NPR “wokeness debate” shows Gamergate never ended

Extremists like Chris Rufo are setting their sites on NPR, and the New York Times is helping them do it. Again.

The Real Story Behind NPR’s Current Problems: https://slate.com/business/2024/04/npr-diversity-public-broadcasting-radio.html

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Toad, and this
is There Are No Girls on the Internet. This is
There No Girls on the Internet, where we explore the
intersection of identity, technology and social media. And today I

(00:24):
want to talk about what's going on with NPR National
Public Radio, or honestly, I guess i'ld say that I
don't really want to talk about it. If anything, I
kind of don't want to. This is the kind of
story that I would probably be tuning out. But it's
been kind of a one two punch with this NPR
story that dovetails with some of the issues that we've
talked a lot about here on There are No Girls

(00:44):
on the Internet, and I also want to connect them
to some larger tech lessons that folks clearly have not learned.
So let's get into it. Yuri Berliner, who had been
NPR's senior business editor up until recently, published a piece
in Free Press basically calling out the fact that audiences
have lost trust in National Public Radio or NPR as

(01:05):
an institution, and basically, Berliner blames wokeness and DEI for
this larger distrust in journalism. More broadly, in his piece,
he argues that NPR used to be really balanced and
fair and curious, but, as he puts it, quote in
recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen
to NPR or read its coverage online find something different,

(01:28):
the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the
US population. If you're conservative, you will read this and say, duh,
it's always been this way, but it hasn't. So Berliner
paints twenty eleven as this rosy golden age of trust
at NPR, you know, before things like DEI and wokeness
ruined everything. He writes, an open minded spirit no longer

(01:50):
exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an
audience that reflects America. So Berlinard argues that Trump really
changed a lot of NPR's culture and trust and standards.
He uses things like NPR not really reporting on the
Hunter Biden laptop story and not reporting more on the
COVID lab leak theory. He uses these as examples that

(02:14):
show that since the rise of Trump, NPR is basically
like in the bag for the Democratic Party. He also
talks about how in twenty twenty, when many of us
were having like a national conversation about race, NPR's former CEO,
John Lansing published a piece that prompted staffers to really
do some self analysis in their own roles in things
like systemic racial issues. So apparently NPR's CEO writing a

(02:37):
piece suggesting that NPR staff you know, think critically about
their own biases and the way they might impact their reporting.
Rather than that being just like thoughtful guidance for anyone
whose job it is to help people understand the world
around them. Berliner acts like this was a terrible sign
of wokeness run amok quote, and we were told that
NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language,

(03:01):
the CEO said that 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 you bring to our work and interactions, and we
must commit ourselves, body and soul to profound changes in
ourselves and our institutions. He declared that diversity on our
staff and in our audience was the overriding mission. The

(03:22):
quote north star of the organization. Phrases like that's part
of the north Star became part of meetings and more
casual conversation. Now, y'all, do not really believe that the
former CEO of NPR said that diversity was now the
most important mission of NPR, more important than any other

(03:43):
part of NPR. Y'all don't actually believe that, do you? You
obviously don't because he didn't say it. I actually went
back and read the piece that Berliner is referring to.
It never even suggests anything of the sort. It is
the most basic, toothless, like we care about diversity, ya
diversity message that you can imagine. But Berliner says that
the CEO basically said that diversity now matters more than

(04:05):
our journalism, which he just flat out never said that,
just like doesn't appear in that piece. Berlinard goes on
to complain about what our frankly pretty fairly humdrum inclusion
efforts that NPR enacted in twenty twenty, things like tracking
the makeup of their podcast listenership and guests. Honestly, these
are things that I kind of can't believe that NPR

(04:26):
did not have in place before twenty twenty. That is
how standard these practices are like even the Shoe String
startup podcast that I work for do and always have
done this. It is a very common thing. Berliner in
his piece he makes it sound like this is like
the identity police, grilling everybody about their race and ethnicity

(04:47):
and identity, rather than just having it be something that
makes sure that your guests aren't like, oops, all white
men talking about different issues. Right. So NPR also got
some funding to do work highlighting specific underrepresented groups through
things like affinity groups for staff like Jewish NPR staffers,
or women, gender expansive and transgender people in technology throughout

(05:08):
public media. Right, And what Berliner does in his piece
is basically just assume that all of this is like progressivist,
all of this is like synonymous with the Democratic Party.
And this is a big gripe quote. And this I
believe is the most damaging development at NPR, the absence
of viewpoint diversity. He says that he doesn't think there
are enough Republicans working at NPR, and apparently he tried

(05:32):
to actually get a meeting with NPR's former CEO to
discuss all of this, but that meeting ever happened, which
is why he is breaking NPR's rules and publishing this
piece in free Press. So one quick note that I
feel like I have to add for context is that
he published this piece in free Press. I don't really
enjoy talking about this particular subset of like soft media

(05:55):
grifter types, because I think it quickly gets into like
a who's who of who's the worst, And these people
are all so boring that I just cannot stand to
think about them. But basically, all you need to know
about Free Press is that it is a substack media
publication run by Barry Weiss, and it's one of those
places where like nobody has principles or cares about free
speech but us, and you know, everybody who is writing

(06:18):
is like just asking questions. We honestly could do an
entire episode on Bari Weiss, But basically, you know the type.
These are not people that I would say are operating
in good faith, and their entire thing is branding themselves
as these brave free speech truth tellers who are the
only ones who think for themselves and are being punished
for it. And they continue to say that as they

(06:40):
get these huge platforms and lots of money to demonstrate
just how unlistened to they are. Again I'm being glib,
but you know the type. So it is really hard
for me to see Berliner publishing this piece in free
press as anything other than this really calculated move to
turn himself into a martyr person who is canceled for

(07:02):
telling the truth about whoa like be real? Had you
ever heard of the name Yuri Berliner before he published
this piece and everybody started talking about it exactly, So
the exact right wing conservative voices in media that you
would expect are completely lapping this piece up. And remember,
he is not sharing this piece in a vacuum. It

(07:23):
is being used as yet another data point in the
ongoing conversation about defunding NPR and sowing distrust in our
public institutions in general, like Senator Ted Cruz is renewing
calls to defund PR. And again, I think a reason
why he published this piece was to tap into that
particular ongoing conservative argument. So to me, this entire thing

(07:46):
reads like Berliner's kind of coming out party to curry
favor with a particular kind of conservative media circle. I mean,
why just retire when you can do this whole thing?
So Berliner was suspended from NPR for five days for
publishing this piece without NPR's permission, which is pretty clearly
against the rules at NPR, and then he resigned. He
blasted NPR's new CEO on the way out, saying, quote,

(08:10):
I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged
by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very
problems at NPR that I cite and my free press essay.
And honestly, I'm sure that he probably will get a
nice little booth in recognition from all the right people.
Right wing outlets are already calling him a quote whistleblower,

(08:30):
which as the host of a podcast where we talk
to real whistleblowers, women who have risked their livelihoods and
their actual safety and sometimes even their actual lives to
speak up about wrongdoing, to actually speak truth to power,
that is so offensive to me to see this white
man like white man, irked by DEI and woke, being

(08:53):
painted as a whistleblower.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Let's take a quick break.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
At here back. So, after his piece came out, fifty
NPR staffers wrote an open letter to NPR's new CEO,
Catherine Marr, who will talk about more in a moment,
demanding that she issue a public rebuke of the quote
factual inaccuracies and illisions in his piece. So right here
is where I was going to do an entire segment

(09:30):
kind of responding to and pointing out the various factual
inaccuracies in his piece. But it just kind of doesn't
even seem worth it. Like Berliner suggesting that it is
DEI efforts in media that have run amok and that
is the reason why media and institutional trust is suffering,

(09:51):
is just ridiculous, and at some level it gets really
exhausting and repetitive to keep pushing it back against this stuff.
When I was putting together the segment, I was like, Yeah,
this is just me repeating the same things I've said
already about this kind of stuff, and almost doesn't seem
worth it to keep pushing back against this stuff. You know,
it's like, why are planes falling out of the sky
black people? Why can't my kid get into Harvard black people?

(10:14):
Why don't people trust journalism black people? So after a while,
it does get a little tiring. So I'm not gonna
include the bit where I really pushed back on his claims,
but I'll just cut to the chase and tell you
what I actually think, you know that meme tweet where
it's a bird saying I feel uncomfortable when we are
not about me. I think that's kind of what's going

(10:34):
on here. I think that what Berliner is actually saying,
if you read between the lions, is I liked it
better when journalism was about white men like me. I
think he's somebody who's been in this business a long time.
He's been in this business for twenty five years. I
think in that time he has seen journalism go from
mostly white to fairly white, and I don't think he
likes it. I think that what he's actually saying reading

(10:55):
between the lines is we need to go back to
the times when this whole thing was about white men
like me. I don't want to have to compete with
the talents and interests and audience of people who are
not white men, and that is the problem. I honestly
don't think it is really that deep, and I'm kind
of surprised to see so many media outlets responding as
if he like did raise some very deep existential issues

(11:19):
and questions beyond, like why is everything no longer exclusively
about me? Like the fact that as a business editor
he clearly felt some kind of a way that the
big boss boss at NPR, like the CEO the main guy,
did not feel the need to meet with him to
discuss the gripes that he was trying to get on
this guy's calendar. And this guy was like, no, I'm good.

(11:39):
That tells me a lot, like what kind of person
feels entitled that they can just meet with the CEO
to discuss whatever their gripe is as opposed to meeting
with their direct manager or whatever. On top of Berlin
are probably not liking the fact that the CEO did
not feel the need to make time for his complaints.
When that CEO left NPR then goes and hires a
young woman to replace him, and I bet berlinerd didn't

(12:02):
like that and saw a young woman getting hired as
yet another sign of wokeness run amuck at NPR. Now,
don't get me wrong, I don't want to come off
like I am defending NPR here, because I do think
that they have some issues that are impact in audience
trust much like media and journalism, just as an institution
broadly does. Media trust is down and people are feeling

(12:24):
disillusioned with journalism as an institution. Last year, a Gallup
poll found that the thirty two percent of Americans who
say that they trust mass media quote a great deal
or a fair amount to report the news in a full,
fair and accurate way Tide Gallup's lowest historical reading, which
was previously recorded in twenty sixteen. So this distrust thing

(12:45):
is real and NPR absolutely should be grappling with it,
But blaming wokeness as the culprit just does not hold water.
Alicia Montgomery, a black woman who worked at NPR since
before Berliner worked there. She joined in nineteen ninety seven
and he joined in ninety nine, published an excellent piece
in Slate, where she now works, called the Real Story
behind NPR's Current Problems. The entire piece is worth a read.

(13:08):
We will put it in the show notes, but basically
she throws cold water on this idea that the problems
that NPR is having with audience trust is because of
black people and like too much diversity and woke. She writes,
it did take a kind of courage for Uri to
publicly criticize the organization, but it also took a lot
of the wrong type of nerve. His argument is a

(13:29):
demonstration of contemporary journalism at its worst, in which inconvenient
facts and obvious questions were ignored and the facts that
could be shaped to serve the preferred argument were inflated
in importance. So I mentioned that Berliner talks about twenty
eleven as a kind of golden age of NPR trust,
you know, the good old days before Race and Woke

(13:50):
and DEI were sort of runn am up. Alicia is
like wrong. She points out how this nostalgic view really
is revisionist and completely self serve on his part, She writes,
take a step into the way back machine into twenty
eleven Fury's so called golden age. That's the year when
senior members of the development team fell for a scam

(14:10):
set up by professional provocateur James O'Keefe. The aftermath took
them out and toppled the then CEO and President, Vivian Schiller.
It came months after the ill timed, clumsy firing of
Juan Williams, which led to senior Vice president of News
Ellen Weiss residing under pressure. Fury also leaped frogs over
a long list of contemporary fuck ups and questionable calls

(14:31):
that could explain the growing public distrust that concerns him.
There are questions about NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Tottenberg's
personal relationship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg compromising her reporting, the
departure of news chief Mike Orecis and other prominent men
in the newsroom after a wave of sexual harassment charges,
the exposure of systemic exploitation of NPR's temporary workforce, and

(14:54):
those are just the public problems. So Berlinard also claims
that a big part of NPR's down fall with the
rise of Trump, and that NPR did not or could
not fairly cover Trump because like they were in the
bag for the Democratic Party. But unsurprisingly, Alicia remembers it
very differently. She writes URI's account of the deliberate effort
to undermine Trump up to and after his election is

(15:16):
also bewilderingly incomplete, inaccurate, and skewed. For most of twenty sixteen,
many NPR journalists wore newsroom leadership that they weren't taking
Trump and the possibility of him winning seriously enough, but
top editors dismissed the chance of a Trump win, repeatedly
declaring that Americans would be revolted by this or that
outrageous thing he'd said or done. I remember one editorial

(15:38):
meeting where a white newsroom leader said that Trump's strong
poll numbers wouldn't survive his being exposed as a racist.
When a journalist of color asked whether his numbers could
be rising because of his racism, the comment was met
with silence. In another meeting, I and a couple of
other editorial leaders were encouraged to make sure that any
coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story

(15:59):
about a lie from Hillary Clinton. Another colleague asked what
to do if one candidate just lied more than the other,
another silent response. And again I feel like Berliner's claims
here about media, particularly NPR, like being too hard or
unfair on Trump, is a historical to the point of
being like a little bit gas lighting, Like when Trump won,

(16:22):
how many interviews did we all have to watch with
like economically anxious rural Trump voters that we were told
that we all needed to be listening to, to the
point where it almost became a bit of a media cliche, right,
like big city reporter goes to a rural diner to
find out what's what? Like did that not happen? Did
we dream it because I remember it, Alisha writes, when
I came back to work on Morning Edition, I saw

(16:44):
no trace of the anti Trump editorial machine that URI references.
On the contrary, people were at pains to find a
way to cover Trump's voters and his administration fairly. We
went full bore on diner guide, a trucker hat coverage,
and adopted the right label to describe people who could
accurately be called racists. The network haud our flexive need

(17:06):
to stay on good terms of people in power, and
journalists who had contacts within the administration were encouraged to
pursue those bookings. We regularly set up interviews with Republican
officials and Trump surrogate, but it was tough because NPR
always loved guests who would be insightful, honest, and perhaps
above all, polite. There were plenty of people who for
years fit that description across the partisan divide in official Washington,

(17:29):
but they were scarce in the Trump administration. We changed
the format of live political interviews, adding what we called
a level set that would be a three ish minute
after a conversation with a political operative or that's an official,
when a host and NPR reporter would try to fact
check what had just been said. So this claim that
Berliner was making that NPR was in the bag for

(17:49):
the Democrats and they did not fairly cover Trump voters
just seems wildly out of step with what somebody who
worked there said happened and what we all saw happened.
Like if you were a during that time, I don't
think you need to tell me that a lot of
media outlets were bending over backward to provide fair and
balanced coverage of Trump's campaign, And I do think it's

(18:11):
worth looking at how that decision impacted media trust. I'd
be willing to bet that coverage of Trump that was
trying so hard to stay neutral instead of presenting the
truth about what he was actually saying and doing probably
did impact audience trust and journalism. And it's not just
that Berliner doesn't think that that specific kind of bias
is worth talking about. It's that he's presenting a version

(18:32):
where that bias does not even exist and then telling
people that that is objective reality. More after a quick.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
Break, let's get right back into it.

Speaker 1 (18:58):
So probably what I have found to be the most
part in her response is when she talks about NPR's
sometimes clunky handling of race. She says, if anything that
would be the real symptom of like wokeness, run them up.
In one anecdote, she talks about how there was resistance
to covering the violent MS thirteen gang after it had
become a major talking point in Trump's anti immigrant rhetoric.

(19:20):
But this was while the gang was like murdering people
in DC, pretty close to NPR's headquarters, just miles from
where many of the staffers actually lived. She writes, I
think a lot of critics would consider that wokeness pussyfooting
around an issue because it might offend people of color.
I saw it as a low key racial bias because
MS thirteen's victims were mostly poor Central American immigrants, the

(19:42):
kind of people we didn't think our affluent white listenership
would pay attention to. So, if you want to talk
about times where politics or quote wokeness was actually dictating
coverage in a concerning way, this sounds like it would
be like a fruitful conversation to have, right, But that
is very different from what Berliner is doing calling MPR
out for, which is just like too much diversity. It

(20:03):
is such a lazy easy accusation that gets us away
from the issues that might actually be meaty or substantive.
Another example along those lines is when we were having
a national conversation about police killings, there was a sort
of side question about like, oh, well, police also kill
white people under shady circumstances too, what about that? And

(20:23):
Alicia writes that it seemed like nobody at NPR really
wanted to talk about that. She talks about how the
team at the race focused podcast Code Switch, which is
one of my favorite podcasts, was the only team with
n NPR to cover a police killing of an unarmed
white teenager named Zachary Hammond. She suspects the reason why
none of the other units within NPR covered it is
kind of political in a sense because it would have

(20:46):
complicated this dynamic of getting to smugly think of themselves
as being on the correct side of the issue. Her
entire piece is worth reading, but ultimately she gets at
this point that I want to highlight, she writes, and
that's what the core editorial problem at NPR is, and
frankly has long been an abundance of caution that often
crossed the border to cowardice. NPR culture encouraged an editorial

(21:09):
fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite
political and social thought, planting a flag there and calling
it objectivity. That would more than explain the lack of
follow up on Hunter Biden's laptop and the lab leak theory,
going full white guilt after George Floyd's murder and shifting
to indignant white impatience with racial justice now. And I

(21:30):
think anybody who reads mainstream reporting or media knows exactly
what she is referring to, right, this kind of safe,
middle of the road reporting that is going out of
its way to not give any whiff of bias, to
the point that it's not actually useful in terms of
informing an audience anymore. Like I remember, when I was
working in news media, we had to walk back calling

(21:53):
things that were objectively obviously racist racist, Like you couldn't
just call something racist. We had to bend over backward
to use these weird phrases that like evoked race but
were not the word racist. And I remember there was
a story where it was some frat and there was
a video of these members of the frat on a

(22:13):
bus where they were singing this chant about how there
would never be an N word in their frat. And
so we were writing up that story and I called
it a racist chant, and my editor was like, no, no,
we can't say it's racist, and we had to walk
it back to I think the phrase that we used
was like racially tinged, which like, what does that mean
if somebody is on camera singing about how they'll ever

(22:35):
be an N word in their frat. I feel comfortably
comfortable calling that objectively racist, but we had to be like, ooh,
it's like racially infused. Like we're not talking about chili
oil here, we're talking about race. So Berliner's free press
piece calling out NPR for being too woke is one
piece of it. But now enter our old friend, enemy

(22:56):
of the show, Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, who
openly manufactures disingenuous right wing panics using the New York Times.
He's the man that brought us the critical race theory panic,
the DEI panic, the Claudine Gay is a plagiarist panic,
And I guess now it's the CEO of NPR is
bad panic. And of course guess who is helping him

(23:18):
do this? The New York Times. So Catherine Marr was
named CEO of NPR recently. She does not have a
journalism background. She was most recently the head of Wikimedia Foundation.
So after Berliner's piece, old tweets of hers were resurfaced
by Chris Rutho. Now keep in mind these tweets were

(23:39):
things that she tweeted before she ever worked at NPR.
She wasn't a journalist when she tweeted them. It's things
like quote Donald Trump is a racist, which she tweeted
in twenty eighteen. She was photographed wearing a Biden hat
in twenty twenty, and she tweeted about this dream that
she had where she went on a road trip with
Vice President Kamala Harris and they both got nuts together
as a snack. Honestly, that is really it like pretty

(24:02):
shocking stuff, I know. So now people are coming out
of the woodwork close reading every public talk, every panel
that she's ever given, even in the years before her
tenure at NPR, to paint her in a bad light.
And this is such a familiar strategy here, to make
Catherine Mahr look foolish and embarrassing and to try to

(24:23):
make any kind of association with her look like it's
toxic because she is that foolish and that embarrassing. They
want people to be embarrassed to stick up for her,
to make sure that none of her allies publicly come
to her defense. They want NPR's leadership and board to
think that she is somebody who is too risky to
be associated with, just like Claudine Gay and crt Rufo

(24:45):
is very explicit that the point here is to make
her toxic and synonymous with negativity, even though she didn't
do anything wrong and the articles are already pouring in
helping Rufo do exactly that. Here's one headline NPR's new CEO,
Catherine Marr haunted by woke anti Trump tweets as veteran
editor claims bias. The New York Post even published a

(25:08):
piece today with the headline NPR's new CEO, who was
called out by whistleblower over pervasive left wing biased recently
purchased a two point seven million dollar NYC townhouse. The
piece talks about how she bought a three bedroom townhouse.
It is almost two thousand square feet, which like, yes, okay,

(25:29):
as someone who lives in a one bedroom shithole, that
sounds like a palace, But like, how is it news
that the CEO of NPR, who was formerly the CEO
of Wikimedia Foundation, who was married to somebody who was
formerly a lawyer at Lyft, How is it news that
she has a nice house? Like It's just so ridiculous
and disingenuous. In response to all this, an NPR spokesperson

(25:51):
said that Mar was quote not working in journalism at
the time and was exercising her First Amendment right to
express herself like any other American citizen. NPR also said
that she has upheld the network's code of ethics since
she was appointed, saying since stepping into the role, she
has upheld and is fully committed to NPR's code of
ethics and the independence of NPR's newsroom. The CEO is

(26:11):
not involved in editorial decisions. So listen to how The
New York Times writes about how mars old tweets came
to be in the news quote. Christopher Rufo, a fellow
at the Conservative Manhattan Institute, called attention to many of
miss Marr's posts on x and shared a response from
Tesla's CEO Elon Musk, who had responded to one of

(26:32):
miss Marr's posts that mister Rufo highlighted saying this person
is a crazy racist. If NPR wants to truly be
national Public Radio, it can't pander to the furthest left
elements in the United States. Rufos headed an interview to
do so. NPR should part ways with Catherine Marr. And
now he has gone from oh, she should be fired

(26:53):
to calling on NPR to be defunded and for the
staff to have masked layoffs. So here's my question. So
the NPR piece makes it sound like Christopher Rufo is
just this random person that we should care what he thinks.
Don't you think it might be useful for readers to
know who this guy is, Like, why should this random

(27:14):
guy from the Manhattan Institute, Why should anybody care what
he thinks about this lady's old tweets? Or maybe it'd
be great context for readers to have that. The New
York Times has actually mentioned Christopher Rufo quite a few
times during their breathless recent coverage of Clauding Gay's tenure
at Harvard University, which led to their coverage, or the
fact that Christopher Rufo specifically said that it would be

(27:34):
important for him to get pick up on that story
from the New York Times, specifically to launder the fact
that it was an attack coming from the right wing,
to make it seem like a more left wing or
moderate attack. Again, I don't know this because I'm some
media savvy person. I know this because I can read
and Christopher Rufo says it over and over and over
again in plain, unambiguous terms, And The New York Times

(27:57):
just pretends that that is not the case, when Rufo
is not even pretending. Just yesterday, he tweeted out the
New York Times story about the NPR CEO Catherine Marr, saying,
the New York Times is directly quoting the NPR tweets
I dug up over the last twenty four hours. We
are driving the narrative. If you dream about sampling nuts
with Kamala Harris, we will make sure America hears about it.

(28:20):
So he's not even pretending that he's not trying to
drive this narrative. And my question is, why is the
New York Times allowing this? Why is the New York
Times decided that this one person gets to dictate their
editorial coverage. And Neil dash put it very well on Threads.
He wrote, The New York Times exuplicitly lets its editorial
decisions be made by Chris Rufo, even as he admits

(28:40):
it's an intentional, bad faith campaign. The story here is
nothing to do with NPR. It's The Times not caring
that it's getting gamed with what it chooses to emphasize
an exercise. Find media executive faces criticism over supporting fascist
causes in their coverage. You won't because they think it's
news when Rufo says it, not when you are. I do.

(29:00):
Now I absolutely agree with him for the most part.
But here's the thing. I don't know if I would
say that The New York Times is getting gamed here.
You know, you get gamed once or twice. Maybe you
got gamed, but you get gamed three, four, five times
like the New York Times. Maybe you weren't getting gamed.
Maybe you're teammates in the same game. I don't know.

(29:21):
And you'll notice that so far it's been Claudie Gay,
a black woman, and Catherine Marr, a white woman. Isn't
it interesting that Rufo keeps choosing people who are traditionally
marginalized women and black women as his targets. And you
know what that reminds me of Gamergate. So here's the
reason that I want to talk about this. If you
listen to our series Internet Hate Machine that we did

(29:42):
with the Cool Zone Media, you know that we talk
and think a lot about gamer Gate and the online
harassment campaigns against black women that predated Gamergate, and how
they were really weaponized for specific political gain. It is
one of my deepest angers that the powers that be
evidently learned nothing from any of that, And I would
argue that it is in part because the original targets

(30:05):
were black women, so everybody was just sort of like, oh,
who cares, and we missed the window to actually learn
anything or take anything away from it. But this is Gamergate.
This is disingenuously whipping people up into a frenzy and
weaponizing that to meet some political end. It is making
existence in civic and public life impossible for women and

(30:26):
then counting on media to write about it neutrally as
opposed to honestly, these are the exact same tactics. You know,
Gamergate was ten years ago, and people with power and
institutions have not learned a thing from it. Nobody is
served by the Internet becoming a never ending barrage of
Gamergate tactics, except the reactionaries and extremists who use those

(30:48):
tactics to ensure that they and they alone get to
determine who gets to be in public in civic and
political life. We deserve so much better, and we deserve
a media that has the balls to tell the truth
about it instead of just helping them along. In twenty
twenty four, you need to understand how to write about
it when actors are not working in good faith. You

(31:09):
cannot let provocateurs write the playbook. You need to be
helping the public understand the landscape and the players, which
I acknowledge that can be hard, can be complicated. Public
radio veteran and civic tech professional in North Carolina, Melody
Kramer actually has built tools to do this at a
hyper local level. She writes publics, radios, libraries, institutions, governments,

(31:31):
nonprofit websites need a strategy for when people are not
acting in good faith. We've been testing out various ways
to approach this at the hyperlocal civic blog I help run.
One is we call people out. Two is we provide
a ton of context for bad actors. Three we use humor,
stickers and all sorts of in person stuff. In short,
we're priming people to understand the contexts and players. Almost constantly,

(31:54):
we aren't neutral. Neutrality gives a platform to people who
don't operate in good faith, and they wep and eyes
objectivity and neutrality. We make clear what our point of
view is and we back it up with loads of evidence.
I've been using it as my testing ground over the
past two years, and it seems to be working in
all the ways we measure. We're all volunteers who care
a lot about North Carolina, and I just got to say, like,

(32:15):
if I sound tired and over this, it's because I am.
I am so sick of this. And like I said already,
Senator Ted Cruz is renewing calls for NPR to be defunded.
Senator Marsha Blackburn has already said that she's planning to
propose new legislative action that would threaten to cut national
public radios federal funding. We're spending all of this energy,

(32:36):
time and oxygen on this disingenuous panic over nothing, when
we could be working on any number of the real
issues facing us as a country. Heck, we could be
working seriously and meaningfully toward having people have more faith
and trust in journalism, but we aren't doing any of
that because we're too busy talking about this whipped up
panic over nothing. And it just feels like for the

(32:59):
women and the black women in particular, who went through
Gamergate as targets, they just did so for nothing. If
institutions have not learned by now how to respond to
this kind of thing when it happened, and honestly, we
should not have to be collateral damage to extremists gunning
for more political influence over our civic and public institutions.

(33:25):
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Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or
just want to say hi, You can reach us at
Hello at tengody dot com. You can also find transcripts
for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No
Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Toad.
It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative edited by

(33:46):
Joey pat Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison
is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amado is our
contributing producer, I'm your host, bridget Toad. If you want
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