Below is my column in the Hill on the effort to end the federal subsidy for National Public Radio, an effort that was greatly advanced by the testimony of its Chief Executive Officer. After imploding at a House hearing, NPR’s Katherine Maher even lost HBO’s Bill Maher who now supports defunding NPR. The Democrats hope to peal off a couple Republicans like Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to continue to fund the outlet. The pitch is to again mouth “assurances” that NPR will adopt more balanced coverage, the same assurance given for over a decade as the liberal bias at the outlet only became more pronounced.
Here is the column:
“This is NPR.”
Unfortunately for National Public Radio, that proved all too true this week. In one of the most cringeworthy appearances in Congress, Katherine Maher imploded in a House hearing on the public funding of the liberal radio outlet.
By the end of her series of contradictions and admissions, Maher had made the definitive case for ending public funding for NPR and state-subsidized media.
Many of us have written for years about the biased reporting at NPR. Not all of this criticism was made out of hostility toward the outlet — many honestly wanted NPR to reverse course and adopt more balanced coverage. That is why, when NPR was searching for a new CEO, I encouraged the board to hire a moderate figure without a history of political advocacy or controversy.
Instead, the board selected Katherine Maher, a former Wikipedia CEO widely criticized for her highly partisan and controversial public statements. She was the personification of advocacy journalism, even declaring that the First Amendment is the “number one challenge” that makes it “tricky” to censor or “modify” content as she would like.
Maher has supported “deplatforming” anyone she deems to be “facsists” and even suggested that she might support “punching Nazis.” She also declared that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction [in] getting things done.”
As expected, the bias at NPR only got worse. The leadership even changed a longstanding rule barring journalists from joining political protests.
One editor had had enough. Uri Berliner had watched NPR become an echo chamber for the far left with a virtual purging of all conservatives and Republicans from the newsroom. Berliner noted that NPR’s Washington headquarters has 87 registered Democrats among its editors and zero Republicans.
Maher and NPR remained dismissive of such complaints. Maher attacked the award-winning Berliner for causing an “affront to the individual journalists who work incredibly hard.” She called his criticism “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”
Berliner resigned, after noting how Maher’s “divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR” that he had been pointing out.
For years, NPR continued along this path, but then came an election in which Republicans won both houses of Congress and the White House. The bill came due this week. Much of NPR’s time to testify was exhausted with Maher’s struggle to deny or defend her own past comments.
When asked about her past public statements that Trump is a “deranged, racist sociopath,” she said that she would not post such views today. She similarly brushed off her statements that America is “addicted to White supremacy” and her view that the use of the words “boy and girl” constitute “erasing language” for non-binary people.
When asked about her past assertion that the U.S. was founded on “black plunder and white democracy,” Maher said she no longer believed what she had said.
When asked about her support for the book “The Case for Reparations,” Maher denied any memory of ever having read the book. She was then read back her own public statements about how she took a day to read the book in a virtue-signaling post.
She then denied calling for reparations, but was read back her own declaration: “Yes, the North, yes all of us, yes America. Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt. Yes, reparations. Yes, on this day.” She then bizarrely claimed she had not meant giving Black people actual money, or “fiscal reparations.”
When given statistics on the bias in NPR’s hiring and coverage, Maher seemed to shrug as she said she finds such facts “concerning.”
The one moment of clarity came when Maher was asked about NPR’s refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story. When first disclosed, with evidence of millions in alleged influence-peddling by the Biden family, NPR’s then-managing editor Terence Samuels made a strident and even mocking statement: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
Now Maher wants Congress to know that “NPR acknowledges we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner.”
All it took was the threat of a complete cutoff of federal funding.
In the end, NPR’s bias and contempt for the public over the years is well-documented. But this should not be the reason for cutting off such funding. Rather, the cutoff should be based on the principle that democracies do not selectively subsidize media outlets. We have long rejected the model of state media, and it is time we reaffirmed that principle. (I also believe there is ample reason to terminate funding for Voice of America, although that is a different conversation.)
Many defenders of NPR would be apoplectic if the government were to fund such competitors as Fox News. Indeed, Democratic members previously sought to pressure cable carriers to drop Fox, the most popular cable news channel. (For full disclosure, I am a Fox News legal analyst.)
Ironically, Fox News is more diverse than NPR and has more Democratic viewers than CNN or MSNBC.
Berliner revealed that according to NPR’s demographic research, only 6 percent of its audience is Black and only 7 percent Hispanic. According to Berliner, only 11 percent of NPR listeners describe themselves as very or somewhat conservative. He further stated that NPR’s audience is mostly liberal white Democrats in coastal cities and college towns.
NPR’s audience declined from 60 million weekly listeners in 2020 to just 42 million in 2024 — a drop of nearly 33 percent. This means Democrats are fighting to force taxpayers to support a biased left-wing news outlet with a declining audience of mainly affluent white liberal listeners.
Compounding this issue is the fact that this country is now $36.22 trillion in debt, and core federal programs are now being cut back. To ask citizens (including the half of voters who just voted for Trump) to continue to subsidize one liberal news outlet is embarrassing. It is time for NPR to compete equally in the media market without the help of federal subsidies.
If there was any doubt about that conclusion, it was surely dispatched by Maher’s appearance. After years of objections over its biases, the NPR board hired a CEO notorious for her activism and far-left viewpoints. Now, Maher is the face of NPR as it tries to convince the public that it can be trusted to reform itself. Her denials and deflections convinced no one. Indeed, Maher may have been the worst possible figure to offer such assurances.
That is the price of hubris and “this is NPR.”
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
It’s been quite astonishing watching the American left fall over themselves trying to deny or walk back their atrocious behavior since 2016 (sure, it goes back much further, but a calcification definitely occurred around then). There will be no walking back, particularly post-covid – we will never, ever forget, and it will not be permitted to happen again here.
Meanwhile, it is downright alarming watching the likes of for example, Britain, succumb, without our protections, to full-on fascism under modern Labour with most of Western Europe following closely behind.
What can I say? God bless the USA!
PLANO, TX — Local seven-year-old Benjamin Gunther was outed as a homeschooler after he looked an adult directly in the eyes while speaking in complete sentences. The incident occurred at a barber shop, when the barber called him back for his haircut and asked if the girls with him were both his sisters. “Nice to meet you, sir. Yes sir, these are my sisters,” responded Gunther, looking at the adult’s eyeballs. “This is Katelyn, and this is Isabella. How is your day?”
The adult in question, 45-year-old Mark Livingston, stood rooted to the ground, gaping in awe. “What just happened?” he wondered. “Did he… did he look me in the eyes while talking? Did he respond to my question, and then proceed to make real conversation? And in a respectful manner? Is he one of those homeschoolers I hear about?” At publishing time, Livingston had confirmed that Gunther was indeed a homeschooler after listening to him spend the next twenty minutes having a Socratic dialogue in Latin with his ten-year-old brother.
So Benjamin is clearly going to make huge contributions to society.
We certainly have a severe shortage of philosophers who are fluent in Latin.
He obviously has a great future ahead of him.
He will fit right in at an elitist woke university.
Meanwhile, Robert, who attends public school, sat quietly solving simultaneous differential equations and used computational fluid dynamics to create a mathematical model of a more efficient aerodynamic wing for the next generation of airliners. He used finite element analysis and high fidelity multidisciplinary optimization to refine the analysis to produce a wing structure that is 30% more efficient.
What a total waste of time !!!!!
Robert would be much better off studying a dead language.
Robert, being an example of public education, cannot do math at grade level, cannot read at grade level. Due to staring into tick toc for hours a day, has limited communications skills. His social skills are equally suffering. These are observations from a good friend of mine who was in public education. She teaches at a private school now. She also feels a lot safer.
Hmmm!!!
Apparently you are so dimwitted that you do not understand that simultaneous differential equations, computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis and high fidelity multidisciplinary numerical optimization are all high level mathematical tools used in aeronautical engineering.
Clearly you are a product of home schooling yourself.
Students who study Latin do far better than average in math and science. And on top of that they also have the intellectual capacity to analyze complex policy issues.
OldManFromKansas-I did 3 years of Latin but my math still sucked, especially calculus. Made the decision to go into medicine easier. Now my daughter studied Japanese but has a Masters in Aerospace Engineering and never touched Latin.
I also could not understand the first sentence in her master’s thesis. Something about fast or slow trips to Mars, fuel calculations with either, plus oxygen demands per crew members, and supplies for food and water. She also did not think suspended animation was a reality just yet.(so disappointing to me)
GEB
Your personal observations fit well with experimental studies.
I am an aerospace engineer who never studied Latin.
Simply saying that students who study Latin do better in science and math does not make it true.
This statement needs to be supported by evidence.
The few valid, controlled studies on this matter find no advantage to learning Latin.
In Search of the Benefits of Latin by Haas and Stern (2003) in the Journal of Educational Psychology “did not find any differences in science and math in students who learned Latin at school and those who did not” and in the Haag and Stern follow up study, two groups of comparable German students, where one studied Latin, the other English, were assessed after two years, “No differences were found in either verbal or non-verbal IQ or grades in Science or Math”.
So no differences could be found in performance in math and science.
What about other areas such as learning other languages.
In language learning, Latin actually makes learning other languages more difficult. The problem with understanding Latin is that you need to pay close attention to word endings; case markers on nouns and time markers on verbs. But in English, and Romance languages, word order and prepositions are more important, endings play a minor role. What Haag and Stern found, predictably, based on Thorndike’s research, was that students who had learned one Romance language first, found it easier to learn another Romance language, than those who had learned Latin. Latin caused incorrect transfer, such as the omission of prepositions and auxiliary verbs in Romance languages. In other words, learning Latin was detrimental to the learning of the new language.
There is no advantage to learning Latin.
There are no valid controlled studies that show this.
Simply saying learning Latin is an advantage does not make it true.
@Anonymous coward
I didn’t say it, but I’ll happily quote it, and if you are a crusty old ‘liberal’ that doesn’t see the writing on the wall regarding your progeny or is incapable/insulated from the feeling of shifting winds, more the better:
‘You’re LARPERS. You missed out on the injustice fights of the past so you invent new issues to take head on, burning your own straw men to keep your cold, dead, souls warm’. And I would add, while you still go home to mom and dad, or even grandpa and grandma nowadays, for a warm dinner and a comfy bed.
Your bogeymen are entirely products of your pathetic, entitled, imaginations, and sorry – we rejected communism long ago. This is not going to change. We are all free and may not always agree on things. Deal with the fact that you live in a legitimately free country, and go tell someone that actually cares, understanding fully we all have the perfect right to disagree with you and continue our lives against what your mind has concocted you need for your own personal comfort, even though you likely don’t have a single real problem today but your own mental self-torture. We aren’t listening anymore. Keep throwing those dollars down the toilet. I’m sure the sewer and those who dwell there appreciate it.a
Would edit for typos if I could; I can’t. 🤷🏻♂️
Meanwhile, Robert, who attends public school, sat quietly solving simultaneous differential equations and used computational fluid dynamics to create a mathematical model of a more efficient aerodynamic wing for the next generation of airliners.
It must be the former First Lady Babysitter or Teachers Union President Randi Weingarten!
REPORT: Not A Single Student Is Proficient In Reading Or Math At 55 Chicago Public Schools
https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/14/math-reading-chicago-schools-report/
Robert must be the son of an American military family stationed in Japan.
ET Tu, Brute- Sorry OldManFromKansas. I just could not help myself. I almost started on Caesar’s Commentaries but went brief instead.
“NOT TO TAX AD LIBITUM”
“[Congress] are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union.”
“To consider the latter phrase, not as describing the purpose of the first, but as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please, which might be for the good of the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless.”
“It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.”
– Thomas Jefferson
The best case for not taxing for or funding NPR is Article 1, Section 8.
The singular American failure is the judicial branch, with emphasis on the Supreme Court.
America and Americans were designed and engineered to be free not subjugated.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Article 1, Section 8
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;….
Dear Mr. Turley, When we would go “up north” fishing, the Minnesota NPR station was about all we could tune in on the transistor radio. It was either that or listening to “your friendly kin” on KTIN out of Aitkin, Minnesota. One year the NPR reporter was unnecessarily rude and snotty regarding President Bush, 41, that I stopped listening to NPR altogether. I have not missed their news programming. It would be alright if the government did pull funding away from them. Let them work for their funding from liberal folks who think like they do. I might suggest their having a few bake sales.
There are pleasurable things to do. Romans 1:30-32
Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:
Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.
# All men are created equal was a big mistake. Replacing John Locke’s “Property” with pursuit of happiness another mistake. Then there’s the troublesome-as endowed by their creator. The creator has become primordial slime mold that just happened to be intelligent enough to expand five senses and it was fruitful and multiplied.
Of course Locke was referencing royalty, Kings and Queens. We leave that understanding out today.
OT: The weather is beautiful this spring. If it were always spring…
All men are CREATED equal—that was a split second in time.
Ultimately, that is an entirely meaningless phrase, but that it reveals the natural and God-given rights and freedoms that are conferred by the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The success or failure of men’s lives will never be equal and is dependent upon the talent and effort of each individual man.
Seems that Elmo Muskrat is in favor of government subsidies for himself, but no one else.
In Canada, 4 Tesla dealerships supposedly sold 8,653 cars in a 72 hour period in January, just before Canadian EV rebates were due to end. Tesla claimed $43 million in government rebates, which was more than half of the total rebate funding made available by the government.
Tesla claims to have sold 8,653 cars in 72 hours at 4 dealerships.
That is one car every 30 seconds for 72 hours, 24 hours a day.
Needless to say, the Canadian government has launched an inquiry into the legitimacy of these claims.
Government subsidies for me, but not for thee !!!!!
Neither Tesla nor Elon legislated these rebates. The fools in Parliament (and in the U.S. Congress did. Elon was just smart enough to profit from what the fools offered.
So when Elmo takes advantage of government subsidies, he is just being smart.
However, if somebody else takes advantage of government subsidies, it is waste, fraud and abuse.
Got it !!!!
Are you aware of a concept known as hypocrisy.
Rebates constitute the illegal corruption of the powers of taxation.
The singular American failure is the judicial branch, with emphasis on the Supreme Court.
You, one so indigent as to have no accretive business to attend to and to be posting here, disparage a man who engendered a personal net worth of $343 billion in the complete absence of even a hint of prosecution for the suspicion of infraction or lack of decorum.
Fox News is Faux Neuz.
NPR is ?
NPR is National Pravda Radio. It is state sponsored propaganda for the DNC. Thought that was obvious.
Fixed Noise is the real state-sponsored propaganda.
UpstateFarmer-it is obvious to most of us but there are some really radical slow learners in the reading group here. Sometimes we have to type at 50% mode just so they can stay within shouting or screaming distance.
Re: D. B. Benson
They are all “Faux Neuz” if you walk through life with Eyes Wide Open, as the majority of people do.
And many simple have no time for the “Neuz”.
Fox does not receive governmental/taxpayer subsidies.
NPR receives governmental/taxpayer subsidies.
The singular American failure is the judicial branch, with emphasis on the Supreme Court.
Gone are the days of Diane Rehm on NPR and PBS’s Friday night McLaughlin Group with its lively and BALANCED debates on the week’s news….Gone is that genuine give-and-take, and the damage is very hard to undo…
Now we have at least two generations of extreme left Wokeness with Ari Shapiro and Mary Louise Kelly, et all. -Even Terri Gross, who was always left-leaning but remained balanced in her interviews, has gone full unabashedly one-sided. (I DO still like “Science Friday.”)
The very selective topic matter, the subtle manipulation (or absence) of countervailing facts, the mixing-in of opinion with news (sometimes as simple as adding misleading or adjectival phrases in front of the news, such as, (just minutes after the first plane): “…..hundreds of migrants illegally removed to El Salvador”–why not just say, “there were @263 migrants on board.”)
It’s that constant drip, drip, drip of distortion that I consider the downfall. I specifically take umbrage with the blatant misuse (and intended effect) of the word “Public” in both NPR and PBS.
I’m glad they’ve all outed. Let them be who they are–in the open. –Just not on our dimes.
I wonder how many are old enough to remember “Jane, you ignorant 5lut!” Now, *that* was some lively delay.
Uri Berliner: NPR Should Refuse to Take Federal Funds
https://www.thefp.com/p/uri-berliner-npr-should-refuse-to-take-federal-funds?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Great link!
I found this little gem there:
“And then there’s NPR’s exit interview in January with Rachel Levine, the transgender former assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. The piece described Levine as having a “friendly, low-key personality” as well as being a Joni Mitchell fan who “brings her lunch from home—today, it’s a turkey wrap.”
All fine, except the story did not mention the most newsworthy event of Levine’s tenure. According to court documents, she pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to eliminate minimum age requirements for children from the Standards of Care for transgender medical treatment, including surgery.”
“Rachel” Levine, a/k/a Richard Levine, is a hysterical drama queen. NPR was flat-out lying about the alleged low-key personality. His only qualification for the job “Joe Biden” appointed him to was that he suffers from a delusion where he thinks he is female. (I know this because a close family member of mine treated with him shortly before he was famous.)
OldManfromKansas- And he/she was absolutely the ugliest version in either state.
There is now way that 42 million people listen to that horse shit station.
Another lie from NPR
Facing a loss of Congressional funding, the leader of NPR now rejects all her totalitarian, ant-America statements and wants us to believe she is the second coming of Newsome. It doesn’t work way. Her past is prelude.
Since I don’t know how to edit or delete, I’ll rewrite: Facing a loss of Congressional funding, the leader of NPR now rejects all her totalitarian, anti-America statements and wants us to believe she is the second coming of Newsome. It doesn’t work that way. Her past is prelude.
” the leader of NPR now rejects all her totalitarian, anti-America statements and wants us to believe she is the second coming of Newsome. ”
How could that be even remotely possible, considering that Navin Gruesome himself is a veritable fount of such statements?
30-40 years ago I listened to NPR news regularly. It always leaned left but I had greater tolerance for it then. Now, the sound of the snobby news announcer makes me nauseous. I do listen to their jazz and classical music while driving, but as soon as I hear, “Live, from Washington, this is…,” I change the channel.
I date their descent into strident leftism to 1990 and operation Desert Storm. They hated the fact we won that one. The commentators they invited on were 100% opposed. Not a single voice defending it. Unlike with Ukraine, they did not support Kuwait being defended.
Prior to 2016, NPR was on in the kitchen from sun up till dinner time. I would even listen in the fields or in the barns. There was a left wing slant but you could still listen, dismiss the bias and get the news. There were a number of “drive way” moments. Then 2016 happened, Trump got elected and they went all in on advocacy journalism. Nearly every story was about race, gender, inequality of some kind. They ran an ad for a report about exercise they were giving later that day. It sounded interesting enough, I tuned in from the fields. Turns out it was a hit piece on exercise as they claimed exercise was a gateway to “white supremacy.” We have a obesity epidemic in America and they dont want you to exercise as you might become a “white supremacist?” Cannot make this stuff up. After that, I switched them off. Matt Taibbi even wrote an article about how NPR was now only reporting on race and gender. Every once in awhile I will tune in, in the truck to see if they are still as biased as they had become. Yep. Time to defund NPR. Let them fend for themselves and not on my taxpayer dime.
” NPR was on in the kitchen from sun up till dinner time. I would even listen in the fields or in the barns..”
NPR was always liberal. That makes you a crazy raving liberal, I’d say.
If you had reference Limbaugh, I would give you credit for being here. You did not.
I’ll also bet, you ain’t a farmer, you’re here from sun-up to sun-down everyday.
Anonymous
You are correct about NotReallyaFarmer.
Like all the other MAGAts here, he lives in a fantasy world of lies and deception.
He claims to be a farmer, but as you note, he is here all day every day.
So sad !!!!
There you go again. Proving you are not very smart. If you had any degree of reading comprehension, you would of noted the part, “I would even listen in the fields or in the barns.” There are these things call mobile devices. You can access the internet nearly everywhere there is a good signal. Just the other day, I was at the mechanics for my yearly state inspection. Sitting in the waiting room, I read some news, the good professor’s blog and made a few comments.
NotReallyaFarmer
Why are you always so defensive ???
Why do you always go to such extraordinary and detailed lengths to try explain how you can be reading and commenting here all day while you are out in your imaginary “fields”.
You are obviously reading everything here as well as commenting at length.
You are not fooling anyone !!!!!
There is no way that you can be “out in the fields” and commenting to the extent that you do.
Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of.
You just need to admit it, and seek some help.
The war-mongering by NPR is the proof that state sponsored media is anathema to democracy and free inquiry.
Go tell that to the Russians and Chinese. They love NPR.
I used to have my clock radio set to NPR and woke up to their stories. Then I realized I was being propagandized by the 2 or 3 stories a week about how talented and wonderful gay men are. I am sure there are many talented and wonderful gay men, but I recognize propaganda when I hear it.
I listen to NPR because is is a known biased source of information. It opens a window into what liberals think and what they are told to think. Keeps my skeptical mind a bit sharper. That said, the government should not be involved.
Why would Signal the encrypted app have Maher on the board?
Margot: The news not being covered….
Professor Turley writes, “The Democrats hope to peal off a couple Republicans like Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to continue to fund the outlet.”
I don’t have a problem with two GOP Senators voting against the majority. Dissent is fine. I do have a problem with ten GOP Senators voting against their own party on this issue. That’s not dissent. That’s Uniparty obstructionism. I guess we’ll find out if we still have a republic.
In other news, Le Pen was framed for embezzlement by the Klaus Schwab judiciary. That’s two EU countries in which democracy died. Britain is on life support. Germany is awaiting extreme unction.
Diogenes-I noted that news this am. The European superstate strikes again or is it just the EMPIRE. This always seems to strike the right leaning parties. Seems like it might be time to Storm The Bastille again. Have to watch out and not injure too many tourists as they tear up the streets for the barricades and please don’t crush the fresh morning pear tarts. That would truly be a sin against the state. Otherwise Allez , Allez to the Bastille or even the Tuileries Garden.
Allez, vestes jaunes!!
@Diogenes @GEB
Saw that as well. They tried with Trump – the slender thread of our *actual* democracy is all that stopped them; Western Europe is not so lucky, and we were – barely. Spooky times.
I agree. It’s still too close for my comfort.
“That’s two EU countries in which democracy died. Britain is on life support. Germany is awaiting extreme unction.”
The second country to which you alluded is Romania, I trust? I saw a report this morning claiming that Poland is seriously considering aping this behavior, depending on first round results in their upcoming elections. It would be a damned sight more honest if these clowns just came out and barred anyone belonging to a particular party, or espousing specific positions, from holding public office. At least their biases and tactics would be obvious to even the benighted. Which, of course, is why they will not do that.