NPR: It’s time for conservative affirmative action

Hell, I’d take a job at NPR to balance things out. I was actually on the network once. About ten years ago, I wrote a book called “If it Ain’t Got that Swing: the Re-birth of Grown-Up Culture.” It was a celebration of swing dancing and a criticism of the pornography and slavery of modern culture. I was booked on the show “Talk of the Nation” with the host Neil Conan. The theme of the show was “Young Fogies,” and there were two other guests on with me — Jedediah Purdy, the author of books about the corrosion of irony and the importance of virtue, and the filmmaker Whit Stillman. The three of us thought that America had lost some grace, sex appeal and fortitude since the 1960s. I knew exactly what was going to happen: Conan and the callers were going to accuse us of being retrograde racists.

But, truth be told, while there was some of that, Conan let the conversation go into interesting directions, and he let the three of us make our points. I remember that the people working in the booth thought it was a very interesting show, and I left the studio wondering, why don’t they do more of these? Furthermore, why did the show get tagged with the smug title “Young Fogies”? Why couldn’t they just regularly have conservatives on to talk about our books, the culture, the pro-life movement, movies, whatever?

Pope Benedict has just released the second volume of his penetrating series of books about Jesus. For us Catholics, it is a major event. But more than that, it is a way to examine the philosophy of Christianity, to pore over, and celebrate or challenge the claims it makes about the truth of the human person. Why isn’t NPR covering this?

Actually, NPR has covered it — and in that coverage one can find the metric for measuring liberal bias that eluded Brooke Gladstone. In the one story NPR ran about the pope’s new book, the focus was on the news that in “Jesus of Nazareth” the pope exonerates the Jews for the death of Jesus. This was treated as major news, even though Pope John Paul II had made a similar declaration more than 20 years ago. Here in one piece was everything that is wrong with NPR: the hyper focus on a topic that would cause embarrassment or pain to conservatives (we’re anti-Semites!); the selective choice of whom to interview, in this case a liberal journalist from the far-left National Catholic Reporter (George Weigel, one of the world’s great Catholic scholars, has an office about 15 minutes from NPR); and the absolute and total disinterest in exploring the deeper truths that religion can offer. NPR didn’t bother to comment on the pope’s writing style, which is incredibly lucid and far superior to his predecessor’s. NPR’s hosts often coo about the latest prodigy from the creative writing schools, but they seem constitutionally incapable of viewing a pope — or a conservative — as an artist or a philosopher with anything meaningful to say. And God bless ’em — I am honestly beginning to believe that half the time they really don’t realize they’re doing it.

I remember that after a particularly festive party I went to about 20 years ago with the dipsomaniacal Irish Catholic crowd I had grown up with, a friend of mine looked at me and said, “When everyone you know has a drinking problem, no one has a drinking problem.” When everyone you know, everyone you work with, everyone you socialize with, everyone you tweet with, is a liberal, then no one is a liberal. But thanks to James O’Keefe, NPR may be stumbling out of the cave.

Oh, and in case Neil Conan is reading this: I have a new book out. It may do us both good to have me on the show again, all things considered.

Mark Judge is the author of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.