“Civility is a Weapon Wielded by the Powerful”: NPR Employees Object to “Tone Policing”

NPR recently had to carry through on a long-announced series of layoffs due to a significant drop in revenue. The result was apparently a tense meeting with executives, according to Bloomberg, including accusations that the liberal outlet was racist and anti-trans in its selection of employees for termination. What was most interesting about the account were objections to “tone policing” and the claim that “civility is a weapon wielded by the powerful.” We have strived since the formation of this blog to encourage civility as a core value for our community. We have not been entirely successful, though I appreciate that the blog is better than most in the tenor of its commentary. It was, therefore interesting to see people in the media objecting to civility as a form of control by the powerful.

I have criticized NPR for its false reporting on issues like Hunter Biden, the whipping scandal at the border and other stories.  NPR declared recently that it would allow employees to participate in political protests when the editors believe the causes advance the “freedom and dignity of human beings.”

The laying off of 84 people created a firestorm and allegations that NPR failed to guarantee that people of color and trans people were not subject to greater terminations.

During the zoom call, CEO John Lansing objected to a black employee who was criticizing executives by name. Lancing said

“I would never, ever, on your worst day, call you out by name in a meeting with 827 people,” he said. “Let’s please keep in mind nobody is happy about this. Nobody is more unhappy about it than those affected, but certainly everybody in the company, beginning with me, this is the last thing we wanted to do.”

Some employees interpreted this as tone-policing and felt uncomfortable.

Lansing was denounced as “racist” and another staff member dropped a link to a segment from NPR’s Code Switch titled, “When Civility Is Used As A Cudgel Against People Of Color.” Still another wrote “Civility is a weapon wielded by the powerful.”

The referenced segment is based on the work of “Gaye Theresa Johnson, who studies the intersection of civility and race at the University of California, Los Angeles.” She explained that civility policing “allowed white citizens to, in effect, civilize people they considered less than.” It also featured the work of Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper who writes “about white reaction to black anger in her book Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower.” Cooper insists that civility standards simply constitute “preaching at black people about how they’re bad and how they’re ungrateful for being angry.”  In citing historical protests, the segment erases any distinction between advocacy and civility.

One could simply shrug this off as just desserts for an outlet that embraces “advocacy journalism,” and often fuels identity politics.  However, it is a sad example of how even civility is now being denounced as a tool of repression in our age of rage.

That is why I recently wrote about the outburst of Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., who screamed about gun control in the Capitol as colleagues left after a vote. Various Democratic members, including former House Majority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md, tried to calm Bowman. However, after Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky, asked him to stop yelling, Bowman shouted “I was screaming before you interrupted me,” which could now go down as the epitaph for our age.