All Things Considered: The Case for Defunding NPR

In the April 9 installment of Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, Uri Berliner, a senior editor at National Public Radio, spilled the few credibility beans remaining in public radio’s corporate pot.  According to the 25-year veteran of NPR, the organization’s initial stage-one bias has aggressively metastasized to produce a decline and homogenization of its listening audience. To put a finer point on it, he suggested that NPR’s reporting had become “knee-jerk, activist, [and] scolding,” something that would be characteristic of “an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience.”

Berliner wrote, “It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent but. . .[t]oday, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”  He then provided an incomplete list of NPR’s demagoguing that included: 

1. credulous coverage of the debunked story that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid, as NPR hitched its polemics “wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, representative Adam Schiff [the inveterate liar, censured by congress for his many prevarications]. . .[who] became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever present muse”; 
2. the purposeful rejection of the Hunter Biden laptop story with the 2020 election just weeks away, something NPR’s managing editor for news dismissed, saying, “We don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” and; 
3. the one-sided and erroneous reporting of the Covid pandemic and the likelihood that a wet market (as opposed to a leak from the bioweapons lab in Wuhan) was the source of the global contagion.

Of course, to modern Cynics, those disciples of Diogenes who quest for the honest among men, those who have long been searching for factual accountings of current events (at least to the extent possible), an audience comprised mainly of truth-seeking conservatives and neutral observers who had been paying attention, Berliner’s revelations were not in the least surprising.  If anything, it was a—yawn—“Oh, yeah? What-else-is-new?” moment.

I vividly recall my personal awakening in September of 1997. For more than a decade, I had been a devoted consumer of NPR programming, mainly because the local station played a euphonious variety of classical and baroque music, but also because I enjoyed Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, Tom and Ray Magliozzi’s Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, and Dick Estell’s The Radio Reader. I even occasionally donated to NPR’s pledge drives.

In fact, I was as happy as a clam until I heard NPR’s memoriam to Mother Teresa. Around noon on the day after her death, probably just before or after The Radio Reader, I listened to an NPR newsreader intone, “Mother Teresa, the Catholic sister controversial for her opposition to abortion, has died at the age of 87.” 

That was it. Nothing about her missionary work, her charity and sacrifice on behalf of Calcutta’s poor. No mention of the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded or of her founding of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, a group of Catholic sisters devoted to helping the vulnerable and those in need. No recounting that she and her congregation of women opened schools to teach poor children and operated dispensaries to help the sick, blind, and disabled and hospices where the indigent could die with dignity. Nothing about the petite woman’s humble selflessness, her strength of character, the hardships she endured, or that one day, relatively soon, she would likely become a saint. 

To NPR’s commentator, the most significant aspect of her existence was that she opposed abortion and that made her controversial. At that moment, I realized how incredibly shallow, disgracefully inept, and shamelessly biased NPR’s “reporting” of the news was. From that day on, I no longer listened or donated to NPR.

NPR’s skewed, too often disingenuous reporting is bad enough; but another consistently underappreciated aspect of the organization’s noxious influence is that of its relationship with public universities—what could be called NPR’s j-school-to-propaganda pipeline.

University journalism schools, or “j-schools,” are rife with the spirit of post-modernity. Whether it’s called wokeness, DEI/CRT, neo-Marxism, decolonization, marxisant, or whatever term you prefer, the post-modern zeitgeist of Western culture suffuses much of academia, particularly the social sciences, and, perhaps, most perniciously, the discipline of journalism. 

For decades, truth, facts, fairness, and objectivity were the bedrock of the profession, but no longer. Facts are tortured into conformance with post-modern conceptions; objective truth is passé. Asserting “we acknowledge there are many different truths” in a 2022 Ted Talk, the new CEO of NPR, Katherine Mahar, describes her own personal truth—one that is indeterminate, multifaceted, and malleable. Her beclouded notion of truth is convenient, though, for journalists who, unfettered by any allegiance to objectivity, are free to choose whichever of the “many different truths” best align with their activist narratives. And make no mistake, the de rigueur of woke activism is now the raison d’être of journalism pedagogy at elite universities.

Jelani Cobb, once a staff writer for The New Yorker, is now dean of Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Ibram X. Kendi, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, is a humanities professor and director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. The pair discussed “objectivity as a fallacy” during the keynote session of the Power of Narrative Conference held at Boston University in 2021. A review of the conference appearing online at the Nieman Storyboard (published by Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism) summed up the theme of the keynote as follows:

Journalists, especially young journalists of color, can learn so much from these two about how to use narrative to decolonize prevailing truths about our past and present to empower marginalized voices and unify disparate communities…the most powerful tool [we] have to cause change is narrative.

For academic elites, objective truth is a nettlesome speedbump, something to be steamrollered flat whenever it gets in the way of the progressive agenda. Journalistic power lies not in an honest, unprejudiced recounting of facts that would allow the reader to decide the merits of the reported incident but, instead, in an activist’s bias buttressed by a carefully curated narrative selected from among many possible pseudo-truths.

NPR claims that more than half of their one thousand stations are licensed to, or are associated with, institutions of higher education. Wherever a journalism program exists at an affiliated college or university, it’s a fairly safe bet that the broadcasting facilities will also be a “hands-on” j-school learning lab. It just makes sense. Students work on the cheap (or for free) in return for “real-world” professional experiences (and, in some cases, academic credit). Public radio affiliates are responsible for producing whatever content they do not purchase from NPR, so students become immersed in all aspects of production and programming. But there is an insidious problem with this arrangement.

The “real-world” experiences to which these impressionable students are exposed is a deceiving maze of fun-house mirrors that reflect the distorted images of a biased worldview. One of the points made by Uri Berliner is that, from top to bottom, the NPR workforce is extremely partisan. As evidence, he offered an informal polling of editorial staff that produced a political affiliation ratio of 87 registered Democrats to zero Republicans. Unfettered by objective truth, NPR partisans are unrestrained in efforts to produce narratives that support or promote a single-minded worldview. One of the points made by Uri Berliner is that, from top to bottom, the NPR workforce is extremely partisan.Tweet This

J-school faculty preach the value of activism and the “power of the narrative” to students interacting with NPR role models who produce and deliver the biased reporting their professors advocate. They graduate, leaving campus to enter the profession as fully indoctrinated activists. This is the j-school-to-propaganda pipeline. The constitutionally-protected free press is thus turned in upon itself to become nothing more than a cheerleader—or worse, a propagandist—for a woke philosophy that is, in so many obvious ways, destructive of liberty in a democratic society. NPR is a culpable enabler of the j-school-to-propaganda pipeline.

Without question, some degree of bias pervades all corporate media. What’s different about NPR is that its programming is supported by tax dollars. Moreover, the organization’s reporting provides confirmation bias for a relatively small audience of upper-class elites and those who identify as politically progressive—what Berliner calls a relatively small “niche audience.” A primary reason that Berliner went public was to correct what he saw as a significant left-leaning bias at NPR that produced a lack of trust among the general population and, consequently, reduced its audience to this niche. For his well-intended efforts, CEO Maher suspended him without pay and he subsequently resigned.

NPR exists, in part, on the tax dollars of citizens who mostly receive no benefit from public radio while, to twist the knife, the organization demeans what its staff ardently believe is a regressive embrace of traditional values. That is what Berliner was trying to tell them. They have lost the trust of the population who fall into Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” who, according to Peter Strzok, are “smelly Walmart shoppers,” and who, according to the forty-fourth president of the United States, are naïvely and retrogressively “clinging to their bibles and their guns.” We, who to the elites are the hoi polloi, do not belong to public radio’s niche audience, yet we have no choice but to support it.

The United States is a nation carrying more than $34.665 trillion in national debt. At some point, we will of necessity, either through intentionally aggressive action or by default, come to terms with our unsustainable excesses. All things considered, ending taxpayer support of National Public Radio is no longer just a good idea, it is an idea whose time has come.

Defund NPR now!

[Image: Uri Berliner]