Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday threw an uppercut at one of the right’s favorite punching bags: National Public Radio.
Trump did so in his own inimitable style, launching an all-caps rant at NPR over its anti-conservative bias.
“NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!” Trump blasted over his own social media platform, Truth Social.
“EDITOR SAID THEY HAVE NO REPUBLICANS, AND IS ONLY USED TO ‘DAMAGE TRUMP.’ THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!”
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Recent comments by Uri Berliner, a 25-year veteran of NPR’s business news section, set Trump off.
In a column for The Free Press, and during an interview with the outlet’s founder, Bari Weiss, Berliner explained how the taxpayer-subsidized radio network has drifted further left since Trump became a national political figure.
And there was one main reason: Berliner wrote that, based on his own research of the staff, he discovered in 2021 that NPR had “87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans.”
In that column, Berliner admitted he is close to the stereotypical left-leaning NPR reporter. But, he said, in years past that didn’t stop NPR from playing it straight for its audience.
“No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to “Morning Edition” from his or her tractor at sunrise,” he wrote.
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And the audience reflected that years ago: In 2011, 26% of listeners identified as conservative, 23% middle of the road, and 37% as liberal.
Yet, as of last year, only 11% were conservatives, 21% were moderates, and a whopping 67% described themselves as very or somewhat liberal.
“An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America,” Berliner wrote. “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.”
After Trump was elected, NPR’s coverage openly “veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.”
That included massively promoting the Russia-collusion hoax, featuring 25 interviews with truth-challenged Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who kept getting air time even as his claims of holding evidence of Trump selling out to the Kremlin never materialized.
Berliner admitted that NPR steadfastly downplayed or ignored stories favorable to Trump or conservatives — the Mueller report, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Wuhan lab leak theory — and then never corrected the record when its premises and reporting were proven false.
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NPR also uncritically and completely bought into the “systemic racism” argument by Black Lives Matter and leftists generally after George Floyd’s death.
“Politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work,” Berliner wrote.
“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,” he continued. “It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”
He noted the effects that have had on the network: “declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time.”
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“The trajectory for NPR is not promising,” he added. “Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong.”
“News organizations don’t go in for that kind of reckoning,” he concluded. “But there’s a good reason for NPR to be the first: we’re the ones with the word public in our name.”
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