National Progressive Radio strikes again
Progressive #Progressive
NPR’s Morning Edition ran a segment on Monday that perfectly encapsulated the broadcaster’s left-wing assumptions, its determination to spread them, the contemptuous betrayal of its mission to represent varied views, and its modus operandi camouflaging propaganda as news.
It’s worth documenting periodically lest we forget that this bias and lack of intellectual curiosity offers a skewed view of important issues and derogates what the national broadcaster is for. We should not sink into oblivious resignation. The segment, from national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, concerned President Joe Biden outpacing his predecessors in appointing judges and, in doing so, reshaping the federal bench. It’s a vital subject on which a news organization with pretensions to public service (using taxpayer money it describes as “essential” to operations) has a duty to be balanced. Instead, all four people quoted in the piece were from the Left and pursued the same narrative. Two were Biden employees.
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Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, said the judiciary is a top Biden priority because “when he talks about rights and liberties, he knows that, in the end, those rights and liberties are decided by federal judges.” Where was the counter-voice suggesting judges should follow only the Constitution and statute law, setting aside their own views about what rights and liberties are desirable? It was nowhere. That voice was missing.
Then came White House lawyer Paige Herwig who boasted on Biden’s behalf that he had confirmed more judges than either President Donald Trump or President George W. Bush. Superficially, this was a statement of fact, but it was more than that. It was presented as a cause for celebration because the president’s appointments made courts “look like the rest of America.” Where was the counter-voice noting that representation is not the role of courts but of elected officials and that judges should scrupulously avoid presuming to represent anyone? That voice wasn’t there either.
Then, to ensure viewpoint diversity didn’t pollute the liberal bubble, NPR quoted Janai Nelson, the head of the left-wing NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who echoed Herwig, saying: “Our judiciary will finally begin to reflect the diversity of this country and the diversity of experiences that black women in particular can bring to the bench.” There’s nothing wrong with more federal judges being black women, but where was the counter-voice noting the impropriety of choosing judges, as Biden does, for that reason? Again, such a voice was nowhere to be heard.
Finally, NPR handed its microphone to Christopher Kang, representing a pressure group called Demand Justice that advocates — you guessed it — the appointment of “progressive-leaning judges.” Oh, and for good measure, the segment also referred to a recent statement by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Not a single conservative or Republican voice. No one acknowledged the existence of judicial originalism or textualism, let alone recognized them as central to two generations of controversy about nominations to the bench. There wasn’t a scintilla of doubt expressed about the merit of choosing judges as champions for one demographic group or another.
The lack of curiosity about why other presidents use different nominating criteria was astounding. The piece, stating facts and quoting interested parties, was presented as news but was, in truth, three minutes of advocacy on behalf of a Democratic president, his party’s agenda, its left-liberal ideology, and a philosophy that has corrupted the federal bench and the very idea of jurisprudence for four decades. It implicitly endorsed the false and pernicious notion that judges should not simply administer laws decided on by a sovereign people but should trawl through their own experiences and prejudices to justify decisions that further a progressive agenda.
It was in keeping with the purely political and ideological musing on the Left recently that Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor (68) and Elena Kagan (62) should resign while Democrats continue to hold the White House and the Senate so they can be replaced by young left-wingers who could sit decades longer on the court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, once a heroine of the Left who was lauded as though she was the first female justice (it was actually Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who broke the glass ceiling, but she was nominated by President Ronald Reagan and so doesn’t count), is now criticized for betraying progressivism by staying on the bench until she died, which allowed a Republican president to replace her with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Judge Robert Bork’s disgraceful 1987 rejection for the Supreme Court, orchestrated by Biden as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was the starting gun for a left-wing race to traduce the function of federal courts. Two generations later, NPR doesn’t bother to acknowledge that there’s any other way of thinking. Bork was once urged by a colleague to “do justice.” His unspoken response was that his job was, rather, to administer the law. It is not a distinction the Left recognizes.
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Tags: NPR, Opinion, Media Bias, Media, Opinion, Law
Original Author: Hugo Gurdon
Original Location: National Progressive Radio strikes again