I caught some of 'Fresh Air' with Terry Gross this afternoon as I was driving. She had a guest who gushed breathlessly and endlessly that the Trump Transition, now starting its second week, is suffering from low moral, bloodletting slashers, hysteria and confusion. She never tried to make any point about how any transition campaign MUST shake down as it goes along or it will not function.
People who have never worked together and are all powerful and influential people are thrown together for the first time to put together a transition that will name nominees to the most important Executive Offices in the country and sometimes egos clash or it turns out that one person or the other is incompatible with the boss. It happens. It's human.
Those of us who grew up to work in strictly hierarchical organizations don't see much of this at the senior level because those sorts of people usually get weeded out long before they reach flag rank. The one's with overlarge egos are brung low by fate or circumstance and the ones who are simply incompatible leave the service.
There are some places where the system appears to break down and that is said to happen on Joint Staffs. I wouldn't know, I only ever served on JTF-A and to be honest, the 3 star Army general was
happy with the 2 star Admiral who ran the Navy side of the JTF and nobody knows what he thought about the Air Force people since nobody outside the JFACC ever saw one. The JTF was 3 services plus the Marines, brought together purely for meetings at Cairo West. All the rest of the time, each service and the Marines, were doing their own things in their own corners of Egypt or on the beach or just offshore.
But, let's return to NPR for a moment. As with the election of Ronald Reagan, the organs of the main stream media including NPR and PBS, entirely failed to engage the other half of the country in any of its programming. Run by hard left media types it only brought onboard harder left academics and policy wonks to explain things and used the occasional putz like David Brooks as their 'token' voice of the right not ever realizing that the right considers him to be an absolute left-wing jackass and moron.
The main stream media, when it bothers to produce stories about the right, adopts an interesting policy of never actually inviting the right to participate. They persist in viewing people like Ann Coulter as an ignorant, shameless, lightweight flake. Then they act all surprised when they suddenly learn that more than half the country has turned on them and their wonderful socialist and progressive ideas.
They never gave any airtime to competing ideas except to blast them out of the water using some of the most egregious and stupid straw-man arguments ever heard. But their real failure for over 50 years has been to call the right wing shallow-minded, ignorant racists, bigots, and lately, misogynists and they are outraged that these arguments, endlessly repeated by themselves, fail to gain traction with the majority of the people who suspect that not every single republican is a bigot, racist and misogynist.
What NPR needs to do now, is hire a real right wing investigative journalist type to do one story a week about subjects already covered by the 'journolistas' of NPR. I think they'd be fascinated by the difference in coverage, interviews and conclusions. I was interested to read how the 'investigations' of wrongdoing caught on tape by James O'Keefe were brushed aside just exactly the way Clinton brushed accusations aside or stonewalled and how James Comey, director of the FBI, brushed aside all the criminal wrongdoing of Hillary Clinton.
I don't think they'll do it because they all persist in believing that they are fair and unbiased in all the coverage they offer in every story aired by them. They're just like Dan Rather and CBS and they didn't learn anything at all from Rathergate.
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