There Are No Girls on the Internet - NPR “wokeness debate” shows Gamergate never ended

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Extremists like Chris Rufo are setting their sites on NPR, and the New York Times is helping them do it. Again. The Real Story Behind NPR’s Current Problems: https://slate.com/business/2024/04/npr-diversity-public-broadcasting-radio.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. This is there are No Girls on the Internet, where we explore the intersection of identity, technology, and social media. And today, I want to talk about what's going on with NPR National Public Radio. Or honestly, I guess I should say that I don't really want to talk about it. If anything, I kind of don't want to.

This is the kind of story that I would probably be tuning out. But it's been kind of a one-to-punch with this NPR story that dovetails with some of the issues that we've talked a lot about here on there are No Girls on the Internet. And I also want to connect them to some larger tech lessons that folks clearly have not learned. So let's get into it. Yuri Berliner, who had been NPR's senior business editor up until recently, published a piece in free press, basically calling out the fact that audiences have lost trust in national public radio or NPR as an institution. And basically, Berliner blames wholeness and DEI for this larger distrust in journalism more broadly. In his piece, he argues that NPR used to be really balanced and fair and curious, but as he puts it, quote,

in recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different, the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. If you're conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it's always been this way, but it hasn't. So Berliner paints 2011 as this rosy golden age of trust at NPR. you know, before things like DEI and wokeness ruined everything. He writes, An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR.

And now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America. So Berliner argues that Trump really changed a lot of NPR's culture and trust and standards. He uses things like NPR, not really reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story, and not reporting more on the COVID-Lab leak theory. he uses these as examples that show that since the rise of Trump, NPR is basically like in the bag for the Democratic Party. He also talks about how in 2020, when many of us were having like a national conversation about race, NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, published a piece that prompted staffers to really do some self-analysis in their own roles in things like systemic racial issues. So apparently, NPR's CEO, writing a piece suggesting that NPR staff, you know, think critical. about their own biases and the way they might impact their reporting, rather than that being

just like thoughtful guidance for anyone whose job it is to help people understand the world around them, Berliner acts like this was a terrible sign of wokeness run amok. Quote, and we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language, the CEO, said that leaders of public media, starting with me, must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions, and he must commit ourselves, body and soul, to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions. He declared that diversity on our staff and in our audience was the overriding mission, the, quote, North Star of the organization. Phrases like, that's

part of the North Star, became part of meetings and more casual conversation. Now, y'all do not really believe that the former CEO of NPR said that diversity was now the most important mission. of NPR more important than any other part of NPR. Y'all don't actually believe that, do you? You obviously don't because he didn't say it. I actually went back and read the piece that Berliner is referring to. It never even suggests anything of the sort. It is the most basic, toothless, like, we care about diversity, yay, diversity message that you can imagine. But Berliner says that the CEO basically said that diversity now matters more than our journalism, which he just flat out never said. That just like doesn't appear in that piece.

Berliner goes on to complain about what are frankly pretty fairly humdrum inclusion efforts that NPR enacted in 2020, things like tracking the makeup of their podcast listenership and guests. Honestly, these are things that I kind of can't believe that NPR did not have in place before 2020. That is how standard these practices are. Like even the shoestring startup podcast that I work for do and always have done this. It is a very common thing. Berliner in his piece, he makes it sound like, this is like the identity police,

grilling everybody about their race and ethnicity and identity, rather than just having it be something that makes sure that your guests aren't like, oops, all white men talking about different issues, right? So NPR also got some funding to do work highlighting specific underrepresented groups through things like affinity groups for staff, like Jewish NPR staffers or women, gender expansive, and transgender people in technology throughout public, media, right? And what Berliner does in his piece is basically just assume that all of this is

like progressivism. All of this is like synonymous with the Democratic Party. And this is his big gripe, quote, and this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR, the absence of viewpoint diversity. He says that he doesn't think there are enough Republicans working at NPR. And apparently he tried to actually get a meeting with NPR's former CEO to discuss all of this, but that meeting never happened, which is why he is breaking NPR's rules and publishing this piece in free press. So one quick note that I feel like I have to add for context is that he published this piece in free press. I don't really enjoy talking about this particular subset of like soft media grifter types because I think it quickly gets into like a who's who of who's the worst.

And these people are all so boring that I just like cannot stand to think about them. But basically, all you need to know about free press is that it is a. substack media publication run by Bari Weiss. And it's one of those places where, like, nobody has principles or cares about free speech but us. And, you know, everybody who is writing is like, just asking questions. We honestly could do an entire episode on Bari Weiss, but basically, you know the type. These are not people that I would say are operating in good faith. And their entire thing is braiding themselves as these brave, free speech truth tellers who are the only ones who think for themselves and are being punished for it, and they

continue to say that as they get these huge platforms and lots of money to demonstrate just how unlisted to they are. Again, I'm being glib, but you know the type. So it is really hard for me to see Berliner publishing this piece in free press as anything other than this really calculated move to turn himself into a martyr persona who is canceled for telling the truth about whoa. Like, be real. Had you ever heard of the name Yuri Berliner before he published this piece and everybody started talking about it? Exactly. So the exact right-wing conservative voices in media that you would expect are completely lapping this piece up. And remember, he is not sharing this piece in a vacuum. It is being used as yet another data point in the ongoing conversation

about defunding and PR and sowing distrust in our public institutions in general. Like Senator Ted Cruz is renewing calls to defund NPR. And again, I think a reason why he published this piece was to tap into that particular ongoing conservative argument. So to me, this entire thing reads like Berliner's kind of coming out party took curry favor with a particular kind of conservative media circle. I mean, why just retire when you can do this whole thing? So Berliner was suspended from NPR for five days for publishing this piece without NPR's permission, which is pretty clearly against the rules at NPR. And then he resigned.

He blasted NPR's new CEO on the way out, saying, quote, I cannot work at a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR that I cite in my free press essay. And honestly, I'm sure that he probably will get a nice little booth in recognition from all the right people. Right-wing outlets are already calling him a, quote, whistleblower, which has the host of a. a podcast where we talk to real whistleblowers, women who have risked their livelihoods and their

actual safety and sometimes even their actual lives to speak up about wrongdoing to actually speak truth to power. That is so offensive to me to see this white man like white man erked by DEI and woke being painted as a whistleblower. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk, to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

The worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. To the group. The group.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me.

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This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise. Breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real.

From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you content. and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slic Life 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. And we're back. So after his piece came out, 50 NPR staffers wrote an open letter to NPR's new CEO, Catherine Marr, who will talk about more in a moment, demanding that she issue a public rebuke

of the, quote, factual inaccuracies and elisions in his piece. So right here is where I was going to do an entire segment, kind of responding to and pointing out the various factual inaccuracies in his piece, but it just kind of doesn't even seem worth it. Like Berlin are suggesting that it is DEI efforts in media that have run amok, and that is the reason why media and institutional trust is suffering is just ridiculous. And at some level, it gets really exhausting and repetitive to keep pushing back against this stuff. When I was putting together this segment, I was like, yeah, this is just me repeating the same things I've said already about this kind of stuff.

It almost doesn't seem worth it to keep pushing back against this stuff. You know, it's like, why are planes falling out of the sky? Black people. Why can't my kid get into Harvard? Black people. Why don't people trust journalism? Black people. So after a while, it does get a little tiring.

So I'm not going to include the bit where I really pushed back on his claims. But I'll just cut to the chase and tell you what I actually think. You know that meme tweet where it's a bird saying, I feel uncomfortable when we are not about me? I think that's kind of what's going on here. I think that what Berliner is actually saying, if you read between the lines, is I liked it better when journalism was about white men like me. I think he's somebody who's been in this business a long time. He's been in this business for 25 years. I think in that time he has seen journalism go from mostly white to fairly white.

And I don't think he likes it. I think that what he's actually saying reading between the lines is we need to go back to the times when this whole thing was about white men like me. I don't want to have to compete with the talents and interests and audience of people who are not white men. And that is the problem. I honestly like don't think it is really that deep. And I'm kind of surprised to see so many media outlets responding as if he like did. raise some very deep existential issues and questions beyond like, why is everything no longer exclusively about me? Like the fact that as a business editor, he clearly felt some kind of a way

that the big boss boss at NPR, like the CEO, the main guy, did not feel the need to meet with him to discuss the gripes that he was trying to get on this guy's calendar and this guy was like, nah, I'm good? That tells me a lot. Like, what kind of person feels entitled that they can meet with the CEO to discuss whatever their gripe is, as opposed to meeting with their direct manager or whatever. On top of Berliner probably not liking the fact that the CEO did not feel the need to make time for his complaints, when that CEO left, NPR then goes and hires a young woman to replace him. And I bet Berliner didn't like that and saw a young woman getting hired as yet another sign of wokeness run amok at NPR. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't want to come off

like I am defending NPR here because I do think that they have some issues that are impacting audience trust, much like media and journalism just as an institution broadly does. Media trust is down and people are feeling disillusioned with journalism as an institution. Last year, a Gallup poll found that the 32% of Americans who say that they trust mass media, quote, a great deal or a fair amount to report the news in a full, fair, and accurate way, Tide Gallup's lowest historical reading, which was previously recorded in 2016. So this distrust thing is real. And NPR absolutely should be grappling with it.

But blaming wokeness as the culprit just does not hold water. Alicia Montgomery, a black woman who worked at NPR since before Berliner worked there, she joined in 1997 and he joined in 99, published an excellent piece in Slate, where she now works, called The Real Story Behind NPR's Current Problems. The entire piece is worth a read. We will put it in the show notes. But basically, she throws cold water on this idea that the problems that NPR is having with audience trust is because of black people and like too much diversity and woke. She writes, it did take a kind of courage for Yuri to publicly criticize the organization. But it also took a lot of the wrong type of nerve.

His argument is a demonstration of contemporary journalism at its worst, in which inconvenient facts and obvious questions were ignored. and the facts that could be shaped to serve the preferred argument were inflated in importance. So I mentioned that Berliner talks about 2011 as a kind of golden age of NPR Trust. You know, the good old days before race and woke and D.I. were sort of run amok. Alicia is like, wrong. She points out how this nostalgic view really is revisionist and completely self-serving on his part. She writes, take a step into the way back machine into 2011. Yuri's so-called Golden Age.

That's the year when senior members of the development team fell for a scam set up by professional provocateur James O'Keefe. The aftermath took them out and toppled the then-CEO and president, Vivian Schiller. It came months after the ill-timed clumsy firing of Juan Williams, which led to Senior Vice President of News, Ellen Weiss, residing under pressure. Uri also leapfrogs over a long list of contemporary fuck-ups and questionable calls that can explain the growing public distrust that concerns him. There are questions about NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Tottenberg's personal relationship

with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, compromising her reporting, the departure of news chief Mike Oreckis, and other prominent men in the newsroom after a wave of sexual harassment charges, the exposure of systemic exploitation of NPR's temporary workforce, and those are just the public problems. So Berliner also claims that a big part of NPR's downfall was the rise of Trump and that NPR did not or could not fairly cover Trump because, like, they were in the bag for the Democratic Party. But unsurprisingly, Alicia remembers it very differently. She writes, Yuri's account of the deliberate effort to undermine Trump up to and after his election is also bewilderingly incomplete, inaccurate, and skewed.

For most of 2016, many NPR journalists warn newsroom leadership that they weren't taking Trump and the possibility of him winning seriously enough. but top editors dismissed the chance of a Trump win repeatedly, declaring that Americans would be revolted by this or that outrageous thing he'd said or done. I remember one editorial meeting where a white newsroom leader said that Trump's strong poll numbers wouldn't survive his being exposed as a racist. When a journalist of color asked whether his numbers could be rising because of his racism, the comment was met with silence. In another meeting, I and a couple of other editorial leaders were encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.

Another colleague asked what to do if one candidate just lied more than the other, another silent response. And again, I feel like Berliner's claims here about media, particularly NPR, like being too hard or unfair on Trump, is a historical to the point of being like a little bit gaslighty. Like when Trump won,

how many interviews did we all have to watch with like economically anxious rural Trump voters that we were told that we all needed to be listening to. To the point where it almost became a bit of a media cliche, right? Like, big city reporter goes to a rural diner to find out what's what. Like, did that not happen? Did we dream it? Because I remember it. Alicia writes, when I came back to work on Morning Edition,

I saw no trace of the anti-Trump editorial machine that Yuri references. On the contrary, people were at pains to find a way to cover Trump's voters and his administration fairly. We went full bore on Diner Guy and a Trucker Hat coverage and adopted the alt-right label to describe people who could accurately be called racists. The network had a reflexive need to stay on good terms of people in power, and journalists who had contacts within the administration

were encouraged to pursue those bookings. We regularly set up interviews with Republican officials and Trump surrogates, but it was tough because NPR always loved guests who would be insightful, honest, and perhaps above all, light. There were plenty of people who'd for years fit that description across the partisan divide in official Washington, but they were scarce in the Trump administration. We changed the format of live political interviews, adding what we called a level set that would be a three-ish minute after a conversation with a political operative or elected official when a host and NPR reporter would

try to fact-check what had just been said. So this claim that Berliner is making that NPR was in the bag for the Democrats and they did not fairly cover Trump voters, just seems wildly out of step with what somebody who worked there said happened and what we all saw happen. Like, if you were alive during that time, I don't think you need to tell me that a lot of media outlets were bending over backward to provide fair and balanced coverage of Trump's campaign. And I do think it's worth looking at how that decision impacted media trust. I'd be willing to bet that coverage of Trump that was trying so hard to stay neutral instead of presenting the truth about what he was actually saying and doing probably did impact audience trust in journalism.

And it's not just that Berliner doesn't think that that specific kind of bias is worth talking about, it's that he's presenting a version where that bias does not even exist and then telling people that that is objective reality. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Bodenker to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel,

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, I-H-H-Haw-Rour. hearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.

Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened.

That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise. Breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves. Their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down,

give you context and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to SportsLice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slicelife 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Let's get right back into it. So probably what I found to be the most interesting part in her response is when she talks about NPR's sometimes clunky handling of race. She says, if anything, that would be the real symptom of like, wokeness run him up. In one anecdote, she talks about how there was resistance to covering the violent MS-13 gang

after it had become a major talking point in Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric. But this was while the gang was like murdering people in D.C. Pretty close to NPR's headquarters, just miles from where many of the staffers actually lived. She writes, I think a lot of critics would consider that wokeness, pussyfooting around an issue because it might offend people of color. I saw it as a low-key racial bias because MS-13's victims were mostly poor Central American immigrants, the kind of people we didn't think our affluent white listenership would pay attention to. So if you want to talk about times where politics or, quote,

wokeness was actually dictating coverage in a concerning way, this sounds like it would be like a fruitful conversation to have, right? But that is very different from what Berliner is doing and calling NPR out for, which is just like too much diversity. It is such a lazy, easy accusation that gets us away from the issues that might actually be meaty or substantive. Another example along those lines is when we were having a national conversation about police killings, there was a sort of side question about like, oh, well, police also kill white people under shady circumstances, too. What about that? And Alicia Wright said it seemed like nobody at NPR really wanted to talk about that. She talks about how the team at the race focus podcast codes with,

which is one of my favorite podcasts, was the only team with NPR, and NPR, to cover a police killing of an unarmed white teenager named Zachary Hammond. She suspects the reason why none of the other units within NPR covered it is kind of political in a sense, because it would have complicated this dynamic of getting to smugly think of themselves as being on the correct side of the issue. Her entire piece is worth reading, but ultimately she gets at this point that I want to highlight.

She writes, and that's what the core editorial problem at NPR is, and frankly has long been, an abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice. NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there and calling it objectivity. That would more than explain the lack of follow-up on Hunter Biden's laptop

and the lab leak theory, going full white guilt after George Floyd's murder and shifting to indignant white impatience with racial justice now. And I think anybody who reads mainstream reporting or media knows exactly what she is referring to, right? This kind of safe, middle of the road reporting that is going out of its way to not give any whiff of bias to the point that it's not actually useful in terms of informing an audience anymore. Like, I remember when I was working in news media, we had to walk back calling things that

were objectively, obviously racist, racist. Like, you couldn't just call something racist. You had to, we had to bend over backward to use these weird, phrases that like evoked race, but were not the word racist. And I remember there was a story where it was some frat. And there was a video of these members of the frat on a bus where they were singing this chant about how there would never be an N word in their frat. And so we were writing up that story. And we, I called it a racist chant. And my editor was like, no, no, we can't say it's racist. And we had to walk it back to, I think the phrase that we used was like, racially tinged,

which like, what does that mean? If somebody is on camera singing about how there will never be an N word in their fret, I feel comfortable calling that objectively racist. But we had to be like, ooh, it's like racially infused. Like, we're not talking about chili oil here. We're talking about race. So Berliner's free press piece calling out NPR for being too woke is one piece of it. But now enter our old friend, enemy of the show, Chris Rufo,

of the Manhattan Institute, who openly manufactured. Actures disingenuous right-wing panics using the New York Times. He's the man that brought us the critical race theory panic, the DEI panic, the Claudine Gay is a plagiarist panic. And I guess now it's the CEO of NPR is bad panic. And of course, guess who is helping him do this? The New York Times. So Catherine Marr was named CEO of NPR recently.

She does not have a journalism background. She was most recently the head of Wikimedia Foundation. So after Berliner's piece, old tweets of hers were resurfaced by Chris Rufo. Now, keep in mind, these tweets were things that she tweeted before she ever worked at NPR. She wasn't a journalist when she tweeted them. It's things like, quote, Donald Trump is a racist, which she tweeted in 2018. She was photographed wearing a Biden hat in 2020. And she tweeted about this dream that she had where she went on a road trip with Vice President Kamala Harris.

and they both got nuts together as a snack. Honestly, that is really it, like pretty shocking stuff, I know. So now people are coming out of the woodwork, close reading every public talk, every panel that she's ever given, even in the years before her tenure at NPR, to paint her in a bad light. And this is such a familiar strategy here

to make Catherine Marr look foolish and embarrassing and to try to make any kind of association with her look like it's toxic. because she is that foolish and that embarrassing. They want people to be embarrassed to stick up for her to make sure that none of her allies publicly come to her defense. They want NPR's leadership and board to think that she is somebody who is too risky to be associated with. Just like Claudine Gay and CRT, Rufo is very explicit that the point here is to make her toxic

and synonymous with negativity, even though she didn't do anything wrong. And the articles are already pouring in helping Rufo do exactly that. Here's one headline. NPR's new CEO, Catherine Marr, haunted by woke, anti-Trump tweets as veteran editor, claims bias. The New York Post even published a piece today with the headline, NPR's new CEO, who was called out by whistleblower over pervasive left-wing biased, recently purchased a $2.7 million NYC townhouse. The piece talks about how she bought a three-bedroom townhouse that is almost two thousand, square feet, which like, yes, okay, as someone who lives in a one-bedroom shithole, that sounds like a palace, but like, how is it news that the CEO of NPR, who was formerly the CEO of Wikimedia

Foundation, who was married to somebody who was formerly a lawyer at Lyft? How is it news that she has a nice house? Like, it's just so ridiculous and disingenuous. In response to all this, an NPR spokesperson said that Marr was, quote, not working in journalism at the time and was exercising her First Amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen. NPR also said that she has upheld the network's Code of Ethics since she was appointed, saying, since stepping into the role, she has upheld and is fully committed to NPR's Code of Ethics and the independence of NPR's newsroom. The CEO is not involved in editorial decisions. So listen to how the New York Times writes about how Mar's old tweets came to be in the news. Quote, Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the

conservative Manhattan Institute called attention to many of Ms. Marr's posts on X and shared a response from Tesla's CEO Elon Musk, who had responded to one of Ms. Mar's posts that Mr. Rufo highlighted saying, this person is a crazy racist. If NPR wants to truly be national public radio, it can't pander to the furthest left element in the United States. Rufo said in an interview. To do so, NPR should part ways with Catherine Marr. And now he has gone from, oh, she should be fired, to calling on NPR to be defunded and for the staff to have mass layoffs. So here's my question. So the NPR piece makes it sound like Christopher Rufo is just this random person that we should

care what he thinks. Don't you think it might be useful for readers to know who this guy is? Like, why should this random guy from the Manhattan Institute? Why should anybody care what he thinks about this lady's old tweets? Or maybe it'd be great context for readers to have that the New York Times has actually mentioned Christopher Rufo quite a few times during their breathless recent coverage of Claudine Gay's tenure at Harvard University, which led to their coverage. Or the fact that Christopher Rufo specifically said that it would be important for him to get pickup on that story from the New York

Times specifically to launder the fact that it was an attack coming from the right wing to make it seem like a more left wing or moderate attack. Again, I don't know this because I'm some media savvy person. I know this because I can read and Christopher Rufo says it. over and over and over again in plain unambiguous terms. And the New York Times just pretends like that is not the case. When Rufo is not even pretending, just yesterday he tweeted out the New York Times story about the NPR CEO, Catherine Marr, saying, the New York Times is directly quoting the NPR tweets I dug up over the last 24 hours.

We are driving the narrative. If you dream about sampling nuts with Kamala Harris, we will make sure America hears about it. So he's not even pretending that he's not trying to drive this narrative. And my question is, why is the New York Times allowing this? Why is the New York Times decided that this one person gets to dictate their editorial coverage? Anil Dash put it very well on threads. He wrote, The New York Times explicitly lets its editorial decisions be made by Chris Rufo,

even as he admits it's an intentional bad faith campaign. The story here is nothing to do with NPR. It's the Times not caring that it's getting gamed with what it chooses to emphasize. An exercise. Find media executive faces criticism over supporting fascist causes in their coverage. You won't because they think it's news when Rufo says it, not when you or I do. Now, I absolutely agree with him for the most part. But here's the thing. I don't know if I would say that the New York Times is getting gamed here. You know, you get gamed once or twice.

Maybe you got gamed, but you get gamed three, four, five times, like the New York Times. Maybe you weren't getting gamed. maybe your teammates in the same game, I don't know. And you'll notice that so far it's been Claudine Gay, a black woman, and Kasper and Marr, a white woman. Isn't it interesting that Rufo keeps choosing people who are traditionally marginalized women and black women as his targets? And you know what that reminds me of? Gamergate. So here's the reason that I want to talk about this. If you listen to our series, Internet Hate Machine that we did with Cool Zone Media, you know that we talk and think a lot about Gamergate and the online harassment

campaigns against black women that predated GamerGate and how they were really weaponized for specific political gain. It is one of my deepest angers that the powers that be evidently learned nothing from any of that. And I would argue that it is in part because the original targets were black women. So everybody was just sort of like, oh, who cares? And we missed the window to actually learn anything or take anything away from it. But this is Gamergate. This is disingenuously whipping people up into a frenzy and weaponizing that to meet some political end. It is making existence in civic and public life impossible for women, and then counting on media to write about it neutrally as opposed to honestly.

These are the exact same tactics. You know, Gamergate was 10 years ago, and people with power and institutions have not learned a thing from it. Nobody is served by the internet becoming a never-ending barrage of Gamergate tactics except the reactionaries and extremists who use those tactics to ensure that they and they alone get to determine who gets to be in public and civic and political life. We deserve so much better, and we deserve a media that has the balls to tell the truth about it, instead of just helping them along.

In 2024, you need to understand how to write about it when actors are not working in good faith. You cannot let provocateurs write the playbook. You need to be helping the public understand the landscape and the players which I acknowledge that can be hard, can be complicated. Public radio veteran and civic tech professional in North Carolina, Melody Kramer, actually has built tools to do this at a hyper-local level. She writes, publics, radios, libraries, institutions, governments, non-profit websites, need a strategy for when people are not acting in good faith.

We've been testing out various ways to approach this at the hyper-local civic blog I helped run. One is, we call people out. Two is, we provide a ton of context for bad actors. Three, we use humor, stickers, and all sorts of in-person stuff. In short, we're priming people to understand the context and players almost constantly. We aren't neutral. Neutrality gives a platform to people who don't operate in good faith, and they weaponize objectivity and neutrality.

We make clear what our point of view is, and we back it up with loads of evidence. I've been using it as my testing ground over the past two years, and it seems to be working in all the ways we measure. We're all volunteers who care a lot about North Carolina. And I just got to say, like, if I sound tired and over this, it's because I am. I am so sick of this. And like I said already, Senator Ted Cruz is renewing calls for NPR to be defunded. Senator Marcia Blackburn has already said that she's planning to propose new legislative action

that would threaten to cut National Public Radio's federal funding. We're spending all of this energy, time, and oxygen on this disingenuous panic over nothing when we could be working on any number of the real issues facing us as a country. Heck, we could be working seriously and meaningfully toward having people have more faith and trust in journalism. But we aren't doing any of that because we're too busy talking about this whipped up panic over nothing. And it just feels like for the women and the black women in particular who went through Gamergate as targets, they just did so for nothing if institutions have not learned by now how to respond to this kind of. kind of thing when it happens. And honestly, we should not have to be collateral damage to extremists

gunning for more political influence over our civic and public institutions. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our merch store at tangoody.com slash store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangooty.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoity.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Edited by Joey Pat. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.

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