NPR is following The Washington Post and CBS News’s example by taking a blowtorch to its climate team. It must be tough not being able to rely on that steady stream of tax dollars anymore, eh?
NPR Chief Climate Editor Neela Banerjee plastered a somber eulogy for her eco-woke department in a LinkedIn post published May 27. “Today, I was laid off by NPR. The climate desk no longer exists separately but has been folded into the National Desk.”
She continued, making it seem like she was ready to ride off into the sunset, “I have rarely been as inspired or happy as I was working with the nine other journalists on NPR's Climate Desk, and I feel so very lucky to have helped you--and learned from you.”
Worth noting that this is the same “Climate Desk” under Banerjee’s leadership that pushed propaganda a few days before Banerjee’s firing characterizing beavers as “little climate warriors” in Britain’s fight against the left’s eternal specter of climate change. And how about this April 3 gem, “NPR wants your big question about reducing your climate impact and saving money.”
Talk about real bang-up journalisming there (not).
It’s pretty safe to say that the world will keep turning without NPR’s supposed, hard-hitting climate coverage. Reading Banerjee’s self-touted bona fides in retrospect is enough to jumpstart a few giggles:
I've been at NPR for six years, and for the last three, I worked as head of its (relatively new) climate desk. We were 10 people who did ambitious, prize-winning enterprise and broke news. We launched an annual network-wide Climate Solutions Week that set the standard for cooperation with member stations and that gave audiences a sense of agency and inspiration amid the planetary gloom. We built a reporting collaborative of more than 50 member stations which covered climate at the local level and became tightly knit in the process. We broke down silos within NPR and helped our colleagues at shows, podcasts and desks understand climate change in their contexts.
“Sense of agency and inspiration amid the planetary gloom?” What kind of poorly-crafted word salad is this!
NPR writ large has even gone as far as simping for eco-terrorism, such as this polluted item from NPR critic-at-large John Powers, “'How to Blow Up a Pipeline' review: An action-packed eco-heist movie." In that piece, Powers called the manifesto that inspired the film by extremist Andreas Malm “the most compelling argument I've read for eco-sabotage.”
At the end of the day, a company’s bottom-line is what drives business. And NPR is apparently being forced to learn like the rest of the liberal media ecosphere that consistently barfing up climate scare porn doesn’t exactly pay dividends.
