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.
I hate to disillusion the author but to most Conservatives the Leftist slide of NPR began before he went to work there. We were already pushing against taxpayer funding for NPR when Reagan was President.
They operate under the false premise they ever had America’s heart and mind.
Isn’t there some kind of “effect” where people believe everything they see in the media until the media reports on the person’s own special field and gets everything wrong? I forget the name of it. Anyway, this guy has that, except he’s actually in the media so it took him longer to figure things out.
I read once that his accent was something he affected after spending time in the UK. Don't know if that's true or not.
“ 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”
My polar opposite lol 😆
Completely agree. The article is decent, he comes oh so close to getting why they aren’t trusted. He reports that there are 87 libs and 0 conservatives on the editorial board but that defunding just cant be the answer. He’s close, guys, but still misses.
> Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, ...
The gaslighting runs deep with this one. In 2011 NPR was full on leftist advocacy.
In 1981 NPR was full on leftist advocacy................
Oh please. NPR has NEVER been credible. It has NEVER exercised reasonable objective standards of journalism. It has always been Leftist propaganda.
The only people who think Clinton was a neocon are far left freaks and Russiabots.
I remember listening to NPR 50 years ago. I noticed that when a contentious political issue was discussed, they would interview a Democrat and ask him to explain their view on the issue. But when they then interviewed a Republican, they only asked about the congressional process on the issue. Subtle censorship and bias.
Germans will German?
Ber·lin·er (ˌ)bər-ˈli-nər. plural Berliners. : a native or inhabitant of Berlin, Germany.
That “donut” thing is one of those stupid mocking memes and nobody was even slightly confused.
There is a Berliner sauce, a Berliner Weisse beer, a Berliner Pastry etc. That donut thing is another of the mocking “look how smart I think I am” internet era “You won’t believe this” stories.
Bookmark.
.
Yeah, I’m aware of that. But there are always these people claiming when JFK gave his speech, the audience was confused and thought he was claiming to be a jelly donut.
Didn’t happen.
G. Gordon Liddy used to tell that story on his radio show. Mainly as a joke, though.......
They are very proud to say at the beginning of each event that CFR takes no institutional or political decisions.
However ... the topics they choose to cover are from a leftist bent. The guests/panel members they feature are from a leftist bent. The audience questions are from a leftist bent. Which means that anything conservative, libertarian, or leftist simply doesn't get brought up. The flavor of CFR is quite clear.
But yeah, they take no position. NPR is the same. Leftist subjects, positions, leftist questions, leftist guests, leftist conclusions. When they have a token "conservative" it's invariably an inarticulate one who couldn't be more useless. It's never a Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Rand Paul, Reps. Higgins, Roy, Massie, Tiffany, Waltz, etc.
I enjoy their documentaries … until they insist on dropping Mario Cuomo into “Baseball,” Henry Gates (of Beer Summit fame) into a genealogy program, or Bill Clinton into everywhere they can stuff him sideways. Then I want to throw the remote through the TV. Their liberal professor “experts” are insufferable.
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