Accusations of bias at publicly funded National Public Radio have led some Republicans in Congress to introduce a bill to defund it.
NPR has been on the hot seat ever since Senior Business Editor Uri Berliner wrote this article for the Free Press website, in which he accused NPR of not only being biased, but completely devoid of any Republicans on the editorial staff.
Berliner told the “Honestly with Bari Weiss” podcast, “I got so frustrated with what I saw was the sort of the lack of different perspectives in our coverage that I decided to look at voter registration and, you know, my staff.”
Berliner said he found 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans. NPR suspended Berliner for writing the article in violation of company policy. He then resigned.
The NPR controversy has led to fresh debate over whether the government should be funding news coverage at all, let alone one-sided news coverage. NPR has so far been unrepentant, with staffers telling the Washington Post they’re being targeted by conservative activists. USA Today columnist Ingrid Jacques wrote that NPR should be defunded.
Jacques told CBN News, “NPR is showing absolutely no inclination to change and seems to be brushing off these very alarming allegations.”
In a statement, National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher said she and NPR remain committed to “public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests.”
But Maher’s social media history before becoming head of NPR shows a sharp partisan bent, once calling Donald Trump a “deranged racist sociopath.”
That NPR is liberal is not surprising. Paul Matzko, new media expert at the Cato Institute, told us, “Journalism as a whole has shifted in a more left-leaning or especially Democratic perspective. There’s something like 3.4 percent of all journalists today report being Republicans.”
The bill to defund NPR is not being given much hope of passage.
George Washington University Law professor Jonathan Turley told Fox News, “The issue is really, should we have a state-funded media at all? The distinction between MSNBC’s view and NPR is really nonexistent. I mean, they’re both basically coming from the same place, but only one’s getting a subsidy.”
A 2023 Gallup poll found that less than a third (32%) of Americans trust the media, down from almost three-quarters (72%) in 1976. Broken down by political party, 58% of Democrats still trust the media, but only 11% of Republicans.
NPR has made itself a bigger target because it has made such a big deal about its commitment to diversity, which, in at least one respect, it clearly lacks.
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