“Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.” — NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher on the truth
The “might be” is rhetorical. Maher is asserting that propaganda in the service of woke progressivism is of greater value than reverence for the truth. Hiding the truth of Biden family corruption and manufacturing stories about Trump family corruption is a way of finding common ground and getting things done.
Maher is not speaking for herself. This is how the woke epistemic works. In postmodernism, truth is reduced to and dissolved by discursive formations, with formations to be selected for their power in advancing movement goals, which function to obscure the truth, which has its own integrity.
For example, the truth is that gender is binary and immutable in the human species (all mammalian species, in fact). The woke take is that gender is either a sociocultural construction and performance with no connection to natural history or a transcendent spirit independent of observable reality; however, whatever the case, the individual’s subjectivity stands in place of the truth, so people are what they say they are.
To be sure, the reduction of truth to individual subjectivity is selective. While a man can be a woman and a lesbian, a white person cannot be a black person. But the disappearance of truth in wokeness makes contradiction irrelevant. You will simply be told that the analogy is fallacious. Not because it is (while it is possible for a white person to be black, the analogy holds), but because the woke movement is righteous; therefore, any rule it invents is correct because it “gets things done.”
This is not a pragmatic take on truth. This is the elevation of ideology over fact and reason. This is the way Nazism worked. The Nazis reduced truth to ideology. Rule and right under Nazism were arbitrary with respect to the truth of the world. The important thing for Nazis was to get things done—according to the ideology. And the goal was the same: advance the interests of the corporate state.
NPR and PBS are are part of the corporate state media machine. Their claim to be apart from the profit-generating side of that machine is an attempt to manufacture the illusion of objectivity. In this way, their existence is more objectionable than their private sector counterparts.
freedom and reason 