It today's New York Times page A9 there is a large colorful ad for something called StoryCorps, part of the "National Teachers Initiative." Sponsors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation AND NPR.
Shouldn't NPR be objectively reporting on issues, not joining with particular advocates and pushing a particular agenda?
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See also last week's thread about Schenley, where NPR affiliate EPR refused to even listen to (never mind investigate) anything other than the PPS point of view on Schenley:
http://purereform.blogspot.com/2012/06/schenley-now-its-not-asbestos-its.html
Proving once again, everything has a price and everyone can be bought. This is so sad, Not quit as sad as Gates using our kids as science experiments, but still sad.
NPR plays a StoryCorps story every Friday -- for a while now, maybe for the past 5 years. Each story is usually a conversation between people with a close relationship to each other -- father/son, grandmother/grandchild, etc. and the stories are archived by the Smithsonian Institute.
The teacher initiative -- (I believe) is just a chance to celebrate teachers using the same format. I heard one -- a conversation between NPR anchor Audie Cornish and her history teacher -- but haven't heard others.
I guess any time Gates is a sponsor of something, there's an immediate reflex of suspicion -- I feel that too.
But it's quite likely that there's nothing too sinister about this Story Corps initiative.
But what if the stories up to now had been more about relationships between family members and friends, without any particular sponsors, and then all of a sudden they start highlighting certain kinds of teachers or teaching approaches and the BMG Foundation has signed on as a sponsor?
I don't know -- I guess anything can go in a negative direction. The one I heard (Audie Cornish & history teacher), the teacher talked about how the demographics have changed in the years since Audie graduated and also about the fact that she spent hours and hours grading papers.
Below is a link to the story corps teachers initiative website.
http://storycorps.org/initiatives/national-teachers-initiative/
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