IRA Glass on NPR:

“I feel like public radio should address this directly, because I think anybody who listens to our stations understands that what they’re hearing is mainstream media reporting,” Glass said. “We have nothing to fear from a discussion of what is the news coverage we’re doing. As somebody who works in public radio, it is killing me that people on the right are going around trying to basically rebrand us, saying that it’s biased news, it’s left wing news, when I feel like anybody who listens to the shows knows that it’s not. And we are not fighting back, we are not saying anything back. I find it completely annoying, and I don’t understand it.”

Let me explain it.

NPR is being attacked by Republicans because NPR is objective news. Republicans know that extremist policy based on lies can’t survive for long in a society in which a free media holds public officials of each party equally accountable. Thus, the Republicans have spent the good part of two decades trying to play the media refs, and if that doesn’t work, destroy the mainstream media and replace it with their own propaganda org, aka Fox News.

It’s the same reason dictators loathe intellectuals. Intellectuals see, and tell, the truth. The media are the intellectuals to the Republicans’ dictatorship of ignorance. And time after time, the GOP has found that they can’t control the media, so they simply destroy it and replace it with something, someone, they can control.

That’s why the GOP doesn’t like NPR.