What Rick Perlstein Says, Re: "The Creative Society"

In a new piece up at CFAF (link in headline, above), he starts out nicely, upbraiding NPR reporter Rene Montagne for her soft-ball, deferential treatment of the Consumer Product Safety's acting director (and former flack for the US Chamber of Commerce) Nancy Nord on Morning Edition on Thursday over the Govt's responsibility in latest recall of Chinese toys by Mattel, and ends with a reminder that we were started on this path by the shitsucking asshole, Raygun, and his drive to privatize (The Creative Society of the title) government services, and his penchant for blaming Government regulation for all social ills.
In all of this I am Rick's rapt admirer and fan. But our paths diverge later in the piece, when he writes:

National Public Radio, by the way, was taken in hook, line, and sinker by Nord's bamboozlement. They entitled their dispatch "Safety Agency: Importers Must Meet U.S. Standards." Even though Nord had never quite said that good flack: they never quite lie because it's simply not true.

I fiercely disagree!

NPR was NOT 'taken in.' They could NOT have possibly NOT known Nancy Nord's 'provenance'; they could not possibly NOT have known her history.

Ergo, they CHOSE their supine, feckless posture of complicity within the right-wing bidness alliance; they CHOSE not to question deeply; they CHOSE to accept the non-answers and evasions, misinformation and mis-statements which Nord so lavishly strewed, like ripe pig-shit, into their all-too-willing, all-too-open microphones.

Just as they virtuously repeat verbatim the codswallop spewed by Richard Murray, the owner of the Utah mine that has now claimed the lives of NINE people. Murray has been an 'outspoken' critic of mining safety regulation (which fact somehow never seems to be repeated in reports which feature him and his 'assurances' that the collapse was not triggered by managerially mandated, unsafe mining practices) and scofflaw who threatens mine inspectors with his close ties to Mitch McConnell (yeah, THAT Mitch McConnell), bought and cemented by his many, extravagant donations to the Senator's campaigns and PACs....

Institutionally NPR has become nothing more than another instrument of the State propaganda apparatus, to paraphrase Althusser. If I could separate my donation, and demand that it be spent ONLY on local operations, I would do so. I cannot--or perhaps MAY not--but I always inform them that I donate to them at all only to keep the local station solvent, and that I have nothing but contempt for them generally.