National Public Radio has had a rough go in the last few years with declining audiences, financial shortfalls, and the recent exposure of its political bias by longtime editor Uri Berliner. However, if you tuned into the comments of NPR CEO Katherine Maher this week at the Texas Tribune Festival, you would think that the only challenging decision for NPR is picking the design of the next pledge drive tote bag.
Despite comments that were repeatedly evasive and misleading, a room full of journalists seemed to just nod like William Safire’s “nattering nabobs.”
Mayer led with what many former employees like Berliner may have seen as a literal punchline: “I stand here to defend the integrity of the newsroom and to defend the integrity of the reporting and to say that every single day our folks get up, and they want to stand there and make sure that they are serving the American public in the best possible way from a nonpartisan perspective.”
NPR, however, has lost much of the public. Ironically, it is now more liberal and white than ever with relatively few minority, male, or conservative listeners.
NPR’s audience has been declining for years. Indeed, that trend has been most pronounced since 2017 — the period when Berliner said the company began to openly pursue a political narrative and agenda to counter Donald Trump. The company has reported falling advertising revenue and, like many outlets, has made deep staff cuts to deal with budget shortfalls.
As she has in the past, Maher portrayed Berliner as pushing a false political agenda in claiming any bias at NPR. She denounced his criticism as an “affront to the individual journalists who work incredibly hard to report the news and report the news well and report the news with integrity … in a nonpartisan way.”
The portrayal of NPR as unbiased and balanced is laughingly absurd. Indeed, many of us objected to Maher’s selection after years of declining audiences and increasing criticism. Maher had a long record of far-left public statements against Republicans, Trump, and others.
As I have stated in the past, I am not suggesting that NPR does not have a right to slanted coverage. Many outlets today have such bias. However, they do not have a right to receive public subsidies.
In a competitive media market, the government has elected to subsidize a selective media outlet. Moreover, this is not the media organization that many citizens would choose. While tacking aggressively to the left and openly supporting narratives (including some false stories) from Democratic sources, NPR and its allies still expect citizens to subsidize its work. That includes roughly half of the country with viewpoints now effectively banished from its airwaves.
While local PBS stations are supported “by listeners like you,” NPR itself continues to maintain that “federal funding is essential” to its work. If NPR is truly relying on federal funds for only 1 percent of its budget, why not make a clean break from the public dole? NPR would then have to compete with every other radio and media outlet on equal terms. And it would likely do well in such a competition, given its loyal base and excellent programming.
Maher and NPR want to continue to offer slanted coverage but require all Americans (including most who do not listen to NPR due to the bias) to pay for it.
Maher’s talk was a litany of faux expressions of concern with no indication of a willingness to change a thing at NPR. Maher expressed a heart-felt need to face “perceived criticism.” Putting aside that there is nothing “perceived” in the criticism, it is clear that she rejects the very premise of the obvious bias of the outlet.
When finally asked by Fox New Digital about voter registration records in 2021 showing an astonishing disparity between Democrats and Republicans in the NPR newsroom, Maher dismissed the data. Berliner found 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans. However, Maher said that there were many employees not part of those stats. That is like dismissing a poll because not every American was contacted. There is no reason to expect that those self-reporting are hugely skewed toward Democrats without a single Republican participating.
She added that they are not allowed to hire employees based on political affiliation. It was again transparently evasive. No one is suggesting a political litmus test based on party registrations. The problem is the hiring of people who are uniformly left and Democratic in their outlooks and values.
Maher said that she believes that “it’s incredibly important for us to have people of diverse viewpoints in the newsroom, and the totality of the lived experience.” However, they clearly are not doing that in their hiring process. It is not an accident when you lack a single Republican in hiring.
We face the same rationalization in academia.
A survey conducted by the Harvard Crimson shows that more than three-quarters of Harvard Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences faculty respondents identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Only 2.5% identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4% as “very conservative.”
Likewise, a study by Georgetown University’s Kevin Tobia and MIT’s Eric Martinez found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools. Notably, a 2017 study found 15 percent of faculties were conservative. Another study found that 33 out of 65 departments lacked a single conservative faculty member.
When pressed, administrators and academics express the same befuddlement why their faculties are exclusively liberal. It is just a mystery. It cannot be due to their own bias in hiring people with clearly liberal or far left views.
Maher was clearly singing to the choir in this event. She noted that some of her viewers want NPR to be harder on Trump. That is hardly surprising. While taking federal funds from the entire country, NPR currently has a shrinking audience of largely liberal, older, white, female Democrats. “Balance” is viewed by many as considering whether Trump is an existential threat to democracy or to humanity.
The falling audience and revenue shows that Maher and NPR are not appealing to a larger audience. Once again, they should not have to do so. If they want a smaller audience while maintaining the current one-sided coverage, that is entirely between them and their donors. What they do not have a right to is a public subsidy for that slanted coverage.
It is time for NPR to operate entirely in the free market like all of its competitors from CBS Radio to Fox Radio. If it is truly offering a broad and balanced news source, Maher will have little difficulty thriving without public funding.
OK; she is either totally delusional and indoctrinated OR she is one hell of a liar/whore who will do anything for the buck…you choose.
The problem with academics/journalists/progressives is not they don’t listen to or entertain other opinions. The problem is they believe they, alone, know the “truth”. They are not censoring, they are preventing wrong information from polluting public discourse.
Despite how many times they have been wrong, despite how many policies they have that fail, despite how many complex problems that may not have a single solution (despite their belief in their solution (singular)), academics/journalists/progressives believe, they alone know the “truth”.
Their hubris is the problem.
The root cause of their hubris – they are stupid.
And you don’t think your sh*t stinks as well. So, bfd.
The difference, progressive, I don’t endorse using government force to silence people that have differing opinions.
I don’t think I know the “truth”
I am open to the possibility, I am wrong.
Have you ever thought about how much people in the past were wrong about, and how much people in the future will KNOW you were wrong about.
There is a good chance most of what you believe is wrong.
That is humility, not hubris.
You seemed to have missed the point here; it’s not that people’s sh*t doesn’t stink, it’s when someone thinks that they have the right to shove their sh*t down someone else’s throat… that is the key here – and hubris does have so much to do with it – inculcated and a false sense of importance.
* I would amend your statement “only they know the truth” to they are creating the truth and if you don’t agree with the created truth you’ll be jailed and possibly the cameras will shut down during your incarceration.
My opinion…
Think of it from a practical standpoint: we generally think that government sponsored media in other countries is really nothing more than a propaganda tool. But NPR is not???
Keep it simple: No government funding of ANY of “the press”. Ever.
I am that former devoted NPR listener who got so sick of their biased coverage during Trump’s term that I just stopped listening . And stopped donating. I was fed up. I especially loved On Point when it was hosted by Tom Ashbrook who , although typically liberal, at least had on his program conservatives who were articulate and persuasive. No more and good riddance to NPR.
I see what you did there, sh!tcanning both liberal and conservative views to become a right wing authoritarian extremist.
Jonathan Stringer,
Well said!
I used to listen to Tom all the time. That was back when On Point was good. Yes, he was liberal, but he asked good questions of all people he interviewed. Although you could tell when he did not get the “gotcha!” answer from a conservative guest, he just would move on and change the subject.
When trump diverted military funding to ‘pay for the wall’ and proceeded to build substandard wall construction that quickly fell prey to the inevitable erosion that anyone could’ve seen coming, no one seemed to care enough to hold him accountable. I didn’t want an of my tax money going toward that train wreck. Think anyone cares?
Turley’s mission is to get you magats all pumped up today.
Yep, that’s it.
@ Anonymous
And, of course, you making an off topic comment is not meant at all to get “magats all pumped up today”, right? Let me guess, your target audience is just run-of-the-mill stooges?
Anyone who calls themselves Anonymous can expect normals to dismiss their rants. You are the outlier. Your need for anonymity self-deletes your post.
* They aren’t “riled up”. You’re a drooling death cult just waiting for all the old recalled remembrances of things past to be gone so you can become ” the havers of all the things”. You had nothing and had nothing to lose. Understandable…
You’re fooling no one…
My opinion..
Wow. Mr Turley. You hit a nerve with the cat lady crowed🤪well done👍👍
When trump’s tariff taxes nearly destroyed the grains markets and required a 58 million dollar bailout, no one asked you what you thought of that. And when that market destruction led directly to the price gouging on the back end of covid, you magats just railed on against Biden. No one cares whether you don’t like NPR or not.
I regret that you left out the part about Biden KEEPING Trump’s tariffs:
” You may recall the former president imposed steep tariffs on China and other nations during his term…A few weeks ago, I asked Republican Sen. John Boozman if he thought higher tariffs on China were good for agriculture.
‘Well, the tariffs must not be too bad if Biden kept them,’ he quipped.”
https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-policy/will-more-trump-tariffs-hurt-or-help-u-s-farmers-
Of course, you might recall that it was during the Obama administration (2013) that China’s WH Group bought out the largest pork producer in the United States, along with 146,000 acres of agri farmland.
Thanks anyway.
We know what is being done. We know why they are doing it. We know who is doing it. What we don’t know is why they have so many apologists. If NPR’s self proclaimed enlightenment was genuine, it would fix itself. The audience would demand it. But that’s not how bias works. The audience is seeking Confirmation Bias and NPR provides it as their primary product. It’s similar to the relationship between the junkies and their dealers, just more dangerous.
Every sentence from NPR is a calculated lie. Every word from Donald Trump is sacred truth.
The oil lobby has been subsidized into existence for more than a century, portions of your tax dollars are spent on weaponry that you may despise, and fox news is routinely on TV in public hospital waiting rooms…
Public funding has never been without bias. Turls just needs to find another way into in to railing on about the lack of ‘conservatives’ in college faculties.
I am one of the “Listeners like you” many of those who have tuned out of NPR. It got to the point that I would jokingly start a countdown, once I clicked on the radio, waiting for the first slur against the President. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six,….Trump. They were obsessed with him. Forget the other 8 billion people and hundreds of countries.
Finally, I turned it off for good. Is that why “Doctor Pimple Popper” is insanely more popular than any cable program?
Regarding NPR’s competition, the cable and traditional “news” organizations preach to the choir. They tell their listeners what they want to hear. One need only look at the advertisements to see they’ve lost the younger crowd unless they are in the market for adult diapers and gold in their IRAs.
It is a sad state of affairs, yet there is a silver lining in that a growing number of independent reporters and upstart news organizations are bypassing cable and out performing them. Bill O’Reilly was the number one show in all of cable news when he was on Fox. He recently showed statistics that his independent news broadcast is reaching significantly more people now than he ever reached on cable.
I also ditched the news paper. I miss having it in the morning but got tired of the propaganda.
1) Prof Turley refers to PBS’s “excellent programming.” Having perused my local PBS stations 1-5, I must contest that description. The only fiction of quality seems to come from overseas, esp the BBC and ITC. There is nothing special about the numerous domestic cooking shows. It is paradoxical that we have a self-described “national” media outlet that specializes in broadcasting international programming.
2) The obvious reason that PBS and NPR cling to their subsidy is that the assertion that they are “national” and “public” inflates the egos of the people who run it. They are the forerunners of the FBI and CIA officials who formed a political alliance with the Democratic Party. They all think of themselves as elite. That sense of superiority is the defining characteristic of the American Left. It is in order to protect that “amour-propre” that they have created an echo chambers on college campi.
I used to love NPR! They still do some great stories but too often I have to change the channel due to the overt bias. Then I forget to turn back to it for days or weeks because it left such a bad taste.
In the sentence below, I think you meant to say “skewed.” We taxpayers are getting screwed by being force to subsidize such bias.
There is no reason to expect that those self-reporting are hugely screwed toward Democrats without a single Republican participating.
PROOFREADER!!!!!!! Please make the following corrections:
– laughably* not “laughingly” absurd
– hugely SKEWED not SCREWED
– SINGING not SIGNING to the choir
– Fox NEWS digital not NEW
“ No one is suggesting a political litmus test based on party registrations. The problem is the hiring of people who are uniformly left and Democratic in their outlooks and values.
Maher said that she believes that “it’s incredibly important for us to have people of diverse viewpoints in the newsroom, and the totality of the lived experience.” However, they clearly are not doing that in their hiring process. It is not an accident when you lack a single Republican in hiring.”
If the professor is not suggesting a political litmus test based on party registration then why is he complaining about not a single republican is hired? In order to know there are republicans working at NPR there has to be a litmus test in the hiring process.
Maybe Turley needs to realize that the right bashing NPR and his own criticism are keeping republicans away from NPR and thus the hiring is mostly democrats. Why would republicans want to work for NPR when Turley is saying they won’t hire Republicans because they are biased?
Contrary to Turley’s claims NPR receives less than 1% of direct government funding. NPR is erroneously labeled as a “government affiliated” because it gets some funding indirectly. It’s based on a federal law,
“ No one is suggesting a political litmus test based on party registrations. The problem is the hiring of people who are uniformly left and Democratic in their outlooks and values.
Maher said that she believes that “it’s incredibly important for us to have people of diverse viewpoints in the newsroom, and the totality of the lived experience.” However, they clearly are not doing that in their hiring process. It is not an accident when you lack a single Republican in hiring.”
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3950550-the-truth-about-nprs-funding-and-its-possible-future/amp/
What Turley is not telling you is the other problem of NPR “losing” audience members not just because if it’s bias, because the internet has made it possible for listeners to bypass local radio stations and directly get their news from NPR. Turley’s claims are not accurate, but then that’s the point. He only needs to create a narrative that is favorable to the preconceived notions of his more gullible readers.
Guĺlible?
Would you have the same argument if the D/R percentages were the exact opposite?
In order to know there are republicans working at NPR there has to be a litmus test in the hiring process.
What are you talking about? You seem to be saying that in order that a third party can survey NPR employees about their political affiliation, NPR has to have a political “litmus test”? Why?
The point is that there’s no “Democrat” box to check on the job interviews, but the bias of the people doing the hiring is such that if an applicant reveals a hint of conservatism, that applicant is rejected, regardless of other qualities or qualifications. And NPR’s teetering leftward slant has been so obvious for so long that Prof. Turley’s pointing it out can have zero effect on how many Republicans might try for a job there.
Your argument appears to be a “Republicans pounce” one – it’s Republicans’ fault that NPR has no Republicans (or at least no “out” Republicans), because there just not applying. Mm hmm.
“NPR receives less than 1% of direct government funding.”
That’s cute. About like a corner shell game is cute.
“If the professor is not suggesting a political litmus test based on party registration then why is he complaining about not a single republican is hired? In order to know there are republicans working at NPR there has to be a litmus test in the hiring process.”
What is Svelaz saying? It is too stupid to respond to, so I will persist in my other question that remains unanswered even after I answered his question.
When the Ottoman Empire broke up, portions of the Middle East were divided into Mandates. Some of the major countries of the time each got a piece of land, which, under specific laws, was to be divided up to become nation-states. That is how many of the countries were created and the boundaries settled. Therefore, each country created worked under the same international rules.
What happened to the British Mandate?
Time for you to respond, but you don’t. You can’t. You are too stupid to do so.
Typo: “There is no reason to expect that those self-reporting are hugely screwed toward Democrats without a single Republican participating.” That should be “skewed”. Darn autocorrect.
It’s coming completely apart, and They both know it. We all know it.
Tonight’s debate is a homage to Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs. Robinson
“… Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at this, you lose
Where have you gone, Joe Biden?
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you
Woo, woo, woo
What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
Boltin’ Joe has left and gone away
Hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey …”
Report: Biden Has Spent 40.3% of His Presidency on Vacation
By: Eric Lendrum – American Greatness ~ September 9, 2024
https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/09/report-biden-has-spent-40-3-of-his-presidency-on-vacation/
Just think of what Joe could have accomplished had he remained in his office more instead of vacationing!
No thanks, an executive with dementia is not what we need.
However, I am bothered by the fact that we don’t have a functioning executive. I don’t think that Joe or Kamala in charge is the answer. But there is a little constitutional problem with our current state of affairs. And we are lucky that so far, no country which does not have our best interests at heart has taken advantage of the situation.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris Debate in Philadelphia,
Tuesday September 10th, 2024
Debate day has arrived.
The first debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to take place Tuesday night at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia with less than two months until the election.
Trump announced in a post on Truth Social that he had accepted the Sept. 10 debate on ABC under the same conditions as the June CNN debate against Biden.
The rules for Tuesday night’s debate mean each candidate’s microphone is only turned on when it is their turn to speak, there is no studio audience and the candidates aren’t allowed to talk to their staff during breaks or bring any notes with them. Both candidates are provided with only a pen and pad and a bottle of water.
Who are the moderators of tonight’s debate?
“World News Tonight” anchor and managing editor David Muir, along with ABC News Live “Prime” anchor Linsey Davis, will serve as the moderators, according to ABC.
How to watch the presidential debate between Trump and Harris
What: Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump participate in their first debate
Date: Tuesday, Sept. 10
Time: Debate begins at 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT.
Location: The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia
On TV: ABC and simulcast on CBS television and streaming platforms.
Online stream: Viewers can also watch the debate on ABC News Live, Disney+ and Hulu.
NPR just like PBS should be set free of government monies. They, like other government institutions, should be left for the market (US citizens) to decide if they should be supported. Just like any other TV or radio station. Period.
End NPR media…if they are just a DNC entity….then let the DNC fund them!
End ALL Federal Aid and Loan backing of Cities, states, non-profits and colleges
Let Capitalism take hold and let Democrats FUND THEIR OWN Failures!
Also abolish Public Unions…which have NO interest in servicing taxpayers.
THEY basically Bribe Democrats to lavish pay and perks!
“What they {National Panhandler Radio) do not have a right to is a public subsidy for that slanted coverage.” Were truer words ever spoken?
And please, change the name. Nothing remotely “national” about this radio!