National Public Radio left Twitter in a hilarious huff. In a statement, CEO John Lansing announced “We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence.”
This contains multiple layers of comedy. For starters, NPR is a platform that has demonstrated an incredibly aggressive interest in undermining the credibility of Fox News Channel and the public’s understanding of how it balances out NPR’s relentless liberal bias and censorship.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik reflects that obsession. He’s filed 13 stories attacking Fox from various angles since February 28, and he’s not the only NPR reporter dropping bombs on Murdoch’s castle.
On April 13, NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross devoted an hour to New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters exploiting the negative publicity from Fox’s ongoing legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems. The suit has embarrassed Fox with all kinds of internal messages showing they didn’t believe wild conspiratorial claims of voter fraud, insisting Trump won easily.
As Gross proclaimed, Peters is the author of a book called Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.
The book carries an endorsement from Joe Scarborough: “A bracing account of how the party of Lincoln and Reagan was hijacked by gadflies and grifters who reshaped their movement into becoming an anti-democratic cancer that attacked the U.S. Capitol.”
This isn’t something that raises any alarm at NPR. On the contrary, it’s exactly the kind of author NPR seeks to promote. Terry Gross has celebrated Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank and his book The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party. There’s Robert Draper, who wrote Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind. There’s Tim Miller, who authored Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell.
Are you getting a sense from this list of honored guests of how NPR defines “editorial independence”?
Anyone actually listening to NPR on a regular basis can tell it loves the Democrats and hates the Republicans. Its reporting on President Biden is a calm, bubbling stream of positive stenography.
In this anti-Fox hour, Peters underlined that Tucker Carlson is an icon of insincerity, a man who privately proclaimed hatred of Trump, but just polished Trump’s shoes in a “historic” one-hour interview. Peters said, “he thinks his audience isn’t ever going to know what he said privately because we all live in such siloed media worlds.” Conservatives are surrounded by a dominant liberal media. The idea that they know nothing about the Dominion fracas is a provocative assertion.
Peters says if Fox News loses this case, “it says that one of the most powerful media organizations in the country has to pay for the dishonest way it covered our democracy.” Peters added “I don’t know that those kinds of lessons of accountability will sink in with the average conservative.”
NPR and their liberal friends imagine conservatives are a cretinous collection of mouth-breathing dullards and conspiracy kooks. Inside their silo, they never consider that NPR could be accused of being a “powerful media organization” that can be accused of covering our democracy in a “dishonest way” in 2020. They dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop as a “pure distraction” without moving a muscle to investigate.
NPR prances about mocking Fox for supinely serving its ideologically fervent base in denial of inconvenient facts. But NPR supinely serves its own ideologically fervent base. They are icons of insincerity in claiming they’re courageously independent guardians of democracy who operate without fear or favor.