This guy smells like a grifter in the making. He basically tried to get fired so he could say he was canceled by liberals and when NPR didn’t fire him, he quit and said he was cancelled anyway. It’s the exact same thing that grifter Bari Weiss did when she was at The NY Times.
Also, there seems to be a coordinated smear campaign to besmirch NPR’s CEO. People were taking clips of her out of context and trying to make a scandal where none existed. (She used to be at Wikipedia and she gave some talks where she basically said Wikipedia, specifically, is less about “truth” than “verifiability.” As in, when editing, cite a source rather than assume you are a source of truth. You can see how some selectively edited clips of those speeches can make someone sound like they aren’t worried about facts.)
Not 👏 all 👏 viewpoints 👏 are 👏 equally 👏 valid 👏 you 👏 asshole 👏.
Berliner has that pathological need of Conservatives to pretend they're so persecuted, and whatever else you might think about Inskeep, he does a pretty good job of breaking Berliner down here.
Inskeep is Morning Edition, Kelly is ATC. I just searched NPR’s website for genocide and Morning Edition, at least, has covered it as such. I found other stories discussing the claims that Israel is conducting genocide and some of them would’ve had to appear on ATC, even if Mary Louise Kelly didn’t write the stories (as a host, she would primarily do interviews, not write stories).
It's the same reason journalists always say "alleged killer" even when the person livestreams themselves committing murder. Genocide is an allegation that the UN has made three times in history since it was defined in 1948.
He's hosted Weekend All Things Considered, but yes Morning Edition isn't any better.
They discuss genocide only in so far as they need to to describe the "far" left's protest and use of that language, their own language still qualifies those terms in a way that it's some kind of open question still rather than a material reality that we see unfolding in front of us.
They still use language like "Israel Hamas War" when describing what's happening in Gaza and other language that reinforces the implication that this is some how two nation states fighting it out, when the reality is that it's a complete slaughter of people in a territory that Israel controls utterly. A territory that the US needs to air drop aid into, as if the Israeli state is some hostile nation that we ourselves are at war with.
Note Kelly beginning this interview by asking if the murder of these aid workers is an "inflection point", this question coming when at the time of this interview* 30,000 civilians* had already been murdered and Gaza was in ruins. This passive voice on topics like Israel is what I'm talking when I say this kind of programing is really problematic to have on NPR.
Haas suggests we need to keep supplying Israel with weapons "depending upon how they are used" as if the US can be depended upon to take action if Israel decides to use them on the Gaza populace, as if they aren't right now using US supplied weapons to kill civilians. The most that Kelly does to push back on how ineffective and empty a solution this is is to raise a proverbial eyebrow and then move on. Kelly may as well be on valium with how breezy and accepting she is of the narrative Haas is suggesting.