)

You know, one of the things that jumped out to me looking at some of these stories and I went down the rabbit hole and tried to find the provenance of some of them. One that jumped out at me was that Senator Kennedy highlighted is monuments and teams have changed names as America reckons with racism. Birds are next.

Mike Pesca (9:59)

Right?

Brian Mackey (9:59)

And this is about, it's, it's a story about how apparently some bird names were named after people that Audubon knew or other other people who discovered, quote, unquote, discovered the species knew and some of like Confederate officers and that kind of thing. And so as school names were changed, they were going to change bird names.

Mike Pesca (10:17)

Right?

Brian Mackey (10:17)

Here's the, here's the thing. This is a local. This was a report from a local reporter at a station in Ohio I couldn't actually, even though it was on NPR's website, I couldn't find that it actually aired on Morning Edition or atc. I spent.

Mike Pesca (10:28)

No, it aired on All Things Considered. It did. Okay, 21, thank you.

Brian Mackey (10:32)

I could not find that.

Mike Pesca (10:33)

And the headline there was, to Make Birding Inclusive. Some Birds Will Need New Names Without Colonial Roots. This, this was a phenomenon. I covered it on my show. I covered it. I'm not going to say tongue in cheek, but there is perhaps a humorous element, I think, to that moderate. That moderate.

Brian Mackey (10:50)

Part of what I'm getting at is that like, this is, like this seems like a reasonable human interest story to me.

Mike Pesca (10:55)

It does. It is. And the way the New York Times covered it, I think included those aspects. I would recommend that coverage. This was, it was a short story, but it literally quoted no one who thought that this was anything other than a good idea. And the language was, this is where decolonization Riff was inspired. As an activist in the birding community, I would say I'm seeking to decolonize the birding experience, not glorifications of folks who don't want people like me birding. They would be upset if the birding community was trying to decolonize. And to me, some of the jargony, you're already in the camp and we're already only speaking to people of a certain progressive persuasion that infused that story.

Brian Mackey (11:41)

Yeah, no, that. I hear what you're saying there.

Mike Pesca (11:43)

Do you?

Brian Mackey (11:44)

Is is part of the issue for NPR nowadays that, you know, a thousand, I don't know, how many stories do you think are produced every week? I mean, I was.

Mike Pesca (11:52)

Well, I don't know.

Brian Mackey (11:52)

Every week.

Mike Pesca (11:53)

I used to do like 10,000 a year. Right?

Brian Mackey (11:55)

Yeah, thousands, literally thousands. And surely some of them are going to be bad takes or have, you know, somebody who wrote the headline and maybe get checked enough. Is that what's happening here? Or do you see this as a more systemic issue?

Mike Pesca (12:09)

Yeah, that's absolutely fair. You're going to. I say this in my piece, you're going to be able to find clunkers, groaners, or even stories that really would upset someone who's not partizan. However, there was a time, and I do think NPR has pulled back from that time where social justice activism certainly infused a lot of the stories and a lot of the de facto opinions that were being expressed as stories. And many, many people heard this, saw this, and the listener, the listenership of NPR suffered. Catherine Mars talked, mayors talked about that. Then there are other stories that even though there are only a few of the thousand were really important, like the coverage of Hunter Biden's laptop, which I know is not. I know that many a listener of NPR does not want to hear prattling on about that. But Catherine Mayer, under oath, did say that NPR got that story wrong when a top editor initially, initially dismissed it as wasting our listeners time. So you add it all up. My main thesis wasn't that. It certainly wasn't. Something like NPR on Net isn't much more good than bad. I listen to NPR all the time and I know it's hard to be a sustained news organization today and the funding is needed. And when I was hearing about the local station heads, my heart was kind of breaking because I know the kind of programing that they produce. But the point is, in this vicious political climate, when you know this is coming, there was bad politics married to bad journalism. That was malpractice. If what you're worried about is sustaining a system that you think, and rightly think is essential. And we'll be back with a Little more of me. It's me teasing the fact that there's more of me. From Monday, let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

Will (14:19)

Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new family freedom offer.

Mike Pesca (14:27)

That's not the itinerary we're following.

Will (14:30)

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.

Mike Pesca (14:43)

Bon voyage.

T Mobile Representative (14:45)

Introducing Family freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 82999 eligible trade in iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due. If you pay off earlier cancel contact T Mobile.

Mike Pesca (15:14)

Okay. We're back with Mike Pesca on the 21st from WIL radio.

Brian Mackey (15:20)

It's the 21st show. I'm Brian Mackey. We are talking about the rescission of funding for public broadcast that the congress approved last week. Two years worth of funding more than $1 billion. And that was just a small piece of that funding rescission which also included a lot of foreign aid. But that is a subject for another day. We're talking for the rest of the hour with Mike Pesca, who is a former reporter and producer at npr. He founded the Gist podcast initially at Slate. Now he runs it independently. Also has a great substack newsletter. He is someone I consider a good faith critic of public media, somebody who doesn't, you know, hate npr, someone who actually enjoys it, as he just said before the break, but does think it has some problems and that some of the critiques of it are legitimate. You can join us today at 800-222-9455. And in fact, let's, let's go now to the phones. Gary is calling from Normal, Illinois. Gary, thanks for calling in.

Gary (16:16)

Hi, I'm big fan of npr. When I drive cross country to Florida or California, all you can get on the radio is right wing conservative Christian radio. And NPR is an important alternative to that. But I think it's a very biased alternative. And I've seen story after story with the same left wing bias your previous commentator mentioned. And what happens is you usually don't make a good argument unless you understand the argument on the other side. And I don't think the listeners to NPR very often get the other side of an argument. One of my examples, there is a here and now story on people who didn't want police and corporations at a pride protest and they said they had all the reasons against the police. The corporations were just out for money and they never gave the other side of the story. Isn't it a good thing that police want to participate in a pride march? Isn't it a good thing that corporations now support gays and lesbians? The bias is obvious and I think it's why NPR has lost its rural audiences.

Brian Mackey (17:47)

Gary, thanks so much. Thanks for sharing your perspective. I really appreciate that. And maybe this is a good time to say we did invite somebody from the Cato Institute to join us on the program today, somebody who has been critical of the the very idea of government funding of media and did not hear back. So, Mike Pesca, I don't know if you want to respond to Gary or Eddie, go ahead.

Mike Pesca (18:11)

Yeah, or channel my inner libertarian. But I think that if I were not the Cato Institute fellow, but someone from a more left leaning place, I might say something like, well, there are of course, podcasts and podcasts are a great alternative and you don't have to be beholden to what's on over the air. But actually this was an argument used against npr. I do think that the caller's points are very much echoed and are reflected in a lot of the listener surveys and the listenership numbers that NPR has faces. But there are a couple of things that some of the listeners who have written in, have alleged or have surmised about that I don't think NPR does, to be fair. I don't think NPR mangles quotes or makes someone looks bad when they sit for a quote. I think they very much try to, if someone sits for an interview, best portray what their actual opinion is. The question is a selection bias, what stories you select and who you decide to actually go to for an interview. So that's just one thing. And Pera really does try to adhere to the best practices of journalism. And there's a push and pull in an ebb and flow to that. I just think ebbed during the exact period or right before the exact period when Republicans always hot to defund npr, got the control of levers of power.

Brian Mackey (19:45)

That's. Yeah, that's an interesting juxtaposition in time you're pointing out, let me say, you know, it's something we deal with here, you know, and I hear Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition saying we reached out to, you know, 48 members of the Republican caucus to join us. None. None agreed. You know, we don't have that many in Illinois. It is a blue state and it's been gerrymandered to be even more Democratic. And it's congressional delegation. There are exactly three members of Congress who are Republicans from Illinois. One of them barely does any media and has never responded or I should say her spokesperson did respond once but has never agreed to come on to the program despite multiple invitations. One does every now and then and the other one does. But you know, it's like five requests for, for, you know, one response. I do think there is something out there where and maybe it is has to do with the perception now that NPR is not going to give them a fair shake. But people just on the right tend to be less willing to come come on npr.

Mike Pesca (20:43)

And yeah, I think it's because media has become so much more siloed that as opposed to maybe when you and I got into this, they don't need npr. They can just talk to their own people. But so can the left. You don't need npr. Maybe the guys who do the Midas touch or some of these other left leaning podcasts might go on NPR to boost audience, but they really don't need NPR anymore. I don't know, maybe that's another argument for the lack of essential essentiality in funding the network. Can I point to one other thing that's very interesting? We've been talking about npr mostly. One of your, one of your station heads was a PBS station head. I think it's fascinating that the bill of particulars, if you will, against PBS is so much weaker than that against npr. And this and the analysis of this cuts both, both way ways. I looked at John Kennedy's 32 critiques. There were also a collection of just from the headlines that Uri Berliner, who's a former editor, my former editor, put together micro feminism, the next big thing in fighting the patriarchy and bringing diversity to Maine's nearly all White Lobster fleet. You know, stories that would again, flatter a progressive predilection. But if you look at the critiques of PBS stories, they're barely there. The most prominent is that the PBS NewsHour far more often uses the phrase far right than far left. But if you get into the statistics, it's because most of those descriptions are for groups like the January Six Riders or Q and on or specific, a specific set of stories where Kevin McCarthy was embattled and imperiled by the far right of his party. So my point is that this does show that if you want to say both PBS and NPR are exemplars of unbiased journalism, it's not true to the same degree. It's also true that NPR is more stories per year than pbs. On the other hand, here's why I say it cuts both ways. So NPR is providing much of the fodder for defunding both PBS and npr. But they still defunded pbs, didn't they? Without PBS doing much beyond saying far right, they still lost millions and millions of dollars of funding. So that maybe shows it doesn't matter given the people who are making the vote.

Brian Mackey (23:01)

Well, and that's where I, I come down, I think, is that a question I have? Is, is all this is our very discussion today sort of beside the point. And this would have been, this would have come down when you have a party that is lined up behind President Trump as much as it is and he set his mind to this and therefore pretty much anything he has set his mind to, at least in this term, he has been able to work his will in the Congress. You know, the yeah. What do you, what do you think of that? That this is maybe.

Mike Pesca (23:34)

But, you know, I know, I know that you said it was for another day that we would discuss the rescission portions of pepfar funding, but that was not rescinded. It seems possible that they could have escaped the cuts or some of the cuts. There was a carve out for some of the emergency systems on tribal lands, though I don't know how effective a carve out that will be. I would just say that NPR was trying to make its best case possible by emphasizing things like the essentialness of the stations when it comes to the warning the public about impending damage. It just my point is that they were trying to put their best foot forward in the thought that maybe that would help and the sheer tonnage of embarrassing stories or stories that they had to explain away gets in the way of that effort. So what I'm saying is maybe you're right, but it certainly didn't help that there were dozens and dozens and dozens of stories that a critic could point to and have at least some validity.

Brian Mackey (24:36)

Let me share another message we got from a listener. Stephen in Champaign via text said, I'm interested in your topic today. I often find myself torn between good coverage and bias with some of the arguments that the Republican Party has put. I wonder if there's just so many bad things happening on the Republican side that it seems like there's an over recoverage of Republican negative issues on this other side of things. Looking at it from their perspective, is that the responsibility to draw hyper hypocritical hip, excuse me, goodness, I can read hypocritical and or issues that cause negative impacts on the US that is Democratic leaning. Let me, I think I can direct direct this into a question I had which is, you know, there are dozens of things we could say about President Trump right now that would be both 100% factual and come off to his supporters as really biased and unfair. And how as a journalist, how do you navigate that?

Mike Pesca (25:29)

Well, I think that you have to do the journalism, but then you have to be sure that it's nailed down and buttoned down and there were big stories that all of journalism got wrong or got out over its skis on that Donald Trump takes umbrage at and if these journalistic organizations are in the private sector, well, we have a First Amendment and for the most part we have robust libel laws, although news organizations can choose to settle on their own. But if you are a public funded organization that is always on the chopping block, it would probably behoove you to go about your job saying it's extra important we don't make mistakes and it's extra important that we don't make mistakes in a particular direction. So NPR aired more than a Few stories, and this was one of the ones that Kennedy pointed to just calling the lab leak theory debunked. And so other organizations did too. But when NPR doesn't and doesn't do a full accounting of what they got wrong, then their funding is imperiled.

Brian Mackey (26:42)

It's the adjective. It gets you so many times in the headline. Leave the adjectives out of the headline. That's my advice.

Mike Pesca (26:50)

What about making. There were trends in journalism that trended towards a social justice mindset. So when npr, along with many other organizations substituted not all the time, but at time, the phrase pregnant women for pregnant people, it would just, you know, raise the hair on the back of the arms of not just conservatives or a couple of instances where they would use the phrase people with uteruses. This wasn't unknown in media, but when NPR does it, funding is imperiled.

Brian Mackey (27:24)

I think this is probably the last question we'll have time for today. But I want to put this in the context of President Trump's broader attack on the media. I think that's a factual way to describe it, right? Cbs, abc, now the Wall Street Journal, the Iowa pollster and Selzer. I mean, is public media just, you know, low hanging fruit because of the government funding? Is this part of the broader story?

Mike Pesca (27:45)

Yeah, to some extent it is. And because of the change of Republican Party to, to the Donald Trump's gravitational pull, Mitt Romney ran against funding public radio and then they, they critiqued him with what? You don't love Big Bird and he went on a Big Bird apology tour. Donald Trump is not that kind of Republican. I also think that the other news organizations, a few of them caved and folded for business considerations. But I don't think. Well, I don't know, but it looks like Rupert Murdoch, at least with the Wall Street Journal won't be doing that. I don't think Ann Selzer with the Des Moines Register is going to be doing that. So there are ways to stand up to Donald Trump, but yeah, this is his playbook. And if you're beholden to the government for funding and your npr, you're first and foremost on the chopping block.

Brian Mackey (28:35)

Where do you think public media goes from here? Should I go?

Mike Pesca (28:39)

I see a couple of, Yeah, I see a couple of things that could happen. One is, you know, there's always counter mobilization. So when someone tries to suppress, or when one party tries to suppress the vote, the other party makes a big deal of that and the vote usually increases, usually. So that could happen. There could be an influx of funding and things could be better than ever. But I think that there is and I think this is a question you were getting to the you were giving to one of the station heads. There was some guardrail aspect to well, we have to pretty much stay within the middle 50 yard lines between the 25 and the 25 on this or else we risk public funding. Now the public funding has been taken away. Maybe those guardrails will be off and public radio or NPR will sound more like Pacifica Radio. It's possible. I don't know. I think the general trends are bigger than the funding trends, which are a pulling back from some of the excesses of the social justice worldview defining public radio and NPR's coverage.

Brian Mackey (29:36)

Mike Pesca is host of the Gist. He's also got a newsletter on Substack. You can find that under Mike Pesca. Strong recommend for both. Mike, thanks so much for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Mike Pesca (29:48)

You're welcome.

Brian Mackey (29:50)

And that is it for us today. Coming up Tomorrow on the 21st show, we're going to present a short interview with the new chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Then we'll be talking about crime free housing rules. There was a debate this spring, legislation did not advance, but it did come up. We're going to dive into that about whether some of these crime free housing rules are due for change or whether they are necessary safeguards for people who live in apartments. That is all coming up Tomorrow on the 21st show, which is a production of Illinois Public Media. Let us know what you thought. Talk@20firstshow.org is our email address. You can find that and every other way to contact us on our website. 21st show.org I'm Brian Mackey. Thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.

Mike Pesca (30:46)

Thanks so much for the 21st for having me on. I really thought it was a great conversation. I was proud to bring it to you. And like I said, if you want to read more of my thoughts on Pesca profundities and see what ChatGPT said about the bias of individual stories, most of most of which comported with what I thought of these stories, go to mikepaska.substack.com and I'll talk to you on Monday.

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