Wikipedia defines “truth” as “being in accord with fact or reality.”
That’s why I wanted to redefine truth to be malleable and partisan when I ran Wikipedia. Now that I head NPR, I seek only to promote truth that aligns with my worldview.
Here’s the truth I spoke at my TED Talk in 2022:
Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done. That is not to say that the truth doesn’t exist or to say that the truth isn’t important. Clearly, the search for the truth has led us to do great things… [but] one reason we have such glorious chronicles to the human experience and all forms of culture is because we acknowledge there are many different truths. I’m certain that the truth exists for you. And probably for the person sitting next to you. But this may not be the same truth.
Even though that reads like something a Vassar freshman would submit to her Logic 101 professor, it is quite penetrating because I thought of it.
Here’s what I mean by our reverence for the truth getting in the way of accomplishing things.
Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford before he became a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Even though there’s zero evidence it ever happened, it is nonetheless true because Ford said so in 2018. Her spoken truth was good enough for me. But when Leland Keyser, Ford’s friend who accompanied her to the high school party where Kavanaugh brutalized her, said she had no recollection of the incident, that got in the way of accomplishing keeping Kavanaugh off the court.
When former NPR editor Uri Berliner wrote that NPR is nothing more than a left-wing propaganda organ that couldn’t understand objectivity if it was explained to its employees using magic markers, whiteboards, and puppets, he expressed incorrect truths. (READ MORE: It’s Bigger Than NPR’s Katherine Maher)
Berliner decried NPR’s scoffing at the Hunter Biden laptop story, which our then–managing editor justified by saying, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
The managing editor’s truthfulness in the fall of 2020 showed zero interest in determining whether the story was true, as it turned out to be. However, the editor’s true untruth accomplished ousting Donald Trump from office by suppressing what would eventually become the Hunter Bider influence-peddling scheme.
Some truths must be more truthful than others.
When Republicans say something objectively true (e.g., a wide swath of the Democrat base supports Hamas), it must be minimized. When Democrats speak truths (e.g., men can become women) or even untruths (e.g., men can become women), they must be amplified because they mean well.
I suppressed accessibility to truth while at Wikipedia and will again at NPR to ensure the truth can be spread. For those unaware, the “free and open” approach was problematic because it resulted in the “exclusion of communities and languages” where “the idea of a written tradition is [not] particular [to them]”; “[r]adical openness did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.”
I stand by those words even though most people, including me, don’t know what they mean. But when you speak such profundities at the 92nd Street Y, and purple-haired audience members murmur and nod along, you must be making sense in theory if not in reality.
News reports have quoted me saying that “‘the way in which we ascribe notability which comes from this white male Westernized construct’ is how society determines ‘who matters’ and ‘whose voice is elevated.’”
By my logic, society didn’t start ascribing notability to things until Christopher Columbus committed genocide in 1492. Before that, nobody ascribed notability to anything, yet we still somehow learned about world history. I suspect this happened because of a white male Easternized construct, which is just another reason to yank down statues.
I have dreamed of overseeing state-run media since I majored in Rigid Marxist Propaganda Adherence at New York University. Now, taxpayers funnel money to NPR, and we churn out stories like: “How that ice cream truck jingle perpetuates white supremacy.”
Still, we are on a shoestring budget and need financial help. I modeled a hat you can purchase to show your support for NPR truly.
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