Not many years ago I was the Chief of Media Relations and senior spokesman for a US military command located outside of the US. It was my practice to arrange media visits to our primary training areas when there was particularly cool training scheduled or when a new weapon system was introduced into the theater.
Those media days were popular with the resident international media and bureau media located in nearby countries. I always invited the NPR correspondent who was headquartered in the capital city of a nearby country — and she would almost always come over the day. She had exactly the same access to the same events as the rest of the media but somehow, her stories always came out differently from those filed by everyone else…it was almost as if she had gone to a different event than the one I had hosted.
Still, I liked this woman and we became friends so I felt free to tease her when she came to my house for dinner with my family & me…One evening at dinner I hit upon a nickname for NPR: Neo-Socialist People’s Radio, and I tried it on her…boy, what a reaction! She became irate…I knew I had hit a nerve.
As the years in that assignment rolled on I began to see that my joke had substance…this reporter and her main news desk routinely sought ways to diminish the work of our command while at the same time airing positive reports on nations that oppose the US presence in the area. When I raised the notion with her that either she or NPR were biased she became extremely defensive and indicated that she thought I was a propagandist for the military and a scare-monger regarding the nations that opposed our presence in the region.
Nothing I’ve heard on NPR or seen on PBS in the years since my return to the States persuades me that NPR should be called anything except Neo-Socialist People’s Radio.
