Censorship Industrial Complex
NPR senior editor admits extreme bias in Russia collusion, Hunter Biden laptop, COVID coverage
From LifeSiteNews
‘There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. … one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies … ’
A longtime senior editor at National Public Radio (NPR) published a blistering critique of the government-funded “news” outlet’s extreme liberal bias, citing how NPR willfully “turned a blind eye” to the truth concerning alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the origin of COVID-19.
The Free Press’ explosive 3,500-word op-ed “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” by Uri Berliner confirms what many heartland Americans have known for decades: “An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.”
“Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America,” wrote Berliner, who has worked at NPR for 25 years. “It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.”
Berliner paints a picture of an organization driven by DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) that almost always “defaulted to ideological story lines,” and is damaged by “the absence of viewpoint diversity.”
“I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans,” Berliner wrote. “None.”
When he presented his findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting, suggesting “we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference.”
Berliner draws attention to three enormous examples of NPR’s blindness regarding enormously important stories, a blindness that likely produced real-world consequences concerning the two most recent U.S. presidential elections and COVID-19 policies.
Russia collusion hoax
“Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting,” Berliner said. “At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.”
“Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse,” he explained. “By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.”
“But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse,” Berliner confessed. “Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.”
“It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story,” Berliner allowed. “What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.”
Hunter Biden’s laptop ignored ‘because it could help Trump’
After the New York Post published a shocking report about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 election, “NPR turned a blind eye.”
NPR’s managing editor dismissed the important story, saying “we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
“But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested,” Berliner wrote. “The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.”
“The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched,” he continued. “During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.”
NPR’s COVID-19 pandemic coverage ‘defaulted to ideological story lines’
Berliner described how NPR’s COVID-19 coverage fervently embraced a one-sided political narrative, promoting the notion that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan while totally disregarding the possibility that it might have escaped from a Wuhan lab.
“The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory,” Berliner said. “Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.
“Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive,” Berliner said. “But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die.
“Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story,” Berliner wrote. “We didn’t budge when the Energy Department — the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research — concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.”
“Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that ‘the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.’”
In all three cases, “politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.”
DEI now trumps journalistic principles at NPR
“To truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization,” explained Berliner, who emphasized that the most damaging development at NPR over the last few years has been the absence of viewpoint diversity.
DEI considerations trumped journalistic principles. “Identity” groups within the organization — including Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR) are now “given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.”
“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies,” Berliner said. “It’s almost like an assembly line.”
Berliner concluded:
With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong. News organizations don’t go in for that kind of reckoning. But there’s a good reason for NPR to be the first: we’re the ones with the word public in our name.
Aristotle Foundation
Toronto cancels history, again: The irony and injustice of renaming Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square
From the Aristotle Foundation
By
In 2022, Torontonians renamed Ryerson University to Toronto Metropolitan University, “to address the legacy of Egerton Ryerson.”1 Rather than remember him as the founder of Ontario’s system of “free” public schools and libraries, Ryerson was “cancelled” for his suggestions regarding the curriculum for the Indian residential schools that were then being proposed. However, the schools themselves were not built until some 30 years later, after Ryerson was dead. Further, modern complaints about the schools are generally misconceived and have little to do with the curriculum.2
In 2024, Toronto is at it again. This time, the historical figure targeted for cancellation is abolitionist Henry Dundas, as city officials seek to wipe his name from Yonge-Dundas Square. The square is a notable city landmark and one of Canada’s most popular tourist destinations. Filled with brightly lit electronic advertisement billboards, the square serves as an iconic social hub and venue for events connected to Toronto’s cultural festivals. The city’s former mayor, John Tory, summarized the case for renaming the famous square – based on a report from city hall – as follows:
An objective reading of the history, the significance of this street which crosses our city, the fact that Mr. Dundas had virtually no connection to Toronto and our strong commitment to equity, inclusion and reconciliation make this a unique and symbolically important change.3
The new name, “Sankofa Square,” is taken not from anything Torontonian, Ontarian, or even Canadian – but from the Akan people of West Africa.
Ironically, city officials not only appear ignorant of Henry Dundas’ many contributions to Canada, and to the abolition of slavery, but are also blissfully unaware that the Akan people of Africa were notorious slave traders responsible for capturing and selling one to two million of their fellow Africans into slavery.4
The man: Who was Henry Dundas?
Henry Dundas was a Scottish lawyer, politician, and one of British Prime Minister William Pitt’s most trusted and powerful ministers who served during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
Critically, Dundas was also a staunch abolitionist, committed to ending slavery as an institution in the British Empire and elsewhere in the world.
As early as 1777, when he was in his thirties, Dundas publicly established his abolitionist position on slavery. When Joseph Knight, a slave from Jamaica, was taken to Scotland by his owner, he challenged his status as a slave under Scottish law. Dundas, then Lord Advocate (principal legal advisor to the government), took on Knight’s case in his private capacity as a lawyer. On the final appeal before Scotland’s highest court, Dundas argued passionately, and with some humour, against the inhumanity of slavery:
We may possibly see the master chastising his slave as he does his ox or his horse. Perhaps, too, he may shoot him when he turns old […]
[But] [h]uman nature, my Lords, spurns at the thought of slavery among any part of our species.5
The court agreed and declared that no slave could remain a slave once they arrived on Scottish soil.6
A decade later, a religiously-inspired Christian abolition movement began in Britain (most famously personified by William Wilberforce) with the goal of ending the Atlantic slave trade. Dundas was a supporter of the movement, but urged that its members go further and challenge not just the Atlantic slave trade but seek the abolition of slavery itself – a much bigger challenge since at that time slavery was practiced on every inhabited continent.
During the 300 or more years the transatlantic slave trade existed, estimates are that 10 million to 12 million Africans were captured, enslaved, and sold by their fellow Africans. The purchasers were largely British, Portuguese, and French traders who acted as intermediaries in shipping slaves to the Americas for re-sale. The destination for 50 percent of the slaves was South America, 45 percent went to the West Indies, and about four percent went to what would become the United States.7,8 Dundas understood that, unless slavery itself was ended – with its unrelenting violence, forced labour, and premature death – slavery as an institution would continue for generations, since legally the children of slaves were considered chattel (like livestock) and were thus also slaves like their parents.
The controversy: Did Dundas’ abolitionism go far enough?
Dundas is criticized today for amending a motion in Britain’s Parliament in 1792.9 His original motion called for the immediate end to the slave trade. But outright abolition was unrealistic at the time, and thus historians agree that Dundas’ original motion would surely have failed.10 Moreover, Britain’s competitors – especially the Portuguese and French – would have simply picked up where Britain left off. Realizing this, Dundas made a strategic pivot and called for a gradual end to the slave trade. His strategy worked, and his amended motion succeeded with a significant majority.11
Change would take time. Only about one percent of the adult population had the right to vote,12 and many had at least an indirect financial interest in West Indian plantations (as did numerous Members of Parliament), and trade with the plantations generated income for businesses in England and tariff revenue for the Crown. Surmounting such entrenched interests would not happen overnight.
And this is why Dundas’ successful motion was key: it shifted the tenor of the public discourse. For the first time, ending the slave trade was up for debate. The British empire at this time was nearing its peak as the largest empire in history, with enormous influence, and thus this step was significant in the eventual abolition of slavery worldwide.
The Toronto connection: Dundas the humanitarian
For his role in abolishing slavery, Dundas ought to be celebrated. The same is true of his major influence on the colonies that would become Canada and, in particular, on what would become the province of Ontario and the city of Toronto. Importantly, that influence was wielded in support of issues that, today, would be described as relating to equity, inclusion, and reconciliation—ironically, the exact criteria (“commitments”) justifying the city’s condemnation of him.
Appointing Simcoe, the empire’s first legislator to outlaw slavery
Dundas was a close friend of John Graves Simcoe (another staunch abolitionist), and he appointed Simcoe as the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada in 1791. It was Simcoe who, two years later, would introduce the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada, the very first legislation in the entire British empire to limit slavery.14
The legislation passed, beginning the abolition of slavery in the province. Although the legislation did not free slaves already present, it freed the children of such slaves at age 25, and made Upper Canada a safe haven for slaves fleeing the United States.15 Like the precedent Dundas set in Scotland, no slave could remain a slave on Upper Canadian soil. Over the next seven decades, more than 40,000 black men and women would risk their lives to escape slavery and find freedom in Upper Canada.
When Dundas appointed Simcoe, he knew about Simcoe’s abolitionist sympathies—and almost certainly anticipated the legislation he would propose.16 And thus, Dundas made possible what became known as the Underground Railroad.
Honouring black soldiers
Dundas also ordered the governors of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to honour Britain’s promise of land grants to 4,000 former slaves who had fought for the British against the American Revolution, and to offer free passage – courtesy of the British navy – to any who preferred to return to Africa.17
Initiating official bilingualism
Upon the division of the then-province of Quebec into Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) and Lower Canada (present-day Quebec) in 1791, Dundas instructed the English governor of Lower Canada to allow French-speaking parliamentarians to pass laws in French.18 This was a serious point of disagreement in the newly formed legislative assembly, as the (powerful) English minority insisted all British subjects be governed in English. Dundas solved the impasse by ordering that legislation be passed in both languages, in what is the first example of official bilingualism in Canadian history. (For context, this occurred only months after England and France were, once again, at war; and thus this act was truly magnanimous.)19
Defending indigenous peoples
Finally, following American Independence, Yankee incursions into Canadian territory were a very real and constant threat. Dundas, as secretary of state for Home Affairs, instructed the Canadian governor Sir Guy Carleton to intervene against the Americans and protect the interests of the “Indian Nations”:
…securing to them the peaceable and quiet possession of the Lands which they have hitherto occupied as their hunting Grounds, and such others as may enable them to procure a comfortable subsistence for themselves and their families.20
The irony: Replacing the abolitionist with slave traders
Given the evidence, Toronto city council’s treatment of Dundas is clearly not only ahistorical but shameful. Regrettably, so is their adoption of the replacement, the term “Sankofa” from the Akan language. Little needs to be said here, other than this: The Akan peoples of West Africa were notorious slave traders. During the transatlantic slave trade, the Akan captured, enslaved, and sold one to two million fellow Africans into slavery. In other words, the Akan were the source of 10 to 20 percent of all transatlantic slaves.
Conclusion
The Toronto city council narrative surrounding the renaming of Yonge-Dundas Square flies in the face of historical fact. Dundas was demonstrably ahead of his time as a humanitarian. And as a politician, he was not only principled and morally courageous but effective. Dundas was one of the key figures in abolishing the slave trade, opening up the Underground Railroad, and protecting minorities of various backgrounds—black, French, and indigenous. If the city really wants to promote the act of “reflecting on and reclaiming teachings from the past,”21 as it claims, it might do well to start with the truth about Henry Dundas’ legacy. There may be times to rename a place or landmark, but this is not one of them.
Endnotes
About the author
Greg Piasetzki is a Toronto-based intellectual property lawyer, a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, and a citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario.
About the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy
Who we are
The Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy is a new education and public policy think tank that aims to renew a civil, common-sense approach to public discourse and public policy in Canada.
Censorship Industrial Complex
Another Mass Grave?
No. One outrageous lie was quickly discounted, yet another lives on, to the detriment of everybody involved.
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
The Kamloops claim didn’t come out of the blue. The TRC’s well-publicized “missing children” wild goose chase thoroughly indoctrinated indigenous communities. It convinced foolish people, like Casimir, Leah Gazan and Kimberley Murray, that thousands of “missing children” had been secretly buried all across Canada.
“My brother Rufus saw them take all those children and stand them up next to a big ditch, and then the soldiers shot them all and they all fell into that ditch. Some of the kids were still alive and they just poured the dirt in on top of them. Buried them alive.”
This mass murder happened in 1943 — not in Nazi-held Europe, but in Brantford, Ontario.
So, there you have it — the personal story of a residential school “survivor” describing the day the Canadian Army lined up 43 Indian children in front of a residential school at Brantford, Ontario, shot them and dumped their bodies into a mass grave. The May 27, 2021 announcement that the remains of 215 former students of the Kamloops residential school wasn’t the first time that a claim about sinister residential school deaths and clandestine burials had been made.
This Brantford story is obviously untrue. Any reasonably well-informed person with a lick of sense would know that at a glance.
But that didn’t stop the claim from making the social media rounds for years. According to the fact-check tens of thousands of people have read this bogus claim over the years, and many appear to have believed it completely. In fact, despite the fact checks proving that the claim was entirely false it continues to circulate today.
Both the Kamloops and Brantford claims came basically from the same place — the strange mind of a defrocked United Church Minister, Kevin Annett. It was Annett who created the bogus Brantford claim. In a strange twist, the picture at the top of the page — said to be from Brantford — is actually a photo of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, as it looked in the 1920s.
And it was Annett who inspired the TRC’s misguided “missing children/unmarked graves” wild goose chase that, in turn, inspired Chief Rosanne Casimir to make the Kamloops claim. Both claims were equally and obviously false: The Kamloops claim was that the “remains of 215 children were found.” In fact, only radar blips (anomalies) were detected- blips that turned out. to most likely be from previous excavations, and not graves. Casimir and Annett both knew that they were making false claims.
Annett’s bogus claims come from his imaginative reworking of stories of “survivors” that he publicized in his blogs, books, interviews and movies.
His most famous movie is Unrepentant. This movie has been viewed by tens of thousands of Canadians, particularly in indigenous communities, such as the Tk’emlups community at Kamloops.
It has won awards, and been praised by eminent people, such as Noam Chomsky. Despite being every bit as false as the claim that the Canadian army shot 43 indigenous children, it actually convinced Member of Parliament, Gary Merasty, that it was accurate history. It is nothing short of amazing that this highly suggestible MP was then able to convince the equally gullible, and newly appointed TRC commissioners that there were many thousands of such “missing children”, as Annett alleged.
The TRC commissioners then launched their “missing children/unmarked graves” campaign despite having no mandate from the federal government to do so. (Independent researcher, Nina Green, describes this in detail here.)
You see, the Kamloops claim didn’t come out of the blue. The TRC’s well-publicized “missing children” wild goose chase thoroughly indoctrinated indigenous communities. It convinced foolish people, like Casimir, Leah Gazan and Kimberley Murray, that thousands of “missing children” had been secretly buried all across Canada.
Indigenous people became hooked on these stories.
Annett’s most famous book is his 393 page opus, “Hidden No Longer.” That book introduced the idea that the deaths of these thousands of “missing children” (his estimates range from 50,000 to 250,000, depending on the telling) constituted genocide. It is absolutely shocking that our MPs actually voted to condemn Canada of genocide based essentially on Kevin Annett’s bogus claims.
Based on those same bogus claims Annett was hired by the Brantford Mohawk community in 2011 to dig up the graves that he claimed existed in the apple orchard area of their residential school. According to Annett, these were the graves of indigenous students who had been secretly killed and buried in the apple orchard at the school, with the forced help of fellow students.
Sound familiar? It should. That was essentially the same grisly tale repeated by Chief Rosanne Casimir years later in Kamloops. (See above.)
Except that the wiser folks within the Brantford Mohawk community twigged on to Annett’s tricks. And when Annett was found on the streets of Toronto, waving around chicken bones, and pretending that they were the bones of children he had unearthed at Brantford, the Mohawk elders came together and publicly denounced Annett as a fraud at a community meeting. They then banished him from their community.
Unfortunately, Casimir became a useful idiot for Annett — just as the gullible TRC commissioners did — and no such leadership has yet come forward from the wiser elements within the Kamloops indigenous community. Those folks are silent, while the more vocal contingent are still sticking to their story that the soil anomalies are the “remains of 215 children,” and not what they almost certainly are — 1924 septic excavations.
So, the questions should be asked: Is the claim that the Canadian army shot 43 indigenous children, and dumped them in a mass grave, any more or less believable than the claim that priests killed and secretly buried 215 children at Kamloops, (or any of the copycat claims that followed it?)
What is it about that Mohawk claim that gives it appeal to only the most gullible among us, while the equally improbable Kamloops claim is still taken seriously by so many people?
On the surface, both claims are outrageous, and have no real evidence to support them. Quite the contrary, every Canadian history book ever written is cogent evidence that both stories are false. But the Mohawk claim was dismissed as the nonsense it obviously was, while the Kamloops claim lives on.
At least part of the answer to those questions appears to be in the response of the government in power, and the media to the claims. If the Brantford claim had been met by a prime minister who immediately ordered that flags be lowered, and offered hundreds of millions of dollars to any other indigenous communities who wanted to make similar claim, no doubt that Brantford claim would have been taken seriously.
Or, if the Brantford claim had been made in a time when a highly ideological CBC would ask no questions, and blindly promote the claim, the results might have been entirely different. As it is, the Brantford claim died a merciful death, while the equally specious Kamloops genocide claim still languishes like a stinking albatross around the neck of every Canadian.
Although the international community is increasingly broadcasting the obvious fact that the Kamloops claim is bogus Canada’s media remains asleep. That is not likely to change until leadership changes in Ottawa, and at the CBC. Pierre Pollievre, when questioned on this topic, stated clearly that he stands for historical truth, accuracy, and a full investigation into all questions pertaining to claims about residential school deaths. Hopefully, that means that excavation and a full inquiry will follow.
But Tk’emlups indigenous elders better wake up, like the Mohawk elders did. You are not doing your communities a favour by letting politicians and journalists treat you like children, by pretending to believe your bizarre claims. These false claims are already doing great damage.
Fortunately, there are many thoughtful indigenous people who do not blindly accept the claims about murderous priests and secret burials.
Here is one such wise indigenous person. He is a priest, and he is willing to do what our federal government and our CBC failed to do from the beginning namely to intelligently discuss the issue.
Thoughtful people like this need to be involved in a full investigation that will clear the air about the Kamloops claim, and get Canada back on track.
Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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