Full disclosure. I was a comrade reporter at NPR in the 1980s doing freelance stories on science, arts, and sports reporting for Morning Edition and All Things Considered. I was so happy to please my socialist overlord editors by producing reports on the archeology of garbage, electronic music created by electric fish, the first artificial heart bridge-to-transplant, Steve Kerr’s emergence as a great college basketball player at the University of Arizona, the asteroid theory of the extinction of dinosaurs, restoring wetlands to help remove pollution from water, the release of rescued baby elephant seals under the Golden Gate Bridge, sex determination in turtles by temperature of egg incubation, the Society of Six painters in San Francisco, arrival of zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, the physics of whether batters’s eyes can follow a pitched baseball from the pitcher’s hand to home plate (spoiler: they can’t), and many more made-up stories to feed the liberal pinko narrative guidelines that governed my thoughts and work.
That said, I actually enjoy most NPR and even PBS productions, especially those clever mocumentaries where they simulate fund-raising that show the futility of asking listeners and watchers to feel their inner Karl Marx. But Ken Burns’ Civil War series was too much. We know the war was not about slavery, but his series insisted otherwise. I wasn’t fooled by his talk of southerners who loved their traditions, even though they, by chance, happened to include enslaving people from Africa to provide the cheap labor needed for cotton farming. Setting the record straight: the South won and there is now an international border running along the Mason Dixon line. Full stop. Thank you for your attention to this matter.