NPR’s Fresh Air lived down to its reputation as a Trump-hating leftist bubble on Wednesday as they discussed their hero Jimmy Kimmel and their presidential hate object on freedom of expression. Host Terry Gross brought on former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron and New York Times legal reporter Adam Liptak. It took Baron three sentences to compare Kimmel’s brief suspension to the Army-McCarthy hearings, as if anyone said Kimmel was a Soviet spy.
MARTY BARON: Well, it was very moving, very emotional and, I think, very effective. I really think that this could end up being an extraordinarily important moment in the history of the country. And you know, I think back to the 1950s, actually. It recalled for me the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, when Joseph Welch was representing the U.S. Army. He told Senator Joseph McCarthy, have you no decency, sir? And that really proved to be a turning point when the country turned against McCarthy and his incredibly malicious behavior.
Baron touted Kimmel as a “counterweight” and “corrective,” that his returning monologue “was highly effective and effective in a way that traditional debate hasn't been.” There was no acknowledgement of Kimmel's blatant lying about Charlie Kirk's killer being a Trump supporter.
Then Gross made it funnier, quoting Brian Stelter about objectivity in broadcasting:
GROSS: I want to quote something that Brian Stelter, who is CNN's chief media correspondent, wrote in his newsletter about Nexstar and Sinclair, the two broadcast owners that are not broadcasting Kimmel. Stelter wrote, (reading) those station owners, Nexstar and Sinclair, have positioned themselves as Trump administration allies, leading public interest groups to raise concerns about the objectivity of the news coverage coming from those stations.
CNN is going to lecture about “objectivity of the news coverage?” The letters “ROFLMAO” come to mind.
Then Baron returned to Jim Acosta soapbox routine on the First Amendment, that journalists can trash Trump as Hitler, but the real offense is Trump using his rights to trash them as Fake News:
BARON: You know, Trump's been going after the press since he launched his campaign for the presidency in 2015, and he hasn't stopped. He's denigrated. He's demonized. He's actually dehumanized the press thousands of times. And he's trying to extinguish an independent press in this country.
And really, the press was the canary in the coal mine. The threat to the free press, it was really an omen of a threat to free speech by everybody - by ordinary individuals, by lawyers, by scientists, scholars, students - you know, everybody. You know, the press is often the first target of leaders who aspire to authoritarian powers, and I think that's been the case with Trump.
Denigrated, demonized, dehumanized – isn’t that what journalists en masse have done to Trump? Why do they fail to see that they exemplify what they protest? They haven't tried to extinguish Trump's political career, bankrupt him, and put him in jail? That he wants to Kill Democracy In Darkness?
And naturally, NPR & Co. don’t talk about the leftist celebration of deplatforming Trump and many other conservatives. To them, it’s only the “free press” blasting Trump that matters, not by “ordinary individuals.” Or maybe conservatives are dismissed as more evil and undeserving of free speech than the ordinary person.
PS: Baron also complained about Skydance picking Kenneth Weinstein as an ombudsman: "It also agreed to have a so-called ombudsman. And it has now named that ombudsman, who came from a very conservative, far-right organization called the Hudson Institute - someone who doesn't really have experience in journalism at all. And he will now be the ombudsman at CBS."
You can dismiss the "far right" business, the way Baron would dismiss describing his old haunts at The Post and The Boston Globe as "far left." But it's false to say he doesn't have any experience with journalism. Weinstein at one time chaired the Broadcasting Board of Governors, now called the United States Agency for Global Media, which is journalism experience.
