WYPR has a lot of decent local programming but when it comes NPR - the phrase "Dr. Goebbels with a human face" is what comes to mind. The human face part comes from the human interest stories with an upbeat tenor - people working hard to overcome the odds against them seem to be a very popular formula, there is something on arts, sciences, sports, environment, etc.
But this human interest stuff is structurally equivalent to music played on commercial stations - its main purpose is to attract audience and maintain their attention for the delivery of propaganda. In the NPR case it is not commercial propaganda, but political propaganda.
That propaganda is rather subtle, which makes it even more insidious. Take, for example, today's story on Vietnam. First, a reporter visits Vietnam, quickly glosses over rebuilding the country after the war (one would think it would be a major accomplishment and focus on a little known country), and then focuses on current problems, shedding crocodile tears over the plight of the rural poor. This is followed by a diatribe delivered by an émigré Ho Chi Minh hater.
Or take another story about a Marine who sustained a severe leg injury in Iraq and is very gung ho to regain his health and come back to kill more brown skin people (the brown skin people part was implied rather than explicit). That is a "war effort" propaganda right there, but that does not end there. The reporter mentions that to save the Marine's leg, doctors are using a hitherto unknown in this country technique developed by, and I quote, a "Siberian doctor" who rehabilitated soldiers wounded in WW2.
No one ever heard of the country "Siberia" let alone one fighting in WW2. That would be the Soviet Union. However, the NPR patriotic propaganda machine could not admit that anything developed in the Soviet Union was superior to US practices and now is being used to save a US patriot life. So the Soviet Union morphed into "Siberia."
An then there is the daily barrage of economic news featuring a large menagerie of pro-business pundits and no one representing organized labor. If the labor issue is mentioned it is either how people "reinvent themselves" and quit good jobs for shitty ones to get more involved in their families, hobbies etc. It’s usually women who do that, of course, but the little Goebbelses at the NPR know better than that, and feature a male character in these roles from time to time. I am yet to hear the "u" word being uttered in a positive context by the NPR mouthpieces.
An there is a incessant barrage of uplifting stories how personal sacrifice and entrepreneurship lifts people form dire straits all over the world. Horatio Alger international. The world "capitalism" is not explicitly mentioned, but the little Goebbelses know darn well that such explicitness would be a less effective propaganda technique than more subtle hinting and then letting the listeners to draw their "own" conclusions.
This mix of uplifting human interest stories punctuated with subtle yet hard to miss hints about the virtual of the US brand of capitalism makes the NPR a very effective propaganda tool for the empire. Far more effective than commercial background noise aka "music" broadcasting punctuated with "messages from our sponsors." The latter at least maintain some separation between regular programming and advertisement.
Keep that in mind next time the NPR will beg you for money.
Wojtek