All Things Considered

On June 7, liberal Democratic House member John Dingell became the longest-serving member of Congress in history and NPR was prepared to celebrate—four days straight.

On June 5, NPR’s Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan and “Political Junkie” Ken Rudin discussed the milestone. Then, on All Things Considered May 6, longtime host Robert Siegel conducted a gushing interview with Dingell himself. In the six-minute interview, Siegel couldn’t bring himself to ask a single tough question—not even about whether the 86-year-old Dingell was too old or too out of touch after being in Washington for so long.

With his disarming Texas drawl, NPR’s Dallas-based correspondent Wade Goodwyn hardly sounds like a far-left activist in the mold of Saul Alinsky, but that’s exactly what he used to be. During the 1980s—at least until 1989—Goodwyn was a community organizer in New York City working with a community group affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, an activist network established by the far-left activist Saul Alinsky to further his politics.

That backdrop helps explain reporter Goodwyn’s angry denunciation of the Texas Republican Party in his May 23 report on NPR’s All Things Considered. Instead of simply reporting on the controversy of the Texas GOP deciding not to take federal funds in exchange for implementing parts of Obamacare, Goodwyn hammered away the Texas GOP’s decision. Goodwyn devoted six times as much time for others to argue against the decision than for it. Apparently believing that such a ratio was insufficient to push his position over the finish line, Goodwyn himself argued against the decision at length.

NPR could stand for Not Pro-Religion. It’s the taxpayer-subsidized network with the Wiccan-priestess reporter. On Friday’s All Things Considered, NPR promoted a new horror movie in which “it’s not the Devil that’s scary.” Instead, “the religious horror is religion itself.”

NPR is pushing an “atheist’s take on Catholic horror.” Those teachings can be “terrifying.” (Disclaimer: NPR reserves the right to spare Muslims all of these criticisms.) The director’s name is Rodrigo Gudino, and reporter Beth Accomando explained the plot:

How enthusiastic can NPR be in avoiding the emerging Obama scandals? Try this: So-called “All Things Considered” aired no features on Benghazi or the IRS on Saturday or Sunday. (This excludes on-the-hour news updates.) But they found time for six minutes on the trade in rhino horns.

It was more ridiculous on “Weekend Edition” Saturday and Sunday – they also skipped both. NPR correspondent Michele Kelemen reported on Secretary of State John Kerry for 4 minutes and 22 seconds without a single word about Libya. Somehow the State Department’s Benghazi fiasco wasn’t listed as a “thorny issue” in the Middle East:

NPR has a seriously bad habit of running “news” stories that are stuffed with liberals...who then aren’t called liberals. On Thursday’s All Things Considered, NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner reported on how Team Obama is queasy about letting girls under 15 – middle-school girls -- get access to “emergency contraceptives,” even after a federal judge mandated they be sold to all ages. 

As Rovner put it, “the administration's decision to appeal that ruling has outraged many of the president's allies in the women's health community.” That’s what they call the aggressively “sex-positive” feminists. The only “conservative” view in this story was...Obama! Well, that's not fair. The Obama quotes they used were liberal-pleasers, too. Everyone else wanted to make America safe for sixth-grade sex.

In today’s installment of NPR Hates Conservatives, we offer a story from Saturday’s All Things Considered. Conservatism is killing Kansas under Gov. Sam Brownback, apparently. Anchor Jacki Lyden reported: “One political writer says it's time to write the state's obituary, and he did.”

Jason Probst read the first line of his screed out loud on national radio: “The great state of Kansas passed away on March 31, 2013 after a long and difficult battle with extremism.” Lyden added: “And that's our cover story today: Red or Dead? The new Kansas experiment.” With the exception of a few thoughts from Gov. Brownback, Lyden focused in on the leftists and their complaints that progressivism is being cast aside:  

National Public Radio’s brand is soothing and civil news and interviews. That certainly didn’t fit when Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy was interviewed Thursday on All Things Considered after the gun-control measures were rejected in the Senate.

Anchor Melissa Block read back to Malloy his comments that gun makers don’t care if mentally deranged people buy their guns. He not only doubled down on that, calling the NRA a “monster,” but when asked what it will take to pass gun control, he suggested Sen. Chuck Grassley might need a mass-shooting in Iowa, or one in Alabama or Mississippi. Civility went out the window on the evening commute.

On Thursday's All Things Considered, NPR's Ari Shapiro couldn't be bothered to feature any of the religious leaders who spoke at the inter-faith service in honor of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, Instead, Shapiro zeroed in on the liberal politicians who spoke, playing five straight clips from President Obama's speech at the memorial event.

The correspondent also played up the President's speaking ability: "This was Obama the orator, a man who is famous for his ability to give a speech that, even in a time of mourning, can bring a crowd roaring to its feet."

Our taxpayer dollars seem to be at work finding the culprit of the Boston terror attack last Monday. But on taxpayer-funded NPR, counterterrorism reporter Dina Temple-Raston was already guessing this was domestic not foreign.  “The thinking, as we've been reporting, is that this is a domestic or extremist attack,” Temple-Raston declared on the April 16 All Things Considered.

So, besides the pressure cooker bomb, whose directions on building it can be found on the Internet, what evidence shows that this is probably domestic terrorism?  Where’s the manifesto?  Who’s claimed responsibility?  All are question marks at this point, so what’s with the incessant speculation by some in the media.  Yes, it could be a crazy right-winger, or an al-Qaeda operative, but what ever happened to a simple narrative of there was a bombing, it’s awful, people died, and federal authorities are investigating the matter? But Temple-Raston heavily implied this matches with past acts of right wing – and domestic – terror:

As Newsbusters has detailed again and again, coverage by dominant news organizations of the Kermit Gosnell murder trial has been almost non-existent. Taxpayer-subsidized public radio is no exception, even after the issue of non-coverage gained widespread attention last week.

As the fifth week of the Gosnell trial continues (it opened March 18), NPR still has not devoted a single piece to the topic of the trial. It did briefly reference the trial once--in a story about Pennsylvania abortion clinic regulations that resulted from what authorities found in Gosnell's clinic during a raid. On March 28, NPR's afternoon news magazine All Things Considered gave only 19 seconds out of 4 1/2 minutes to reporting on the Gosnell trial. In sharp contrast, the piece's author, Jeff Brady, NPR's Philadelphia-based National Desk Correspondent, gave five times the amount to time to detailing the "expensive" hardships Pennsylvania abortion clinics now have to endure. The story left out entirely the details of the horrendous charges against Gosnell.

Late last year, NPR already proved its affinity for publicizing a vicious tale where the Virgin Mary is turned into a bitter atheist who denies the divinity of Jesus and hates the Apostles for trying to spread Christianity. But NPR proved it again....on Good Friday.

The news “hook” is the forthcoming Broadway adaptation, a one-woman monologue, set to open on April 22. So NPR obviously timed the piece to tweak the Christians. All Things Considered anchor Robert Siegel interviewed the actress, Fiona Shaw, and after he heard her read from this Christian-bashing work in an Irish brogue, he compared Jesus to an Irish Republican Army terrorist leader: 

If we're going to have our tax dollars spent on NPR covering political news, can't we at least insist that they report the news accurately?

On Friday's All Things Considered, co-Host Audie Cornish opened an eight-minute segment by saying, “the gay marriage debate arrived at the Supreme Court, and White House efforts to tighten the nation's gun laws ran into serious Republican opposition.” Granted, the Tea Party caucus in the Senate is planning on a filibuster of the anti-gun bill that’s making its way to the floor, but the “serious” opposition comes from within the Democratic Party, as no less a partisan Democrat than Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid noted a few weeks ago.

On March 19, Ed O’Keefe and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post reported that Sen. Feinstein’s assault weapons ban amendment to the gun control bill had, in the words of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, “using the most optimistic numbers, has less than 40 votes.”

Faux conservative David Brooks of the New York Times used his Friday appearance with Mark Shields on the PBS NewsHour to bash Republicans over sequestration, comparing GOP tactics in dealing with spending to a trite circus act.  Either Mr. Brooks forgot that sequestration was the president’s idea or doesn't care about facts getting in the way of cozying up to his liberal media buddies.  Even liberal Democratic Sen. Max Baucus (Montana) admitted to that, and it’s explicitly mentioned that sequestration was the White House’s idea in Bob Woodward’s new book about the 2011 debt ceiling fiasco.  

Shields piggybacked off of Brooks’ remarks, and said that the GOP’s fallback position is blaming the president, as if Obama is blameless in this dismal situation.

Last Friday’s All Things Considered segment on NPR was a real treat because David Brooks was absent, and therefore, couldn’t be his squishy self alongside liberal columnist E.J. Dionne.  National Review’s Mona Charen, a real conservative, filled in for the New York Times pseudo-Republican, and effectively countered Dionne’s Obama cheerleading.

The two were asked by host Robert Siegel to analyze the president’s State of the Union address last week, and to no one’s surprise – that Dionne was fawning over the speech, while Charen took a more pragmatic approach.

During Friday’s broadcasts of the PBS's NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered, liberals continued with their narrative about the fiscal cliff, and how it’s not all that bad.  Previously, Mark Shields and E.J. Dionne agreed with New York Times-style Republican David Brooks that they would go off the cliff.   The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne equated it with the “will of the people.”

But now, the Post’s Ruth Marcus and E.J. Dionne insist that the cliff isn’t a cliff.  It’s actually a well-defined “slope." But in the words of Joe Biden, “this is a big f***ing deal.”

Julie Rovner, NPR's resident ObamaCare flack, failed to include any conservatives experts for her report on Medicare on Tuesday's All Things Considered . Rovner played two sound bites each from Drew Altman of the Kaiser Family Foundation and from MIT's Jonathan Gruber, whom the Washington Post named the Democratic Party's "most influential health-care expert." She didn't mention either individual's liberal affiliations.

The closest that the correspondent got to mentioning their left-of-center politics is when she pointed out how Gruber "likes the way the Affordable Care Act takes on Medicare with a variety of approaches."

On Thursday’s All Things Considered, NPR anchor Melissa Block announced it was time to mark the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street protests. “One year later, the tent camps are gone. So what's happened to the movement and the people who joined it?” Question: If it failed utterly, why celebrate the anniversary?

For "reflections" on the state of this amorphous radical movement, Block interviewed two Occupiers NPR had previously interviewed when the protests were most heavily celebrated by the media. She had no conservative questions (or critical guests). At least, Occupy Boston activist Jason Potteiger has a sense of humor about it, telling NPR it was a failed political Woodstock:

NPR's idea of Republican convention coverage is to expose Mitt Romney as a flip-flopping fraud flirting with the "extremist camp within the Republican Party." On the very liberal show Fresh Air on Tuesday, host Terry Gross brought on two Boston Globe reporters who've penned an expose called The Real Romney. They talked for 43 and a half minutes.

Veteran Globe editor Michael Kranish found “disaster” in the GOP platform “which takes a very hard line on abortion, and he's picked Paul Ryan, who in the past has voiced a very hard line on abortion....And it's a disaster on the left and certainly in the center because Mitt Romney wants to talk about the economy.” Gross also wanted the Boston authors to trash Romney for his birth-certificate joke, and expose Romney's polygamous Mexico-based ancestors:

Scott Horsley's report on Wednesday's All Things Considered could have mistaken for a three-and-half minute ad from a pro-Obama super PAC. Horsley played up how "Mr. Obama often tempers his speeches with a dose of modesty about what government can and can't do" and how the President "pushes back strongly against the anti-government rhetoric of his GOP opponents."

The NPR correspondent also sympathetically noted that "part of the President's challenge...is persuading Americans that the people government is taking care of really are our own." Horsley filled the segment with talking points from Obama's campaign and with soundbites from the Democrat and his campaign, and failed to include any from his opponents.

At the same time that NPR was offended enough to go “truth squadding” on Romney’s advertisements attacking Obama's weakness on welfare, NPR’s Don Gonyea reported on Harry Reid’s unsubstantiated charges of Romney tax evasion by leaving the clear impression that Reid is effectively punching away at a Romney “vulnerability” and sees nothing to lose. He certainly can’t seem to lose with NPR.

On Wednesday's All Things Considered, NPR anchor Melissa Block introduced the story as “Don Gonyea reports on the increasingly ugly fight,” but that was applied to both Reid and the Republicans. But their online headline was “In Brawl Over Romney's Tax Returns, Harry Reid Gets Marquee Billing.” Like a boxer, get it?

NPR is the network that sought out Christopher Hitchens to trash Mother Teresa upon her death as a horrible fraud, and then when Hitchens died, they warmly remembered how he hated God and Mother Teresa. So it's not surprising that radical leftist and gay activist Gore Vidal was going to be honored without a second of dissent or disapproval of critics.

None of the glowing obituaries and appreciations carried an ideological label, and one -- on Wednesday night's All Things Considered -- contained a glaring falsehood -- that William F. Buckley called Vidal a "queer" on national TV in 1968 without being provoked. Vidal called him a "crypto-Nazi" first. NPR turned to the gay novelist Christopher Bram to do the honors, and he brazenly lied:

Like all the other Obama-friendly media, NPR on its evening show All Things Considered devoted time to putting Obama’s “you didn’t build that” outburst “in context.” Co-host Audie Cornish promised, “In a few minutes, we'll listen to exactly what the president said in context.” They offered Obama a 70-second soundbite.

But first, Cornish turned to NPR correspondent Scott Horsley, who spent 90 seconds unloading how the businesses the Romney campaign is using to rebut Obama’s remark are all beneficiaries of government largesse:

The liberal media aren’t hiding their contempt for the House holding another ObamaCare repeal vote. Thursday’s Washington Post published an article headlined: “A House they looked down on: In the visitors’ gallery, health-law repeal vote didn’t look so dignified.”

On Wednesday night’s All Things Considered, congressional correspondent Andrea Seabrook dismissed the entire debate as "largely fact free, with both sides exercising more condescension and moral outrage than anything else.” That’s right, NPR is describing someone else as condescending:

NPR's All Things Considered on Friday night aired a shocking piece questioning China's one-child population policy and the forced abortions that result when people try to go around the prohibitions.

Host Melissa Block said loud pleas inside China "come after gruesome photos of a 7-month-old fetus whose mother was forced to have abortion spread across the Internet last month. Increasingly, Chinese scholars say the government's population policy is not only inhumane, it's also creating a demographic disaster, one that will leave China with far fewer workers and more elderly people to take care of." Reporter Frank Langfitt told the story of Deng Jiyuan and his wife Feng Jianmei, who have a six-year-old daughter. After Feng got pregnant again, she was abducted and given a labor-inducing injection : 

NPR's Tamara Keith forwarded the "war on women" talking point of Democratic senators on Tuesday's All Things Considered as she reported on their proposed Paycheck Fairness Act. Keith spotlighted how "the bill's author...Senator Barbara Mikulski from Maryland, points out women earn just 77 cents for every dollar made by a man in the same position. She says that's the real war on women."

However, the correspondent omitted that several cosponsors of the bill actually pay their female staffers less than male staffers. She also slanted towards the liberal politicians by playing three soundbites from them, versus only one from a Republican senator.

Mickey Kaus at the Daily Caller flagged an example of NPR “laundering” an amnesty activist named “Lucy” as just a typical Latina who represents how Romney might have difficulty with the Latino vote. It’s the same “Lucy” that heckled Mitt Romney until supporters applauded over her yelling. It’s not even the first time “Lucy” has harassed Romney. 

On the May 23 All Things Considered, NPR’s David Welna interviewed an “undocumented” young woman named only “Lucy” on the sidewalk and she complained that he’s failing to support the “DREAM Act” providing amnesty for illegal immigrants who came to America as children:

NPR obviously thought the case of Monsignor William Lynn, "the highest ranking Catholic official in the U.S. to be criminally tried for covering up child sex abuse by priests," was newsworthy, as they devoted four and a half minutes to the story on Thursday's All Things Considered. Meanwhile, the public radio network has yet to cover the Monday filing of 12 major lawsuits against ObamaCare's contraception/abortifacient mandate by Catholic dioceses and organizations on the air.

Correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty's report aired mere minutes before the CBS Evening News led with the Lynn case. On Friday, Media Research Center president Brent Bozell took both CBS and NPR to task for playing up the story, while remaining completely silent on the pro-religious freedom litigation.

The broadcast networks stubbornly pushed ahead, logging another 24 hours -- now we're at four straight days --  ignoring the Catholic lawsuits against the Obama administration. And once again on Thursday night, instead of covering this historic lawsuit championing religious freedom,  the CBS Evening News offered another two and a half minutes to a “massive coverup” of Catholic sex abuse in Philadelphia. That’s five minutes on Catholic abuse charges to 19 seconds on Catholic religious freedom. ABC and NBC are still silent, completely silent.

Taxpayer-funded NPR, which has ignored Catholic religious freedom on its morning and evening newscasts all week, covered the Philadelphia trial for four and a half minutes on the show they call “All Things Considered.” The only Catholic news story worthy of consideration for these outlets seem to be dated stories on what CBS calls “predator priests.”