Posted on 04/09/2024 9:04:43 AM PDT by Red Badger
Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.
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You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.
I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.
So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.
It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, 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.
If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.
But it hasn’t.
For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.
Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.
What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.
Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.
In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.
The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as 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.
When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.
Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.
The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.
But that wasn’t the case.
When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.
Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”
Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.
Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”
When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.
You want to hear something slightly amusing?
The other day I was reading a book from the mid-90s. The author was liberal leaning but still was able to weave a good yarn so it was entertaining. The plot was about Iraq, Saddam and his use of chemical weapons with the worry that he was getting nukes.
This was while Bush was governor of Texas.
Perhaps there is a reason libraries are getting rid of all books written before 2017.
Sorry, but I have listened to NPR for more than 30 years now, this statement is an absolute lie:
“In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, 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.
If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.
But it hasn’t.”
Sorry sir, but it ALWAYS has been leftist drivel when it has come to its news reporting and editorial, period. One of the reasons I began to listening to NPR was because I got to see what the other side was saying.. NEVER EVER was their reporting or editorializing “middle of the road”, not EVER.
I will agree their leftward slant has gotten worse and worse over the years, every year it was worse than the year before, this authors belief that the end started with Trump is delusional. I will agree that any attempt to claim validity died completely during the Trump Years, but the credibility outside the leftists who enjoyed having their views reinforced, was tenuous at best, even back during the Clinton Years.
NPR is basically left wing pomposity paid for by your tax dollars, at least anything in their news and opinion devisions, and has been for no less than 3 decades.
““Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” - William F. Buckley, Jr”
A good example of how badly we get OUTSMARTED. The Leftists know FULL WELL there are other views, also called the MAJORITY VIEW, but since they control the media, they get to pick which people they want to provide the ‘other view’ - think Romney, for example. And likewise, they know FULL WELL which Democrats to NEVER let on the air (albeit, very few these days, but they do exist).
NPR——We Are Smater than YOU!
They Always had that snarky Attitude.
The Chemical weapons went to Syria......................
Monotone, self-righteous presenters are only part of it.
I doubt Senator Fetterman (D-PA) will get many interview invitations...................
You never had any trust with me.
You’ve always been into weird left-wing stuff.
I agree. I used to listen occasionally when I was on a trip in the car. NPR has always seemed biased toward the left to me, but it was occasionally at least tolerable. The last several years, though, have gone off the rails. With their treatment of Trump and the pandemic, I called it quits completely.
OOPS
I posted about PBS, not NPR, for some reason I saw PBS.
The only thing I know about NPR is that I always saw it as just PBS on the radio, far left and somebody made sure that you could hear it everywhere, in places where you couldn’t receive regular radio.
The interviews were the WORST. They always featured the most extreme radicals on the topic they were talking about at the moment.
That blew their cover as "moderate" instantly.
I just find it interesting.
I am reading a lot of books written in the 90s and am finding a bunch of bread crumbs on how we got here.
Just read a Police Procedural set in NYC and they were chuckling about how the "New Mayor" thought he was going to clean up the city and how they did not want it cleaned up because all the perverts, homeless and illegals added "flavor" to the city. These were not the villains (the villains were the conservatives of course) these were the police officers.
Exactly. I listed to NPR for a couple of hours a day in my early 20’s and it galvanized me as a conservative, as I never agreed with any of their biased reporting.
This was long before 2011!
“If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.
But it hasn’t.”
A better take is that Liberals, generally, consider themselves to be “mainstream” and “in the middle”. regardless as to how far left they are.
So, for a liberal to look back and say, “we used to be down the middle”. Is to him/ them, true. As they find it difficult to realize how far left they actually are.
So what this REALLY means is that NPR has moved SO FAR LEFT, that even your typical, of the 20 years ago mindset (e.g. Bil Clinton type liberals), thinks they have gone too far.
I was never a Liberal or Lefty, even as a young pre-teenager.
But I didn’t become openly hostile to NPR until the mid-Eighties (likely because I never listened to anything beyond Rock and Roll stations) and I still listened to Car Talk on NPR, which I enjoyed.
But somewhere along the way, I began to fiercely resent them-and the fact that taxpayer money was contributing to it.
I thought this article was a fair self-criticism. Bit it is clear that his attitude is like pissing into the wind at NPR. They aren’t going to listen, to take his advice, or to change. So I pray for their demise.
It takes courage for someone in her position to do so.
She should be applauded and encouraged.
Too bad you haven’t also lost America’s funding. NPR should be cut loose in the name of equity.
It’s a guy...................I think, but don’t hold me to that................It’s NPR after all.................
Thanks. Just figured it out.
Good Lord, that's a quad-fecta. What a stereotypical lib.
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