NPR Nazis And Beheading Jokes
by digby
Howard Kurtz interviewed the head of FOX News, Roger Ailes. He’s quite a guy. The good news is that it turns out that this very influential media leader is a sober business executive (unlike vituperative bloggers who use the inappropriate, incendiary language that’s ruining our discourse):
Then he turned his sights on NPR executives.
“They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”
He also said that Jon Stewart is a crazy socialist who hates conservatives otherwise he wouldn’t make fun of Sarah Palin. And he thinks Bill O’Reilly is becoming a liberal despite his little fantasies about beheading Dana Milbank. (I suppose that’s probably because on FOX it’s a matter of record that liberals and fundamentalist Islamic terrorists are allies in the war against Real America.)
This man is the chief executive of a news network that uses “fair and balanced” as its slogan and everyone in Washington has a hissy fit if Democratic politicians say otherwise.
It’s now thoroughly mainstream for right wing news executives and commentators to accuse liberals and journalists of being Nazis, murderers and terrorist sympathizers — while liberals and journalists who express alarm at such things are marginalized as extremists. Can we see the problem here?
One note: It’s possible that they will succeed in defunding NPR, which would effectively remove any rival to right wing hate radio. (Not that NPR is particularly liberal, it’s just dull mainstream news and talk, which is the preferred format for liberals and moderates alike.) After ACORN, they may feel they can make it happen now and it’s just possible that they can.
But even if they can’t, this is a masterful working the refs move. NPR does not see itself as an ideological organization and (like so many liberals) is embarrassed to be accused of bias, so its people will subconsciously go out of their way to prove that they aren’t. Nobody knows how to manipulate the news environment like Ailes.
.