Free Republic

CNN This Morning host Audie Cornish used Friday's Group Chat to promote her new CNN podcast, Engagement Party, co-hosted with former her former National Public Radio colleague Ari Shapiro, whom she brought onto the Chat panel. The discussion quickly turned into a nostalgic send-off for Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. The segment perfectly illustrated the insular world of legacy media’s liberal talent pipeline. Cornish and Shapiro, both veteran NPR anchors, were joined by Garcia-Navarro (another longtime NPR host) as they lovingly processed Colbert’s exit. Shapiro set the tone early, describing the finale as “so moving” with a “snow globe moment” that...

College radio used to have great music, from experimental jazz to progressive rock to fusion country to classical music. But then the Corporation for Public Broadcasting promised to help pay their bills... as long as they passed that money onto NPR. Your local university allowed its radio station to essentially launder money to NPR (and other even further-left organizations like Pacifica Radio). So when NPR claimed it received only 1% of its funding from the federal government, they meant only 1% came DIRECTLY from the federal government, but it nearly all came from the federal government. To the extent they...

If I didn't have my garage radio tuned to NPR (my early warning system) I never would have known about the stealth plan to build yet another "professional sports complex" with a price tag of $2.3 billion in Hillsborough County. I don't even know which sports team this one's for. The article featured Tampa's Mayor exclaiming they still had a lot of work to do on it but she hoped the "Commission" wouldn't need to "raise taxes" (hint, hint) to get it done. Excuse me, Ms. Mayor but where the hell have you been? In 2024 the County Commission got...

NPR is restructuring its newsroom, including cutting some reporting and editing jobs, as it attempts to keep pace with changing audience habits while adjusting to an era without federal subsidies.

A CSPAN caller who said he voted for President Donald Trump three times delivered a shocking takedown of the president Saturday on Washington Journal. The caller, who identified as Thomas from Hawaii, told host Taylor Popielarz that he now regrets his votes for Trump. “It’s hard for me to say this,” Thomas said. “But I think if I can open up about it in public that it might help others. I wanted to believe Trump was the real deal for a long time — even though I had doubts because I knew enough about his business history to think otherwise....

Ramtin Arablouei, 43, who has been at NPR since 2015 and co-hosted “Throughline” alongside Rund Abdelfatah, left the broadcaster after a female employee on the show filed a complaint in March. The employee alleged that Arablouei made her uncomfortable during frequent one-on-one meetings by divulging extensive details of his personal life. She also claimed he made inappropriate remarks during team meetings, including a comment describing a producer as “a case for race mixing” that left staff uncomfortable, according to a report from the New York Post. Additionally, the employee accused Arablouei of flirting with guests and a contract worker associated...

This week, a National Public Radio (NPR) headline asserted "new poll finds a majority of Americans unsure if attempts on Trump's life were real." The article went on to disclose that "30% of Americans think at least one of those incidents was staged. Forty-five percent said each of the attempts was real." That leaves about 25% in the "unsure" category. The poll was conducted by NewsGuard/YouGov. NewsGuard has been a left-wing "fact checker" since it was founded in 2018. NPR's federal government funding was recently withdrawn for its consistent left-wing bias. In the July 2024 attempt at a Trump campaign...

Don’t cure cancer because it would devastate the cancer industry! Don’t improve healthcare access because you’ll hurt the funeral industry! That’s the kind of brain hurt logic NPR employed to decry President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration as a devastating blow to the U.S. economy. “The economic chilling effect of Trump's immigration crackdown,” read NPR reporter Greg Rosalsky’s incoherent May 12 headline. Rosalsky flailed over Trump’s ICE raids in Little Village, Chicago: “Many in the community seemed to be scared to go about business as usual. There seemed to be a clear ‘chilling effect’ on their economic activity —...

At a time of historically high political violence in the U.S., a substantial number of Americans doubt the legitimacy of recent attempts against President Trump's life. Trump has been the subject of three assassination attempts over the last two years, however, a NewsGuard/YouGov poll released Monday finds that 30% of Americans think at least one of those incidents was staged. The findings come just weeks after a gunman allegedly attempted to storm the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where Trump was in attendance, but was stopped at a security checkpoint by law enforcement before reaching the main ballroom. In the weeks...

Either NPR is so high on its own ego that it believes it can get support from George Soros-backed groups for its lefty spin-jobs without anybody noticing or it’s so obtuse that it thinks nobody with a skeptical mind will even take the time to look. NPR immigration correspondent Sergio Martínez-Beltrán came out with a dense, 1498-word pro-illegal immigration sob story May 5 attacking the Trump administration for daring to enforce immigration law in Minnesota. “Minneapolis grapples with the impact of Trump's largest immigration crackdown yet,” read Martinez-Beltran’s narrative-twisting headline. He didn’t even bother to wait past the first paragraph...

A recent NPR report on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's public Ramadan events exemplifies a broader media pattern: portraying Islam as a neutral, purely spiritual faith while obscuring its civilizational and political dimensions. The story portrays public prayers and communal iftar meals as harmless cultural inclusion, portraying them as efforts to "normalize Muslim life" in the city. The Political and Military Significance of Ramadan In NPR's coverage, Ramadan appears merely as a tradition of communal meals and a marker of diversity. Large iftar events organized alongside the government, including one held in a prison complex, are described as gestures...

Imagine a robot that could do your laundry, make your bed, cook your dinner, or stock the dairy section at your local grocery store. Humans have long been able to teach robots how to do individual tasks, but instructing them on these more sophisticated jobs has been an elusive goal, despite billions of dollars invested into robotics. Robots with neurotic personalities, a la C-3PO of Star Wars fame, can come off as relatable to people, a new study finds. Now, a team of scientists in Switzerland has made progress in the quest to invent helpful robots that can act on...

NSTITUTE, W.Va. — A chemical leak at a West Virginia silver recovery business on Wednesday killed two people and sent about 30 others to hospitals, including one in serious condition, authorities said. The leak occurred at the Catalyst Refiners plant in Institute as workers were preparing to shut down at least part of the facility, Kanawha County Commission Emergency Management Director C.W. Sigman said. A chemical gas reaction occurred at the plant involving nitric acid and another substance, Sigman said at a news briefing. He added that there was "a violent reaction of the chemicals and it instantaneously overreacted." "Starting...

Gerardo Aldana is a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. Our Living Lands producer Daniel Spaulding spoke to Aldana about Mayan astronomy, Mesoamerican culture, and the importance of Indigenous knowledge. “If we think of Indigenous cultures and their approaches, especially Mesoamerican cultures and their approaches to astronomy, it wasn't to transform and control nature,” Aldana said. “It was to find ways to open up dialogues with nature so that now your engagement with your environment can be a productive and a healthy one.”

In an arid valley near the village of Kourtimale in southern Djibouti, a tattered chain link fence marks the boundaries of what was once Abdi Guelleh's farm. ...was once meant to be one tiny brick in one of the world's most ambitious environmental projects: Africa's Great Green Wall. ... This multi-billion dollar project was launched by the African Union in 2007. The plan: to plant a "wall" of trees spanning the entire width of Africa — 4,350 miles long and 10 miles wide — to fight desertification in the Sahel, the arid region to the south of the Sahara desert....

US District Judge Randolph Moss overturned the federal government's decision to discontinue the subsidies to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) calling it "a violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. Neither the President nor Congress has the right to cancel the payment of federal money to these broadcasters merely because they don't like what they are broadcasting or they have better uses for the funds." White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson called Judge Moss' decision "a ridiculous ruling by an activist judge attempting to undermine the law. NPR and PBS have no right...

NPR didn’t manage to quote a single member of the Michigan synagogue that was attacked last month by a crazed Hezbollah-supporting terrorist last month — but did manage to track down his pals 6,000 miles away in Lebanon, a new report reveals. Now even NPR’s public editor is criticizing the lefty broadcaster for the stunning oversight. Instead of focusing on the victims in the heinous attack, a March 14 “All Things Considered” segment sent an NPR reporter to the Lebanon hometown of Ayman Ghazali, 41, who just days earlier had rammed his truck into a Jewish preschool at Temple Israel...

According to the political ideology that I subscribe to (libertarian), I’m supposed to be in favor of ending government funding of NPR. And from a theoretical point of view, I agree with that position.But for me, the real world always supersedes any theory. NPR, along with its government funding, is a long standing tradition in this country, just like the national parks, the national museums, and the Post Office. So even though it goes against libertarian theory, I support a continuation of all of those things.I like to call myself a “bad” libertarian because I am always happy and willing...

Citing the First Amendment, a federal judge on Tuesday agreed to permanently block the Trump administration from implementing a presidential directive to end federal funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, two media entities that the White House has said are counterproductive to American priorities. The operational impact of U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss’ decision was not immediately clear — both because it will likely be appealed and because too much damage to the public-broadcasting system has already been done, both by the president and Congress. Moss ruled that President Donald Trump’s executive order to cease funding...

NPR correspondent Eyder Peralta was amazed during a segment Friday by his recent trip to Venezuela following President Donald Trump's arrest of the country's president Nicolás Maduro. "It is absolutely surreal because you land at the airport and the signs are in Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese, which tells you just where this country was facing a few months ago," Peralta told host Steve Inskeep. "And then you go out on the streets and people here tell you that they feel like a weight has been lifted." He continued, "For the first time in a long time, there are street...