… and also destroying the jobs of thousands of journalists and other members of The Toiling Masses in the MSM.

Oh wait. That last is being caused by millions of people now ignoring the MSM they used to read, watch and listen to.

The title of this post is not from the Babylon Bee, whose writers must often wonder if they can continue to satirise the real world. It is an actual headline from Britain’s Independent newspaper.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, not just because of the increasing uselessness and insanity and sweaty desperation of dying media companies, but also because this sort of shit is fed to them by NGO’s like Covering Climate Now (CCN) – and I already covered the disgusting Amnesty International yesterday:

The group provides advice to reporters on all beats to not only insert a “climate crisis” narrative into every beat, but also how to cover the topic. This includes telling journalists not to platform what it calls “denialists,” which includes anyone who “ridicules” climate activists or suggests that climate change is not producing a global emergency.

The site is full of tips on what language to use, how to write headlines and suggested stories for journalists to cover, all in line with an anti-fossil fuel message. It suggests avoiding “fake experts.” To determine the value of experts a reporter might interview, CCN points them to the activist website DeSmog, which demonizes anyone, even those on the left, who in any way dispute the “climate crisis” narrative.

Basically CCN is writing the stories for the lazy bastard “journalists”, encouraging them to make statements attributing “extreme weather” to climate change, even in the absence of any data to support the claims.

“Even in the absence of explicit attribution data, it’s accurate to say that climate change is making extreme weather more common and more severe,” CCN tells its partnered media organizations. It then provides tips for language journalists can use to blame “extreme weather” on climate change for any story.

Even ones about obscure subjects like Indonesian trans prostitutes. CCN is also not some tiny group:

The Guardian, NPR and The Conversation are among the hundreds of media outlets associated with or listed as partners…Covering Climate Now boasts partnerships with hundreds of major media outlets across the world. 

Even NPR (National Public Radio), America’s public broadcasting equivalent of RNZ? Yes indeed says none other than a twenty five year veteran journalist, Uri Berliner, who is still working there and who pins their decline to the rise of Trump (because of course):

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency. . .

Veered? What he goes on to describe is a lot more than “veered”, starting with the Trump-Russia Collusion bullshit…

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff. Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming. 

… to the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop four years later, on which subject NPR was so outraged about that it responded with an official statement:

“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

So take that, darlings. Your credentialed and informed betters have merely made yet another editorial decision about the newsworthiness of a story, based purely on their sharp noses that can detect what’s real and what’s fake news – and nothing at all to do with political partisanship:

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump. 

Berliner has more examples at the link, plus other non-news examples of the rot inside NPR, once one of America’s more respected MSM institutions:

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.” …Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.

Hahahahahaha…. The modern Left wants to use all those weapons to destroy our society but the joke is they’re destroying their own institutions first, starting with wanting no diversity of thinking; that might lead to thinking critical of Democrat party ideas and policies:

Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.

A big part of the reason why the MSM plods on through decline to destruction is that they just can’t see themselves. Following Berliner’s article, NPR responded in full denial and double-down mode:

NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner’s assessment. 

“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” she wrote. “We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world.”

They’ve read Nineteen Eighty Four, yes? But as an instruction manual:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.“

When I lived in America in the 1990’s I religiously listened to “Morning Edition” at the start of the day and “All Things Considered” at the end, as well as watching the McNeill/Lehrer Newshour every Friday on PBS, the TV arm of the outfit. Reading Berliner it seems he still lives in those times, with sorrow over the present in respect of NPR’s past. However, over at Powerline, Steven Hayward, has a different perspective on those times:

[W]ith only one exception,* every experience I had appearing on an NPR show when I lived in Washington went badly, as it became clear that I had been set up or was invited in bad faith, such that I finally told any NPR bookers who called, with extreme prejudice, that I would not appear on an NPR show because they were dishonest media. And then I’d hang up.

He also quotes a 1993 article by one Glenn Garvin, How Do I Hate NPR? Let Me Count the Ways, which I somehow missed despite it being published in the Chicago Reader, of which I was aware. His description of his NPR-fanatical sister (and who constant surprise at the world not matching NPR’s claims) is amusing: her statement to him that “I’d rather get my news from people who think like me.” being the forerunner of those Social Media algorithms so dreaded and decried by MSM defenders today. Although I wasn’t that bad, his descriptions certainly match the pre-Internet days that contributed to my blissful naivety as I listened to and respected NPR but not Rush Limbaugh:

It’s not that the network’s editorial brain trust meets each morning to plot the day’s campaign to rid America of Republican taint. It’s that the newsroom is composed almost entirely of like-minded people who share one another’s major philosophical precepts…. Their thinking is apparent in both what they report and their approach to it. They believe that government is the fundamental agent of change, that government can and should solve most problems. They believe most of those solutions involve spending large sums of money. They believe that taxes are not only an appropriate way of raising money, but an important social responsibility. They believe that, although individuals cannot always be trusted to make correct choices, bureaucrats usually can.

As goes Radio New Zealand, the BBC, the ABC in Australia, plus the overwhelming majority of private MSM entities supposedly controlled by Right-Wingers, since the owners are, by definition, capitalists and therefore those MSM sites must be Right-Wing in their news coverage. That last claim I’ve seen many times over the years on Lefty blogs even in the face of one’s eyes and ears seeing and hearing that NPR’s coverage of the Russian Collusion and Hunter Biden laptop stories, plus all the rest, was the same as that of the NYT, Washington Post, LA Times, and the rest.

So the problem described by Berliner has actually been around for at least three decades. The only difference now is that they’ve become even more Left-Wing, with “political correctness” having morphed into the far more toxic “Woke” philosophy of bottomless awareness of oppressor and oppressed dialectics on all issues, and their beloved State now gleefully being encouraged by the likes of NPR to solve the “problem” of Right-wing opposition.