Leftist Radio Talker Thom Hartmann Can't Stand NPR: 'Too Much Right-wing Bias There'

August 14th, 2013 10:46 PM

One of the reasons liberal talk radio has never been a big national success is the liberal elephant in the room: NPR. But when you're a leftist host like Thom Hartmann, NPR looks like a den of corporatist pigs about two political inches away from his villains, like the Koch brothers.

On Tuesday's show, he announced "I'm astounded that several times a week I hear on NPR somebody from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, treated as if they were some kind of an expert on something. These are front groups for the right-wing corporatists and the billionaires." You can't be an "expert" and a capitalist, apparently.

Hartmann lamented "It's reached the point now where I'm pretty much not even bothering to listen to NPR any longer because there's so much right-wing bias [on] there." He added "I'll stick with Amy Goodman [on radical-left Pacifica Radio] if I want the news." Like NPR, Pacifica stations are subsidized by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Last Friday, Hartmann hosted one of Phil Donahue’s former producers at MSNBC, Jeff Cohen, who insisted “NPR has been, and public TV, they've been so under the gun from right-wing pressure and paranoia for so many years that they keep getting more and more timid and conservative to prove that they're not liberal.”