Defund NPR

National Review Online

Thursday, April 18, 2024

 

National Public Radio has every right to operate as a left-wing propaganda outlet masquerading as a legitimate news organization. But it is not entitled to pursue this goal with taxpayer money. The latest revelations about the ideological rot at NPR have only made this case stronger.

 

Before his resignation on Wednesday, Uri Berliner had worked at NPR for 25 years, most recently as a senior editor. But after being suspended for last week writing a long essay for theFree Press criticizing the organization for its bias, Berliner decided to resign, saying he could no longer work there comfortably.

 

In his essay, Berliner argued that while NPR always had “a liberal bent,” in the past, it at least attempted to provide some balance. These days, he wrote, “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.”

 

The change, he said, started with the election of Donald Trump. He described how the programming relentlessly pushed the Russian-collusion story only to leave it largely unmentioned once the Mueller report did not establish collusion; how NPR consciously refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story in the runup to the 2020 election; and how during Covid, its journalists portrayed the lab-leak theory as having been debunked when it had not been.

 

In the wake of the George Floyd killing and the ensuing riots, NPR followed other institutions in imposing a DEI framework organization-wide. “Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace,” Berliner recounted.

 

He described how employee “affinity” groups emerged based on identity, including “MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).”

 

But in all the focus on diversity — which was described as NPR’s “North Star” — there was no effort to expand ideological diversity. When Berliner did a search of voter-registration records of editorial employees of the D.C. newsroom, he found 87 Democrats and zero Republicans. His efforts to raise alarms about this fell on deaf ears.

 

Berliner’s essay has brought new scrutiny of its new CEO, Katherine Maher, and her long history of activist statements that border on parody.

 

“I do wish Hillary wouldn’t use the language of ‘boy and girl,’” she lamented in 2016, “it’s erasing language for non-binary people.” In 2020, she defended rioters, posting, “I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.” She also wrote, “Lots of jokes about leaving the US, and I get it. But as someone with cis white mobility privilege, I’m thinking I’m staying and investing in ridding ourselves of this spectre of tyranny.” At another point, she posted a picture of herself — masked outdoors, naturally — with a “Biden for President” hat. In a meandering TED Talk that makes Vice President Kamala Harris’s musings seem coherent, Maher blurted out the gem that, “We all have different truths.”

 

Clearly, Maher, who took the helm in January, is not the cure for ideological bias at NPR.

 

If NPR wants to run a journalist enterprise that is dedicated to advancing progressive ideology, it should do so with income from sponsorships, donations, subscriptions, or other avenues — just like every other media organization. It should not benefit from subsidies from U.S. taxpayers.

 

NPR likes to argue that only 1 percent of its funding comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But as Howard Husock of the American Enterprise Institute has explained, this is highly misleading. The 1 percent figure refers to direct funding, but a much larger percentage of its revenue comes from local public radio stations, which use federal funds to purchase programming produced by NPR. In 2021, he notes, “NPR reported $90 million in revenue from ‘contracts from customers,’ a significant portion of its $279 million and much more than 1 percent.”

 

Admittedly, in principle, we don’t think that it is the role of the federal government to fund public broadcasting. But if the government is going to be subsidizing a news organization, that organization should at least be balanced with a mix of perspectives more representative of the country. When it fails to do this, any justification for continuing to support it out of the common treasury falls apart.

 

Berliner, in his resignation letter, wrote that he does not support calls to defund NPR and expresses hope that NPR can “thrive and do important journalism.”

 

But the reality that Berliner describes is too deeply rooted to be easily changed. Even if Maher were replaced as CEO immediately, it wouldn’t alter the fact that the producers, editors, and journalists will still be overwhelmingly — if not exclusively — left-wingers. Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize their salaries.