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The great years of public broadcasting were the 1970s when Masterpiece Theater presented critically-acclaimed historical dramas like I, Claudius or The Life of George Sand. NPR(National Public Radio) – and especially its Philadelphia TV affiliate, WHYY – was also noted for its concerts and offbeat poetry and arts and culture documentaries, that included poets reciting their work or being shown living their lives in downtown urban tenements.
The years passed and suddenly there was NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ with Terry Gross. This was the pre-political Terry Gross – when there was no Donald Trump to obsess on – where the topics focused on interviews with authors, historians, scientists and musicians. At this time NPR commentators still spoke rhythmically clear sounding English rather than the affected and very whiny ‘baby talk’ (where every sentence ends in a question mark and where the word ‘so’ is used to begin sentences) you hear on the station today.
Ironically, the NPR babytalk voice revolution happened about the same time the station erupted into full-blooded wokeness.
“It [NPR] is close to unlistenable now because of this political evangelism in nearly every minute of airtime,” a 2022 Intellectual Takeout article declared. “The same lens is applied to every topic under the sun and mercilessly forced into every segment.”
The article then questioned the station’s “moral preaching about dangerous conspiracies… that endlessly tells its listeners how fearful they should be about non-existent horrors like an epidemic of police violence against unarmed and non-resisting black men.”
Tune into NPR any time of the day or night and within minutes you’re likely to hear chatter about how awful Republicans are, threats to democracy via conservative politicians, how the right exaggerates the threat of illegal immigration, why biological men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, how climate change is influencing people not to have children, or how Christianity is finally waking up and changing its doctrines to adopt to the dictates of secular culture.
Even if you happen upon an innocuous NPR Jeopardy-like quiz show on a Saturday morning – where contestants are fed “uplifting” questions having to do with Democrat policies and snide questions about conservatives – it becomes plainly obvious that far-left ideology has saturated every square inch of NPR.
No matter where you turn – NPR car talk, garden talk, or any show generally unrelated to politics – the host will invariably find a way to let in those ideological winds. Every hour, every minute, the NPR agenda never quits.
One has only to recall the case of Uri Berliner, a senior business editor who worked at NPR for a quarter of a century, who in April 2024 wrote in The Free Press, a Substack publication, that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.”
Berliner listed a litany of journalistic NPR abominations in its coverage of the origins of Covid-19 and even the war in Gaza. Berliner said the broadcaster “had allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage, risking its trust with audiences.”
Former President Trump at the time made it clear, as he’d done many times in the past, that NPR’s government funding should end because it is a “national trust” and people relied on it for fair reporting.
That did not happen. Instead, NPR weathered the crisis – Berliner was suspended for 5 days without pay but ultimately he opted to resign – as many (but not all) of his colleagues condemned what he wrote in The Free Press.
The Chicago Tribune, reporting on the story in April 2024, revealed one of Berliner’s arguments was that “the station had unethically refused to run anything it thought might help Trump,” and that, “NPR had thus changed from a neutral news outfit, following the facts, to a cabal of advocates for one side of the political divide.”
“It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent,” Berliner observed, “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.”
Berliner laid most of the blame for the station’s 24/7 embrace of woke culture on John Lansing, NPR’s former chief executive, now replaced by Katherine Maher.
Lansing was very clear about NPR’s mission. In 2020, he stated:
“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism, we can be agents of change. The leaders in public media-starting with me-must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. … And we must commit ourselves-body and soul-to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions. We must do all this not as a ‘project’, not as an extracurricular activity, we must do this because, by definition, it is our work.”
But Maher might as well be Lansing’s body and brain double. Before he resigned from NPR, Berliner cited Maher’s past posts on X; especially one in 2018 that called Donald Trump a racist, another condemning Hillary Clinton for “erasing language for non-binary people” because she used terms like “boy” and “girl.”
“Maher is always on about her own ‘white cis mobility privilege,’ even as she continues to exercise it all day,” wrote Crispin Sartwell in Sublation Magazine. “When your CEO is telling you how it’s going to be, and decrying her own privilege as she does so, she’s liable to leave you confused…”
The National Review summed up Maher as “so cringe-inducingly woke that she almost reads like an intentionally cruel parody of wokeness.”
In May 2024 the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held hearings on media bias after Berliner’s NPR allegations. Maher, as the newly hired president and CEO of NPR was invited to participate but she declined to appear and said in a statement that the hearing conflicted with a “previously scheduled and publicly posted all-day meeting” of the company’s board of directors.
Democrats called the Hearing a waste of time. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Florida, stated, “This Congress will unfortunately go down in history as the least productive in modern time, wasting time and taxpayer dollars on witch hunts.”
The committee targeting NPR, she added, paralleled the communist actions of Chinese and Russian governments and Republicans “were undermining” journalism.
Castor told the Committee NPR reporting was objective and should receive more federal money.
Post House committee hearings WHYY-NPR news seems to have doubled down in the bias department. One WHYY news headline in October 2004 read: “Trump Invokes racist tropes, calling Harris ‘lazy as hell’ and ‘slow.’” This headline is reminiscent of the headlines in the Marxist-oriented underground newspapers in the late 1960s. Call it a headline and editorial wrapped up in one.
WHYY’s cultural news reporting is just as bad. The headline for an interview with black opera star Latonia Moore read: “Opera is full of racism. What can be done to revolutionize it?” The answer: nothing. That’s because the singer in this case refused to tap into NPR’s agenda and give them what they wanted: how terrible it is to be black in the white privilege world of opera.
Only one conclusion can be drawn from all this: NPR, with its skewed leftist ideological reporting-that even creeps into its Saturday afternoon “fun” quiz shows-is really a hazard to the nation’s mental health. And it should not be supported in any way by taxpayer money.
The longer NPR is allowed to go on and suck money from the government and allow left wing politics to contaminate the news and influence the wording of its stories and headlines-while emerging victorious after viral accusations by respected journalists like Uri Berliner-the more it stands to influence legacy media which is becoming more and more like NPR.
We are, sadly, a nation surrounded by NPR media whether it’s NBC, CBS or MSNBC.
The Ronna McDaniel story is a case in point.
The former GOP Chair was hired by NBC News as a political analyst but was canned after protests from other NBC hosts who criticized her work to “undermine the 2020 election.”
What is this if not the malevolent influence of that free range entity known as NPR?