An NPR journalist is pretty shocked by the taxpayer-funded outlet’s hard-left bias
Since their inception, taxpayer-funded NPR (radio) and PBS (television) presented themselves as neutral outlets dedicated to uplifting Americans while providing fair and honest information. This was always a lie. The outlets catered to the shibboleths of white, upper-middle-class liberals. Now, though, according to Uri Berliner, a 25-year veteran of NPR, NPR has dropped any pretense of balance or objectivity. Instead, beginning in 2016, it threw itself wholeheartedly into open, hard-left political and social advocacy. That would be sad if it were merely another commercial media outlet. What makes it bad is that you’re still paying for it.
NPR likes to claim that it gets only about 1% of its annual budget from the federal government. In fact, when you break down the numbers, as of 2023, NPR and its affiliates got about 39% of their budget directly or indirectly from both federal and state sources. Indeed, NPR concedes that “Federal funding is essential to public radio’s service to the American public…”
And what do we get for that money?
Image based on the NPR logo. (Public domain.)
Well, beginning in 1970, we got culture in the form of televised high-end culture; children’s programming that wasn’t dedicated to selling cereal but that sought, instead, to educate; documentaries that had the same vibe as The New Yorker once did, when it delved into non-standard things like 1920s jazz musicians or orchid smugglers; and news programming that purported to be staid as opposed to sensational, cosmopolitan as opposed to parochial, and, above all, objective as befitted a publicly funded outlet.
For decades, the cultural stuff, children’s TV programming, and documentaries lived up to that billing. The news, though, was always biased—or at least, very quickly became biased—because it was made by and for the progressive college crowd.
I know this because I was an NPR consumer from 1987 through 2001 when I was the generic white, upper-middle-class, professional, secular Jewish Democrat voter. NPR was my worldview reflected back at me. In carefully packaged segments that purported to be thorough, NPR routinely lambasted conservatives and elevated Republicans.
In 1991, NPR coverage left us in no doubt that Anita Hill was correct that Clarence Thomas was not only an Uncle Tom but also a sexual predator. It ensured we knew in 1992 that George H. W. Bush was a disaster, and that Bill Clinton presented a hopeful future. It gently chided us for our racism.
By the early 2000s, it was a staunch advocate for euthanasia. I vividly remember one long-form interview in which a Dutch man assured us that euthanasia was safe only in socialized medicine countries because families there weren’t pressured to kill granny to save money on her medical care. Of course, history quickly showed us that families will do anything to save granny. It’s socialized medicine that uses euthanasia to cut costs.
I lapped it all up.
What changed for me was the fact that we all have something we know in our bones to be true. No one can lie to us about that thing. I knew to be true that Israel was (and is) the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, a country that either bought the land it sits on or won it fair and square through traditional warfare, and that has a population with ties to the land going back 4,000 years. I knew, too, that her enemies were genocidal maniacs. So, when NPR’s reporting on the Middle East was constantly—albeit always delicately—slanted again Israel, I knew it was lying.
And of course, once you see the lies, you can’t unsee them.
This gets me to a fascinating essay by Uri Berliner, who has worked at NPR for 25 years. Berliner has figured out that NPR has turned into a Maoist organization, but even though he still sees some lies, he fails to recognize them all.
Ignoring NPR’s decades of classy, subtle Democrat bias, Berliner contends that everything fell apart in 2016 when Trump was elected. Then, instead of “tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president,” NPR began its “efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.” Berliner asserts that the reporting on the Russia hoax was honest, if mistaken, but that NPR fell down on the job when it ignored the story once the hoax was revealed. Not even a “my bad.”
He's also critical that NPR ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story, memorably characterizing it as a “distraction” from the real issues. Even Berliner was surprised when “one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.” Fair-minded, NPR style.
Berliner also takes issue with NPR’s unwavering loyalty to the COVID-came-from-nature narrative, even in the face of increasingly compelling evidence that it was from a Chinese lab leak. Indeed, it “didn’t budge” when the Energy Department said it was likely that a lab leak explained the virus. To justify this refusal to acknowledge the lab leak theory, a colleague explained that, having been burned by the Bush administration’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” narrative, he wasn’t going to be fooled again, no matter the evidence available.
To Berliner, the cause of all these problems was its now-former CEO, John Lansing, who’d worked on the government dime at the Voice of America before joining NPR. Lansing brought with him the whole DEI panoply, which was triggered by George Floyd’s death. Suddenly, radical identity politics invaded NPR, complete with Maoist struggle sessions and a workforce (both in the office and at the negotiating table through unions) that defined itself solely through race, religion, and sexual identity, with a heavy dose of antisemitism underlying all of it.
It’s that reference to George Floyd, though, that reveals that, even as Berliner struggles to understand what happened at NPR, he still doesn’t get it. Having castigated NPR for blindly believing the Russia Hoax and COVID narratives, he uncritically accepts that Floyd, who died from a combination of illegal drugs and severe heart disease, was “murdered.” He is as incurious as his colleagues, only his shibboleths are slightly different from theirs.
The funniest part of the whole sad essay is that, despite its best efforts at intersectionality and wokism, NPR remains what it has always been: a niche, white, upper-middle-class outlet. Minorities do not listen to it and do not care that the crazy college grads are purportedly acting on their behalf.