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.
Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.
