WILBERT RIDEAU: INCESTUOUS RELATIONSHIP WITH NPR
National Public Radio (”NPR”) lacks serious credibility. It is commonly recognized that NPR has a liberal biased agenda by everyone with enough sense to get out of the rain. Part of their agenda is to promote Wilbert Rideau, the former editor of a prison magazine, as an awe-inspiring individual who overcame nearly insurmountable obstacles to become an award-winning inmate journalist. I have written before about the liberal media’s love and fascination with Rideau (here and here).
Once again I must correct another of these liberal media stalwarts: NPR. Lamenting the fact that Rideau has not received an invitation to speak before any professional journalism group since his release from prison, NPR had this say in its promotion to get Rideau invited before one of these groups:
“Mark Saltz wrote for the Associated Press in 2006, ‘while in prison, Rideau went from an illiterate teenager to a well-read, self-educated man.’”
Once again I have debunked the myth that Rideau was an “illiterate teenager” when he was convicted and sent to Louisiana’s death row in 1962 (here and here). This myth was created by Rideau while he was in prison and absorbed as fact by liberal journalists who loved the downtrodden black inmate in a redneck southern prison who self-educated himself by virtual candlelight. The myth became so entrenched that Mark Saltz reported it as a “fact” in 2006, one year after Rideau’s release, and NPR continues to hype the myth.
Wilbert Rideau at the time he committed his crime and after he was sent to prison was a highly intelligent young man. His own high school teachers reported as much. Rideau also had the criminal cunning to buy a pistol, a knife, and a suitcase needed to rob a bank, take three people hostage, wound two of them as they fled for their lives, and kill a third by stabbing her through the heart and slitting her throat as she begged for life.
Rideau wrote in his memoir, “In The Place of Justice” (Random House 2010), that he decided to rob the bank in 1961 at age 19 because the white community in Lake Charles, Louisiana had so marginalized him that it was the only way to escape the city and start a new life in sunny California. Now does that sound like an “illiterate teenager?”
There’s another fundamental flaw in the erroneous illiterate teenager myth. Rideau said in a number of media interviews before his release from prison that white prison guards smuggled him books to read while on death row and in his memoir he credits a fellow condemned inmate as the one who got him interested in reading by providing him with a copy of a Frank Yerby book.
If Rideau was illiterate, how did he read Yerby’s Fair Oaks and a host of other books “smuggled” to him on his path toward self-education. Being illiterate means the individual cannot read or write.
The fact is that Rideau is a literary fraud—and media outlets like NPR are bound and determined to shove him down the throat of the American public.
Sam Jones said:
Sep 23, 11 at 9:04 pmYou are saying that because there is a “left wing” agenda, that NPR is not credible in terms of facts. Problem is, people on the left say the same thing about Fox News (“right wing”). It doesn’t end well.
What really matters is: how good are the editorial/fact-checking departments? You can have a biased newspaper that tries to push an agenda that still gets its facts right, yes? And you can have an unbiased newspaper that gets its facts totally wrong.
One other tip – if you want widespread support for your cause, using the argument “Oh it’s sooo liberal so it’s not credible” will simply divide your audience.
People in rural America tend to be Republican. People in urban America tend to be Democrat (you may be aware of this since you spent some time in Houston – even though it does have a significant Republican power base, the city is getting more and more blue). As the country empties and as cities gain more and more prominence, the “liberal” mindset associated with Democrats will increase.
If you approach NPR from the “fact checking” perspective THEN you can win over people from both sides.
bsinclair said:
Sep 25, 11 at 6:01 amSam Jones – I am definitely not a Republican nor am I a political conservative. The entire thrust of my posts is that Rideau’s memoir was not seriously fact-checked–and that the “liberal” media have given him a forum to express his points of view with little or no regard to their merit. Even someone with has no frame of reference for either Rideau or his prison background could not rationally accept the content of the memoir. But I do seriously thank you for your comments. They were well-stated and well-received.