NPR Doesn’t Care About the Environment Either

The right has been trying to defund NPR and PBS for years, arguing the government should not be supporting their “partisan” perspectives. And while they continue to receive a little federal funding, the declining percentage has meant increased fealty to their corporate sponsors. Starting in the early 2000s, it was clear that NPR was starting to move toward the middle, with more stories reported from a conservative perspective, more conservative voices and less leftist presence on the airwaves. That has only worsened over time, at least to an old leftist like me, and now they have made their latest parry in the struggle to undermine any progressive voice in American mainstream media, cutting their staff to a single part-time reporter on climate change (from three full-time reporters and an editor). Not surprisingly, we are already seeing a decline in that coverage this year and it should only get worse going forward.

The good news is that most news on climate change is bad news, and we can thus save ourselves from the increasingly depressing reality that we have all but killed the planet. Better to ignore the crisis and instead focus on the lives of the rich and famous, our favorite sports team and the continued inability of our politicians to do much beyond calling each other names.