On The Media was always an NPR outlier for me. A usually perceptive peek inside the meta narratives that I've been interested in since studying McLuhan in high school. I had to stop listening around the Trump era because it drifted into the dishonest space you identified above. So sad and weird.

What is going on with the smart people in America? At a minimum they should be suspicious of the certainty of their beliefs. Anyone who isn't shouldn't dare consider themselves part of any intelligentsia.