The folks at National Public Radio really don’t like Fox News. They don’t like NPR people on Fox News. When the NPR talk show Fresh Air with Terry Gross wanted to discuss Fox News and its role in nurturing tea-party protests, they gave 40 minutes to David Weigel of the left-wing site The Washington Independent. It had the usual tone of exploring the dark side of the moon. Gross led off the show discussing the new conservative protests:

It's a right-wing movement that has been interrupting town hall meetings, staging tea party protests, and challenging Obama's citizenship. The new influence of Fox News TV host Glenn Beck was demonstrated by the 9/12 March on Washington, which he promoted on his show.

To NPR, apparently every Tea Party protester is a birther, and every conservative question at a town hall meeting was an "interruption." They discussed his article on the recent Values Voter Summit for Christian conservatives first, and then turned to the topic of Fox:

Terry Gross, the female Philadelphia-based host of the National Public Radio show Fresh Air, notoriously tangled with Bill O’Reilly in 2003 by asking O'Reilly to respond to Al  Franken's attacks on him (two weeks after a giggly interview with Franken himself). A July 1 interview with Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz on the (apparently hopeless) state of the Republican Party caused her to pick up the left-wing bloggers’ attack on Rush Limbaugh as someone who says "extreme wild things" and damages the GOP:

GROSS: You know, I always wonder what Republicans -- and I know you can't really generalize here because every Republican is different -- but what Republicans think of right wing talk radio and TV. Take Rush Limbaugh, for instance. He says some pretty extreme wild things. He's not running for office. He's not taking responsibility for running the country. He's, I mean, he's a talk show host and what he needs is an audience and ratings and saying extreme things is very good for getting audience and ratings.

The Washington Post reported Friday that Richard Cizik resigned his position as spokesman and vice president for governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals after he declared he was "shifting" toward supporting civil unions for homosexual couples in a December 2 National Public Radio interview. Post reporter Jacqueline Salmon explained the remark was "anathema to most evangelical Christians, who believe that the Bible permits marriage only between a man and a woman".

This is an example of a reporter avoiding the obvious on the Bible's contents, like saying the public "believes Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance opposes pollution."

Cizik’s become a darling of media liberals over the last few years for insisting that global warming is a bigger issue for religious people than sexual issues like abortion and homosexuality. But Cizik dropped a bunch of bombshells in that interview, declaring he voted for Barack Obama, despite his hard-left social positions; agreeing that younger evangelicals "know gay people" and aren't as "threatened" as their elders; and suggesting Sarah Palin's environmental positions were like burning the Bible. Here’s the civil union passage:

Unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers got a "distinguished professor" reception for most of the hour on NPR’s nationally distributed show Fresh Air with Terry Gross on Tuesday. But Gross was much more hostile to Bill O’Reilly back in 2003 than she was to Ayers. Gross set up Ayers with questions like this: "When Sarah Palin started talking bout how Obama was palling around with terrorists, meaning you, did you start getting a lot of death threats?" And: "When you were getting those death threats, did you think at any point that the McCain-Palin campaign had crossed the line into irresponsibility?" She asked the terrorist if the Republicans were inspiring violent thoughts.

For his part, Ayers insisted on blurring John McCain and even former Johnson aide Bill Moyers into a chart of terrorism, that America needs "a kind of truth and reconciliation process where we look at what everyone did, that we don't hold up the Weather Underground as the most insane and crazy and off-the-tracks group without also asking, what did you do, Robert McNamara? What did you do, Henry Kissinger? What did you do, John McCain? What did you do, Bill Moyers?"

On Wednesday, the NPR talk show Fresh Air with Terry Gross aired an interview about Sarah Palin with Michael Carey, columnist and former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News and public broadcasting host (of a political talk show called Anchorage Edition). Gross aggressively went after Palin on every front, including her "extreme" religious views:

GROSS: Sarah Palin's religious views strike some people as extreme. For example, in 2005, she attended a service at her former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, where a bishop from Kenya prayed over her, asking Jesus to keep her safe from every form of witchcraft, and he had claimed to have driven out a witch from his village in Kenya. In June, she told a group that his prayers helped her to become governor. Have her religious views been seen as extreme at all within Alaska?

It was bound to happen eventually - someone from the global warming movement tying the recent Myanmar cyclone to the so-called climate change phenomenon.

Former Vice President Al Gore in an interview on NPR's May 6 "Fresh Air" broadcast did just that. He was interviewed by "Fresh Air" host Terry Gross about the release of his book, "The Assault on Reason," in paperback.

"And as we're talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated," Gore said. "And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China - and we're seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming."

National Public Radio knows how to identify itself as the secular liberal media. On Good Friday, the show Fresh Air with Terry Gross recycled a 2004 interview with retired academic John Dominic Crossan, a co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, a man who believes the Gospels are largely mythology, someone's ahistorical hopes, and that the resurrection of Jesus never occurred, and that perhaps the body of Jesus was consumed by wild dogs. In this interview, Gross also asked him to comment on (disparage) the movie The Passion of the Christ, which he eagerly did. He suggested too much focus on the passion of Christ is "dangerously close to pathological." (Photo from NPR.org)

Just two weeks ago, we noted Fresh Air gave unbelievers about three times more air time than believers. Here's a sample of the Crossan interview:

GROSS: When you, as someone who studies the historical Jesus, think about the resurrection, do you think about it as metaphor or as actuality?

On Friday, the NPR chat show Fresh Air with Terry Gross (aired on over 400 stations from WHYY in Philadelphia) carried two interviews on science and religion. They might claim the discussion was balanced, but not when you consider the time allotted, as listed on the NPR web page:

Richard Dawkins: An Argument for Atheism (27 min 41 sec)

Francis Collins: A Scientist's Case for God (10 min 50 sec)

Apparently, an almost three-to-one time difference is a fair fight on NPR.

In case that's not imbalanced enough, the Dawkins page also helpfully links to another 30-minute NPR interview with Dawkins about his book The God Delusion on the show Talk of the Nation. The interviews are repeats from last year, but NPR doesn't generally tell listeners about that when the show airs.

Philip Shenon, investigative reporter for the New York Times, has written a book on the 9-11 Commission and talked about it with Fresh Air host Terry Gross on National Public Radio Monday. Judging by Shenon's past willingness to heap all of the blame for 9-11 on the then eight-month old Bush administration (as opposed to the eight years of Clinton that preceded it), it's no surprise he praised Clinton's former National Security Advisor, the disgraced Sandy Berger, who got caught and convicted for shoving copies of classified documents into his socks.