re: #279 Charles Johnson

That’s like saying I’d be blameless if I let someone post Milo Yiannopoulos articles on LGF. Hey, I didn’t actually produce them, did I?

I recognize I’m being tendentious about this, but with reason. Please hear me out:

NPR is a program production entity. It is a nonprofit based in Washington that produces and distributes programs such as “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and “Weekend Edition.” It also co-produces and distributes a few other shows to member stations, such as “1A” and “Wait, Wait!” And it produces the Tiny Desk Concerts, for which we are all grateful.

NPR owns no radio stations. It does not and cannot exert control over what programming is carried by its hundreds of member stations, which are free to take programs from NPR or from its competitors. It has its own code of editorial standards and journalistic ethics, which it can enforce only on the programs that it produces, not on those produced by local stations or especially by NPR’s competitors.

PRI is one of those competitors. It has been owned by Boston’s WGBH for a few years now. It used to be based in Minnesota but is now based in Boston. It co-produces “The World” with the BBC and offers it to other public radio stations.

Other such competitors include APM, which produces “Marketplace,” and Pacifica, which distributes “Democracy Now!” (but no longer produces it, because everything that has to do with Pacifica is extremely complicated.)

Your local public radio station (KPCC, I’m guessing, in Charles’ case) is not “NPR.” Even if it brands itself as “Your NPR News Station,” it’s still not “NPR.” Only NPR is “NPR,” and it does not produce the show that carried the interview with Jim Hoft.

Blaming NPR for the Hoft interview because you heard it on KPCC, which bought the show from PRI, is like blaming Kellogg’s for whatever was in your General Mills Cheerios, just because they were next to the Froot Loops on the cereal shelf at Vons. Every local public radio station has its own different cereal shelf. Mine happens not to even carry “The World.” It’s like complaining to Charles about a Milo interview because some other blogger posted links to both Milo and LGF in the same post.

(And yes, I realize that “NPR” has become a generic term for “public radio,” which is a source of huge frustration for lots of people in the public radio industry, but we are fact-based people here, dammit, and just because “NPR” is common shorthand for “public radio” doesn’t mean NPR put Jim Hoft on the air any more than it means Kellogg’s made the Cheerios in my bowl.)

The blame here applies to WGBH, to the BBC and to PRI. You could make a case for extending it to KPCC or whatever local radio station is broadcasting “The World.” There are plenty of valid reasons to complain about what NPR itself does. This is not one of them.