Poor NPR. Life just isn’t fun any more. Like its Hollywood cousin, the movie industry, it’s seen some of its upper management hit with sexual harassment claims. Then there’s those pesky unions it’s had to negotiate with. But all that pales next to the stress and strain its reporters face having to deal with President Trump and the country’s lack of respect for what they do.

As my grandmother would say, bless their hearts.

How ever do they get anything done when they have “nonstop meetings with staffers” because things have gotten so bad for them? Yet, apparently everything was just wonderful until the sexual harassment claims became public. It seems those were “just the tip of the iceberg. It was like this spark that just lit up this whole powder keg.”

Was NPR COO Loren Mayor completely clueless about what was going on or are we looking at a snowball effect? Or, more likely, is this yet another manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome?

According to Mayor, “A lot of the anger from that just sort of tapped directly into, and even this broader climate was in there too, being in a newsroom, feeling under attack every day as a member of the media, that sense of stress also all came forward.”

Of course, that stress is from the President’s attacks on the media for fake news and from the public for not believing their every word. Taken in conjunction with the following tweet, the irony simply drips from the NPR boardroom all the way down to street level.

Glover is, according to her Twitter account, the 21st president of the National Association of Black Journalists. On the surface, I agree completely with her tweet. A good journalist should question authority and resist spin. Unfortunately, we see too little of the first — at least when the authority in question is liberal. When it comes to resisting spin, I can’t help but laugh. Too many journalists, including those at NPR, live to spin.

The recent controversy over President Trump’s alleged use of the term “shithole” is a case in point. NPR began covering the story by bleeping the word out, much as it has whenever a sitting president used a profanity in any context. Then, as other networks decided to run with the spin (“MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called Trump an “openly racist president.”‘), NPR reporters were given the go-ahead to use the word.

“We feel it is necessary to say the word ‘shithole’ so that listeners have the full context,” standards and practices editor Mark Memmott wrote in an internal memo. “But, the word should be heard very sparingly. No more than one use of the word each hour in the main shows is enough.”

Pardon me while I laugh. I don’t know which is worse: the possibility the powers-that-be at NPR think their listeners are too ignorant to be able to figure out what the word being bleeped was, that they couldn’t figure out the context or that NPR believes their listeners are foolish enough to buy into this supposed explanation.

But they’re stressed, don’cha know. The president is mean to them, calling them out on their biased reporting. What’s a reporter to do?

Obviously, it’s not to stay away from the spin. After all, when is the last time you heard someone from the MSM, and NPR in particular, remind their listeners/readers about Dick Durbin’s history of lying about what happened in private meetings at the White House?

Besides, how are they supposed to report anything when they are in non-stop meetings with staffers who are, apparently, sooooo traumatized by all that is going on to do their jobs? Who knows, maybe they are trying to be the Kathy Griffin of news reporting.