{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "description": "I've never been a fan of NPR in any meaningful sense — I trust their reporting, find it credible and reliable but have never become attached to its more lauded shows and the hosts attached to them. Steve Oney does a magnificent, engaging and thorough job of reporting the organization's raucous early days, its reporting missteps, scandals and successes. While I may not be deeply invested in NPR, I find it — as an institution — to be trustworthy and an essential part of the public discourse. It's fair-minded, reliable and fallible, as any human organization is going to be. Oney manages to make this retelling both fair minded without becoming clinical. I was never aware of much of this history — the drug use, efforts to unionize, the reckless spending of CEO Frank Mankiewicz, the Juan Williams firing and on and on. I am aware of the ebb and flow of conservative efforts to cut funding to NPR, PBS and the CPB. Reagan tried it and failed, Mitt Romney advocated for it and the altogether more fascistic, imbecilic and incompetent Trump administration seeks to do the same. They dislike NPR because they accuse it of having a liberal bias which is, at most, a bit of a tilt. A bent? Reality has a liberal bent and today's conservatives are often at war with reality. We're lucky to have NPR, we should fight for its continued survival, particularly when we already underfund public institutions like it and have managed to gut journalism as an industry writ large. : Reagan's presidency was an abject failure with bad policy, scandal and consequences we're still living with today. One of the worst modern presidents. Truly. : See the at war with reality bit and the epistemological crisis we currently find ourselves in.",
  "path": "/reading/books/9781451656091/on-air",
  "publishedAt": "2025-05-17T00:00:00Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:sttgf52vkk46f6yuknvqxvgh/site.standard.publication/self",
  "tags": [
    "journalism",
    "politics",
    "history",
    "nonfiction"
  ],
  "title": "On Air"
}