Another Prog vanity project swirls down the drain …. glug, glug, glug …..

According to the NY Post, NPR has cancelled its racial issues  show “Tell Me More” due to lack of interest and any real audience or meaningful corporate sponsorship. (!)

The show, which ran on the taxpayer subsidized radio network for seven years (As an aside, can you think of any other event that happened, oh, about seven years ago, coincidentally timed to the launch of a radio show based on lecturing/hectoring white people about “race” that may have had some influence over an organization that depends upon generous federal government financial support for survival? Remember to write your answer in the form of a question!)

“Tell Me More”,  produced at the NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C.  was a production of NPR News in association with the African American Public Radio Consortium, representing 20 independent public radio stations that serve predominantly black communities. 

The show , headed by “distinguished award winning journalist and Harvard alum Michel Martin”  represented an effort to reach African American listeners and other minority communities in order to grow the NPR audience beyond their traditional 90% white liberal cohort. Other NPR initiatives focused on issues of “race and ethnicity”  include its “Code Switch” team and Michele Norris’ “The Race Card Project.”

“Tell Me More” struggled to build an audience and “the economics of producing ‘Tell Me More’ as a daily show have been challenging” stated NPR in their decision to fold the program and lay off 28 staff.

According to The Daily Kenn’s analysis, “Tell Me More” was more a show about lecturing white people about their need to feel perpetually guilty, while reinforcing the victimization meme for the minority listeners it failed to attract, than a show about having a meaningful and honest discussion about racial issues in contemporary America.

NPR management concluded that the failure of “Tell Me More” was proof that shows discussing race were not marketable.  Apparently the fare that they offered, such as well entrenched race grievance monger Ta-Nehisi Coates pontificating about his latest screed , er, “essay” in Atlantic magazine demanding “Reparations” (“We’re going to be in for a fight”) wasn’t as tasty to white liberals as Martin had assumed.

The Daily Kenn begs to differ.  In their view, the problem NPR failed to see was that discussions about race must be honest to be marketable.

The NY Post opines that the issue is not that the conversation was about race, the failure was that the conversation was based on the discussion about race that the baby boomer generation insists on having …. and that which millennials reject, to the dismay of the professional race-grievance class:

A recent MTV survey found that 73 percent of millennials “believe never considering race would improve society” and “68 percent believe focusing on race prevents society from becoming colorblind.”

And the vast majority (84 percent) of these young people say their families taught them that people should be treated the same regardless of race. Yet only 37 percent say they were brought up in families that talked about race.

A (black) writer for Slate, deeply upset by these results, explained that millennials misunderstand racism.

It’s not about the “different treatment” of some groups, says Jamelle Bouie, but about “white supremacy.” Bouie concludes: “As such, their views on racism . . . are muddled and confused . . . A generation that hates racism but chooses colorblindness is a generation that, through its neglect, comes to perpetuate it.”

So, “Tell Me More” wasn’t really about having a “discussion” about race, it was a forum to provide the professional race grievance mongers to lecture whites about “white supremacy” and “white privilege” and to extend the white guilt credit card indefinitely.

The fact that even the 90% white extreme liberal listening audience of NPR doesn’t want to be “told any more” is a good thing.

Paging Eric Holder, we’re holding that discussion on race but on our terms.  Now, who are the cowards for refusing to join the conversation?