I was just on NPR’s website for an unimportant reason and I encountered this remarkable artifact of the media in the year 2026:
Bear with me, please, because I want to describe what is in this screenshot that I grabbed: First, it says “Popular on NPR.org.” Then, there’s a picture of an old white guy with a white beard looking like he’s mansplaining to a woman who we can barely see. He’s speaking into a microphone with the NPR logo on it. The photo is emblazoned with an “NPR Newsmakers” bug, again with the logo, in the lower right corner. Underneath the photo and directly under the bug, is a headline that says “NPR’S NEWSMAKERS,” followed by the actual title of the story: “The pastor who wants to repeal voting right for women is becoming more mainstream.”
That “is becoming” is doing an awful lot of work, because NPR is very clearly implicating itself, within the photo and in all the text surrounding the photo, as one of the major forces that are mainstreaming the pastor who wants to repeal voting rights.
One of the most important jobs in a major news organization is to decide what you don’t cover. Not every idea is worth coverage. And at the top of the list of ideas that are not worth coverage is the idea that any human being is unworthy of personhood. We do not debate people’s fundamental rights as human beings or question their humanity. Ever. Why? Because that’s Nazi shit. Period.
Obviously, reporters do not endorse every idea they quote or report on in the course of their work. But when you are platforming a bigot in a photo with repeated instances of your logo and you’re billing him as one of your “newsmakers” and writing about him “becoming more mainstream,” you are complicit in that bigotry. You’re not just an objective observer. You are giving him a platform that he does not deserve.
You might say, “oh, but the story is marked as ‘Popular,’ so clearly there’s an audience for it.”
To that I respond, “Bullshit.” Just because people like to stare at awful shit doesn’t mean you’re required to post gruesome photographs of car accidents. There is no reason—zero—to platform this hateful man and his bigoted, ugly ideas. This is a disgrace that reflects poorly on every reporter at NPR.
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