On Sunday night, NPR’s weekend All Things Considered anchor Michel Martin had a long eight-minute interview with pro-basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who’s recently best known for popping off with radical leftist opinions for Time magazine’s website.
Martin went looking for the legend to trash another legend, Michael Jordan, for failing to get behind the black Democrat challenging conservative Sen. Jesse Helms in 1990, who Martin announced had “very retrograde” attitudes on race:
National Public Radio is being hailed for its commitment to diversity in its latest promotion of anchors and producers. With NPR evening anchor Melissa Block departing, they promoted Kelly McEvers and Ari Shapiro to work alongside Robert Siegel and Audie Cornish on the nightly newscast All Things Considered. Michel Martin will take over hosting the show on weekends.
Cornish and Martin are black, and Shapiro is gay. “That leaves Siegel as the only straight white dude delivering the news on ATC,” explained Andrew Beaujon at Washingtonian magazine.
Despite the fact that National Public Radio is a publicly supported network, its long-term financial struggles claimed another casualty on Tuesday: Tell Me More, a program “expressly designed to have a primary appeal for African-American listeners and other people of color” will air its last episode on Friday, August 1.
The move will leave 28 people unemployed, and program host Michel Martin admitted to having “scar tissue” before releasing a statement in which she asserted: “I hoped we could have found a way to save the show, but NPR news management has assured me that the mission that we’ve undertaken will continue in new ways, and I’m sticking around be a part of making that happen.”
On NPR’s race-matters talk show “Tell Me More” on Monday, host Michel Martin discussed the Donald Sterling scandal with New York Times sports columnist William Rhoden, announcing he had written the book "Forty Million Dollar Slave: The Rise, Fall, And Redemption Of The Black Athlete."
Rhoden used the Sterling scandal to thump a tub for racial quotas in journalism. He claimed that every time there’s not a black journalist in a newsroom or a stadium press box, that news outlet or media elite is Donald Sterling-level racist: [MP3 audio here.]
NPR’s afternoon talk show “Tell Me More” spent 17 minutes on Thursday on a cover story in The Nation entitled “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars” by Michelle Goldberg, a contributor to The Daily Beast. They called it "Mean Girls Online."
Host Michel Martin interviewed four feminist radicals about nasty online fighting along racial lines, and even "transphobic " lines. The uber-feminist actress Martha Plimpton (a star on Fox's sitcom "Raising Hope") hilariously came under attack because promoting a pro-abortion event called "A Night of a Thousand Vaginas" was cruel to "trans men" who don't have vaginas:
Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman said something Thursday that though true is destined to shock many Americans.
Speaking on NPR, Freeman said Barack Obama is "not America's first black president. He's America's first mixed-race president" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
National Public Radio awarded almost 23 minutes to “Gay Pride Month” on the afternoon talk show Tell Me More, including 13 minutes to a segment promoting gay parenting that featured Marcus Mabry of The New York Times (formerly of Newsweek).
But first came almost ten minutes devoted to the leftist author Linda Hirshman and her new book Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, How a Despised Minority Pushed Back, Beat Death, Found Love and Changed America for Everyone. Hirshman offered a glowing tribute to “Radical Faeries” founder Harry Hay and even said his background in the Communist Party gave him an “oppositional consciousness” that was crucial to the gay revolution:
NPR's afternoon talk show Tell Me More promoted the left-wing Take Back the American Dream conference on Tuesday by granting an almost ten-minute interview to ultraliberal Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Conference, who blurted out "Koch brothers" every two minutes.
"This week, progressive activists are meeting in Washington, D.C. with the goal of answering what they see as the corrupting influence of money with the power of numbers," Martin announced. "Organizers of the Take Back the American Dream conference are hoping to energize the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party ahead of the 2012 election." Martin asked Eliison why they are faced with the mystery that this is a close election, as if Obama should be far ahead at this point despite the very sluggish economy: