Tag: npr

Does @NPR not read @NPR when it comes to gun violence?

NPR, 2013 (“Rate Of U.S. Gun Violence Has Fallen Since 1993, Study Says”):

“Firearm-related homicides dropped from 18,253 homicides in 1993 to 11,101 in 2011,” according to a report by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, “and nonfatal firearm crimes dropped from 1.5 million victimizations in 1993 to 467,300 in 2011.

There were seven gun homicides per 100,000 people in 1993, the Pew Research Center study says, which dropped to 3.6 gun deaths in 2010. The study relied in part on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

NPR, 2015 (“What Is The Psychic Toll Of Gun Violence?”):

While 30,000 people a year in the U.S. die from gun violence, [Georgetown University psychiatry professor Liza] Gold noted, two-thirds of those commit suicide. Of the remaining 10,000, a full 90 percent lose their lives in acts of violence from someone known to them.

Continue reading Does @NPR not read @NPR when it comes to gun violence?

Bernie Sanders gets quizzed on his loyalty to America by… NPR?

This is not Blue-on-Blue.  This is someone who needs to retire.  And no, I don’t actually mean Bernie Sanders.

Diane Rehm [NPR]: Senator, you have dual citizenship with Israel.

Bernie Sanders: Well, no I do not have dual citizenship with Israel. I’m an American. I don’t know where that question came from. I am an American citizen, and I have visited Israel on a couple of occasions. No, I’m an American citizen, period.

Continue reading Bernie Sanders gets quizzed on his loyalty to America by… NPR?

NPR’s Lead Editor for Politics unaware that Evangelicals support Israel.

If this doesn’t prove to certain people that NPR lives in its own little world, probably nothing will.

israel

“Israel is the biggest applause line at an evangelical Christian university?” …asks the “Lead Editor for Politics and Digital Audience” for National Public Radio.  I actually don’t want to whale too badly on Domenico Montanaro: for all I know he’s kind to his mother, helps old ladies across the street, and mentors orphans. But this is a remarkably pure example of what the Left used to call ‘epistemic closure,’ before they realized that we could throw that comment right back at them, and with considerably greater impact. Continue reading NPR’s Lead Editor for Politics unaware that Evangelicals support Israel.

This is actually a pretty good look at next year’s most vulnerable governors.

NPR didn’t do anything too sneaky-like, here. The list is balanced: Malloy in CT & Quinn in IL for the Democrats; Corbett in PA, LePage in ME, and Scott in FL for the Republicans.  It’s also pretty realistic; once you get past these guys the probabilities start going way down… with one caveat.  That would be Lincoln Chafee, in RI.  The guy may not even make it out of the Democratic primary alive (yup, he switched parties); and if he does Chafee’s numbers in a three-way race are awful.  They’re so bad, in fact, that this might be why NPR left him off of the list: this was a list of vulnerable Governors, not dead men walking.

Or maybe it’s just that NPR has its little ways, after all.  Or must have its private victories…

Moe Lane

PS: For some reason, I was under the impression that Charlie Crist had actually declared that he was running for Governor of FL on the Democratic ticket.  This has not actually happened yet, though; and I wonder why that is. And whether he’s getting a certain amount of resistance to the notion, behind the scenes.

Tweet of the day, Oh, Yeah: #NPR Can Kiss My Blindingly-White Irish Tuchus edition.

For stuff like this, of course.

Continue reading Tweet of the day, Oh, Yeah: #NPR Can Kiss My Blindingly-White Irish Tuchus edition.

NPR tries, fails, to scaremonger on air traffic controller sequester woes.

Quick summary of this NPR interview: NPR hates the sequester, and brought in a spokeswoman from a local small airport to scaremonger about it by talking about the horrible, horrible loss of – thanks to the sequester – small airport air traffic controllers (ATCs).  Small problem: lots of airports don’t actually use ATCs.  In fact, the aforementioned spokeswoman’s own airport doesn’t have 24-hour coverage.  And… most of that airport’s heavy traffic takes place outside of ATC-coverage hours.  Seriously, that’s what she said:

I’d like to point out that we don’t have 24-hour tower coverage here currently. Those air traffic controllers are only directing traffic between 8 am to 8 pm seven days a week. And most of our heavy traffic is outside of those hours.

Matt Welch* (via Instapundit) had a lot of fun with this article generally, but I’d like to drill down on this one point, in order to ask a question: if heavy traffic is largely happening outside of existing coverage hours, why doesn’t the airport shift its ATC coverage hours?  Is it because the heavy traffic will shift itself, in order to avoid the ATCs? Continue reading NPR tries, fails, to scaremonger on air traffic controller sequester woes.

#rsrh NPR earns some style points. #ows

Background: former NPR host Lisa Simone decided to become a spokeswoman for Occupy Washington.  Shocking, I know; and also a violation of NPR’s own code of conduct.  So NPR… fired Lisa Simone.

Shocking, I know.

Now, normally I’d meanly speculate on just why NPR jumped on this, but then I read this sentence:

The official who fired Simeone reportedly did so over the phone and read NPR’s ethics code to her during the call.

Reading out the ethics code to the person that you’re firing over the phone?  Just so that they know how and why the messed up?  That is worth maybe a little forbearance.  Positive reinforcement, and all that.

#rsrh NPR needs better producers.

Or perhaps just ones with functional consciences.  Short version: not only did NPR apparently confuse Michelle Malkin with Eric Holder (I guess that all non-whites look alike to them) when it came to Birtherism and secret Muslims; they expanded the bit to make fun of her extended family, at a time when her family is a little busy right now trying to locate a family member who has been missing for several weeks*.  The first bit is ‘merely’ one more sloppy bit of research and execution, researched and executed by people who are neither as intelligent nor creative as they think that they are.  But the second bit?  That’s just trash behavior.

I don’t like funding trash behavior.

Moe Lane

*For those trying to play the “They didn’t know!” card: two minutes of research on the Internet would have revealed this, given that Michelle has been burning up the Internet trying to find her cousin.  Although I suppose that it might make people feel better if it turns out that NPR is merely incompetent, not cruelly callous to other people’s suffering.

NPR’s Ron Schiller: Ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray.

This is, after all, what writer Neal Stephenson calls “The Age of Scrutiny:” there is no such thing as a private conversation or opinion any more.  Like that fact or hate it, but you must accept it: too many cameras, too many people who can afford them, and data storage just gets cheaper and cheaper.  It is also an age that has elevated hypocrisy to the first rank of sins; better by far to be a forthrightly unpleasant person in public than to be one who is unpleasant in private, but who never acts on it in public.  Combine the two, and hi-jinks ensue.

Continue reading NPR’s Ron Schiller: Ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray.

Voting with my pocketbook: Arthur edition.

Via Glenn Reynolds, ladies and gentlemen: your tax dollars at… actually, “waste” doesn’t have the right connotation of “bizarrely surreal.”  Essentially, Democratic legislators have mainstreamed the antiwar Left’s Giant Puppet People by bringing the cartoon aardvark Arthur to a budget discussion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCb2YngpCDM

Now, here’s the thing: I try to regulate what my kids watch.  I’m assisted in this by the fact that my wife is, frankly, too cheap to pay for cable; so we buy and rent videos.  Arthur was on our list of stuff to maybe buy when the kids were older; it is abruptly no longer on that list.  It’s nothing personal, but if the Other Side is going to be using cultural icons as partisan weapons then it’s perfectly acceptable for me to respond appropriately.

Moe Lane (crosspost) Continue reading Voting with my pocketbook: Arthur edition.