But it’s not just conservative media and avowed white nationalists who are pulling previously fringe ideas toward the center.
National Public Radio, widely regarded as left-leaning, but really just barely a liberal radio network, has helped mainstream white supremacy, too. Last week Noel King, host of “Morning Edition,” interviewed Jason Kessler, organizer of last year’s deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and this year’s in D.C. King asked Kessler about his beliefs about different races of people, providing Kessler a platform to broadcast his white supremacist views uninterrupted ― and unchecked ― to a national audience. Some in that audience probably thought Kessler’s unreconstructed racism sounded like a reasonable set of ideas.
Others excoriated NPR for the interview. The network defended the interview. “Interviewing the people in the news is part of NPR’s mission to inform the American public, it does not mean NPR is endorsing one view over another,” the network said in a statement. “Our job is to present the facts and the voices that provide context on the day’s events, not to protect our audience from views that might offend them.”
In granting someone like Kessler an on-air interview because its “job is to present facts and voices,”
NPR is every bit as complicit in the mainstreaming of white supremacy as Fox News. It just uses a more modulated tone. And, in giving Kessler a platform to spout white supremacist talking points, NPR moves those ideas to the center of political discourse. This may be an unintended consequence. It is nonetheless consequential.
Under the guise of “both sides” journalism, NPR is helping to make white supremacist ideas mainstream.