NPR head doesn’t get it even after spending a year going into “Darkest America.”

The former head of NPR, Ken Stern, decided to imitate European explorers who trekked into darkest Africa to discover how the natives lived.  For the head of NPR, Middle America is unexplored territory.   He decided to attend their native festivals, observed their native religious ceremonies, ate their native food.  He even went on a native hunt. 

But let us echo his actual words:

I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show.

He was surprised to find out that the natives were not all headhunting cannibals.

I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.

Attending the natives quaint religious ceremonies he didn’t understand the theological imperatives that brought them together, but he was shocked to discover that hate was not the guiding impulse.

I spent many Sundays in evangelical churches and hung out with 15,000 evangelical youth at the Urbana conference. I wasn’t sure what to expect among thousands of college-age evangelicals, but I certainly didn’t expect the intense discussion of racial equity and refugee issues — how to help them, not how to keep them out — but that is what I got.

He was surprised to find out that the native spear carriers were not mindless killing machines.

None of my new hunting partners fit the lazy caricature of the angry NRA member.

He even found that the natives were upset because the ruling class ignored their needs.

I also spent time in depressed areas of Kentucky and Ohio with workers who felt that their concerns had long fallen on deaf ears and were looking for every opportunity to protest a government and political and media establishment that had left them behind.

Of course, while the natives issues have been ignored (or ridiculed), the ruling class means well.  The people who are currently leading them are terrible people, they’re agitating for change, they’re inappropriate who don’t use the right knives and forks.  And it’s having an unfortunate effect: the rulers are losing the respect which are rightly theirs.

Some may take pleasure in the discomfort of the media, but it is not a good situation for the country to have the media in disrepute and under constant attack. Virtually every significant leader of this nation, from Jefferson on down, has recognized the critical role of an independent press to the orderly functioning of democracy. We should all be worried that more than 65 percent of voters think there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media and that our major media institutions are seen as creating, not combatting, our growing partisan divide.

 

Some of this loss of reputation stems from effective demagoguery from the right and the left, as well as from our demagogue-in-chief, but the attacks wouldn’t be so successful if our media institutions hadn’t failed us as well.

 

None of this justifies the attacks from President Trump, which are terribly inappropriate coming from the head of government.

Stern believes that the media needs to focus more on the benighted natives, yelling at them in in their own curious language, dominating their discussions, telling them the “right-think” in their tribal events, their religious ceremonies, their governing councils.

You can’t cover America from the Acela corridor, and the media need to get out and be part of the conversations that take place in churches and community centers and town halls.

Whoops.  The Liberal Culture has gone a little too far driving the rest of us away from the things that interest the inhabitants of the Acela corridor.  Having taken over total control of Hollywood, music, the arts, the press, academia and the courts they are absolutely gob smacked to find out that they no longer have the respect - or the attention - of the natives.