Well, at least they're consistent
NPR got exposed last week. In fact, it was a week ago today when I wrote about Uri Berliner’s expose on his place of work, NPR.
I haven’t covered everything that happened, but it went about like you’d expect. In the immediate aftermath, NPR tried to paint Berliner negatively and praised their diversity efforts without actually acknowledging that there is no ideological diversity anywhere in NPR.
Berliner himself isn’t on the right, so he doesn’t count. Nor does literally anyone else there from what we can tell, and NPR officials couldn’t point to a single person who leaned right in their personal politics. Not even a libertarian.
So, there have been a couple of developments I wanted to talk about.
In his piece at The Free Press, Berliner acknowledged his hope that the new CEO would take steps to improve ideological diversity at NPR, writing:
A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star.
Well, that was a lofty hope, and I joined Berliner in that hope.
Unfortunately for Berliner, that doesn’t seem to be working out.
NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had "lost America's trust" by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset.
Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.
Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner's essay for the online news site The Free Press. It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including former President Donald Trump.
That’s because it was true.
Every word Berliner wrote was accurate, but because he spoke outside of the family, he had to be punished.
So much for his hope that Maher would be different.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t really much real hope of that. You see, it turns out that NPR likely chose Maher because she’d keep going down that very same road.
Katherine Maher’s tweets from 2020 could have come straight from the mouth of an ardent liberal activist.
“What is that deranged racist sociopath ranting about today? I truly do not understand,” she wrote in May 2020.
“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive,” she wrote in a separate post that month. “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.”
And from July 2020: “Lots of jokes about leaving the U.S., 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 specter of tyranny.”
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But it apparently can’t fathom that its own politically homogeneous makeup might impact its coverage – with Maher going so far as to suggest any comment to the contrary is “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”
“I joined this organization because public media is essential for an informed public. At its best, our work can help shape and illuminate the very sense of what it means to have a shared public identity as fellow Americans in this sprawling and enduringly complex nation,” Maher told staff in a memo Friday. “NPR’s service to this aspirational mission was called in question this week, in two distinct ways. The first was a critique of the quality of our editorial process and the integrity of our journalists. The second was a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.”
She added: “Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions. Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”
In other words, Berliner dared think that diversity of thought mattered to any degree at all.
Berliner never actually said ethnic diversity, sexual diversity, or gender diversity were bad things. I think it’s stupid to seek balance based purely on superficial characteristics, but Berliner didn’t suggest he agreed with me there. He simply pointed out how that is all that matters to NPR.
They never actually address the crux of his argument, that NPR lacks anything close to viewpoint diversity that might provide a check on rampant bias.
Oh, I know they say they’re looking into it, but this smacks of “internal investigation” nonsense where they’ll come out somewhere down the road and say they investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong.
When the people who are pushing ideology investigate whether they’re pushing ideology, do you expect them to come out and say they are? Not if they want to be taken seriously.
Let’s not pretend that Berliner didn’t try to bring this to NPR’s attention.
He reports that he did and no one seemed the least bit bothered by it. They didn’t care then, but now that he’s told the world about it, now they care…but only about what he said.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
At least one lawmaker wants to see NPR defunded.
When it comes to liberal media bias, there's perhaps no bigger culprit than NPR. Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR, wrote what's been called "a bombshell expose" and "a voice of sanity" for The Free Press that spoke to that rampant bias. Keep in mind, NPR is taxpayer funded. Although NPR has tried to downplay the issue, it's not exactly going away. In his Friday episode of "The Verdict," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) addressed the matter, highlighting the need to defund NPR.
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Cruz wasted no time in offering "I would eliminate the funding for NPR tomorrow," calling it "the right thing to do" and adding "we shouldn't be in the business of funding NPR."
It doesn't look to be that easy, however. As Cruz explained, "the problem is every Democrat wants to spend your taxpayer dollars funding NPR because why wouldn't you? If you're a leftist, why wouldn't you be willing to use U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund a propaganda outlet for your view?" It's not just Democrats, though. The senator revealed that "in the budget battles, too many Republicans are scared of taking on NPR and so between the two, it keeps going."
Of course they would. NPR is basically a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee at this point and they can use your tax dollars, in part, to help fund it.
NPR claims it only received one percent of its funding from taxpayers, so it really shouldn’t be an issue to forgo that money, now should it, even if Democrats would love to keep it.
The truth is that they get a lot more than that.
The one percent is in direct payment from the federal government to NPR itself. However, The Hill looked into this a year ago and found:
NPR may receive little direct federal funding, but a good deal of its budget comprises federal funds that flow to it indirectly by federal law. Here’s how it works: Under the terms of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, funds are allocated annually to a non-governmental agency, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, overseen by a board of presidential appointees. That corporation, in turn, can choose to support original programming produced by public television or public radio — but, by law, must direct much of its $445 million funding (scheduled to top $500 million next fiscal year) to local public television and public radio stations across the country, via so-called “community service grants.”
Here’s where things get tricky. Local stations, if they want to broadcast “All Things Considered,” “Fresh Air” and other programming produced by NPR or competitors such as American Public Radio, must pay for it. Indeed, in its consolidated financial statement for 2021, NPR reported $90 million in revenue from “contracts from customers,” a significant portion of its $279 million and much more than 1 percent. Such revenue was exceeded only by corporate sponsorships, which totaled $121 million. One can think of these funds as federal grants that have been sent from Washington — but returned to it.
What’s more, local stations are actually required by law to do so. The 1967 act specifies that, of funds they received from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, “23 percent of such amounts shall be available for distribution among the licensees and permittees of public radio stations solely to be used for acquiring or producing programming that is to be distributed nationally and is designed to serve the needs of a national audience.”
In other words, if a local public radio station decided it no longer wanted to carry “Morning Edition,” it would not have the discretion to use some portion of its federal grant to support, for example, local newsgathering.
So basically, the law creates a framework where money is funneled through local public television stations back into NPR. As a result, they get a lot more in taxpayer money than any one percent. According to NPR, those fees account for 31 percent of their revenue.
So defunding them is viable way to gut them as an organization. Think of what kind of a hit Bud Light took. That was 34 percent of their revenue was lost. With no money coming in from tax dollars, NPR would lose 32 percent, which is awfully close.
Unfortunately, as Cruz said, it’s not likely to happen.
What is likely to happen is that Berliner will probably be quietly put to pasture—he’s too liberal to take a job with Fox News or something, though Bari Weiss might have a spot for him at The Free Press—and they’ll pretend it’s not a big deal.
Then they’ll keep using taxpayer money to fund partisan attacks disguised as unbiased journalism, consistent in their delusion that they’re doing everything right.
They’re not and based on their new leadership, there’s not a chance in hell that anything will change.
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