Every leftist I know basically pees their pants laughing at the concept of NPR being “too liberal.” If anything, the public radio broadcaster twists itself into knots trying to present the “reasonable side” of right-wing arguments — even if they can’t find a reasonable argument and they essentially have to invent one.
The standard joke in left-wing circles is that NPR stands for “Nice, Polite Republicans.” If NPR is “liberal,” it’s only “liberal” when compared to commercial, for-profit news-talk radio, which is almost 100 percent across-the-board conservative.
The controversy flared up a few days ago, when an NPR news editor, Uri Berliner, published an article on a right-wing website, The Free Press, arguing that the public broadcaster is staffed by partisan Democrats who skew the service’s journalism and push excessive, unwarranted coverage of topics such as racism, reproductive health and LGBTQ rights.
Berliner, who was suspended without pay for five days for disparaging his employer, has now resigned in protest.
The conservative media is having a field day with Berliner’s article (which is undoubtedly what he wanted).
Republicans in Congress want to use the article as justification for their efforts to completely de-fund NPR (never mind that only 1 percent of NPR’s funding comes from the federal government; another 9 percent or so comes indirectly from state and local sources, in places where NPR stations are owned by local and state governments).
Fox News has been blaring that “NPR’s scandals have reached a fever pitch” and the National Review has an editorial out, “Defund NPR.”
This is all, of course, horse hockey, as Col. Potter would say.
On his own blog, NPR host Steve Inskeep has demolished Berliner’s article. Berliner did more than just cherry pick facts, Inskeep says; he made things up.
Writes Inskeep: “He says there is no debate over stories at NPR, just a ‘frictionless’ process like an ‘assembly line.’ … Uri is a prominent editor—did he approve bad stories without friction?”
According to Inskeep, Berliner claims that NPR frequently uses the word “Latinx” to describe persons of Hispanic and Latin American descent; he cites it as an example of the network’s “wokeness.” So Inskeep says he did a search at npr.org for the previous 90 days:
“I found: 197 uses of Latino, 201 uses of Latina, and just nine uses of ‘Latinx,’ usually by a guest on NPR who certainly has the right to say it.” (The emphasis is Inskeep’s.)
Berliner’s article, says Inskeep, fails as journalism: “Uri calls for ‘viewpoint diversity’ but did not seem to embrace it for this article. He didn’t seek comment from anyone or otherwise engage anyone who had a different point of view. The failure to vet the story may explain why the errors and omissions all go in one direction, toward confirming the writer’s pre-existing opinions.”
Although NPR has issued a response to Berliner’s article, Inskeep concludes that there is no need for a point-by-point rebuttal; The Free Press, he says, “let (Berliner) publish an article that discredited itself.”