The Washington Post came running to the rescue of its liberal friends at NPR on Wednesday on the front page of their Style section. Online, their book review by former Post media reporter Paul Farhi came with this promotional headline:
With NPR under threat, a colorful new history shows why it matters
Steve Oney’s engaging and deeply reported On Air follows NPR from its beginnings in the early 1970s to tens of millions of listeners per week.
This is just the latest liberal book on the history of NPR liberals. Farhi is effusive on how every penny ever spent on NPR is glorious:
As longtime journalist Steve Oney documents in On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR, a lively and engaging new history of the organization, it has been money well spent by the government, helping to create and support a national network of enormous value.
Conservatives have long despised and disparaged NPR for its allegedly liberal bent, but its news programming has been of routinely high quality for decades. There’s no real substitute for NPR: Satellite radio and podcasts don’t offer its comprehensive live coverage; commercial radio gave up long ago trying to tell the stories NPR does. Without NPR, many parts of the country would be audio deserts, bereft of in-depth news, foreign reporting and newsmaker interviews (yes, even with Republican newsmakers).
Liberals sound ridiculous when they write the phrase the "allegedly liberal bent" of NPR, as if that's in doubt. Would they write about the "allegedly conservative bent" of Fox News or Newsmax? It's like writing about "allegedly alcoholic" whiskey.
Farhi explored how Oney curiously leaves out inconvenient topics, like NPR's extreme tolerance of Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg palling around everywhere with leftist Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (later penning a book about their palling around). He then weirdly acknowledges maybe "allegedly" is a silly term.
He might also have engaged more with the criticisms of the committed cadre of NPR haters. Yes, NPR has sometimes sounded suspiciously liberal, but it has more often sounded suspiciously effete and overly focused on the tastes of the upscale suburbanites who also happen to be the most loyal contributors to its stations’ pledge drives.
We at MRC have spent years providing a mountain of examples of NPR's effect leftist tilt. Farhi failed to engage in the notion that if NPR is taxpayer-funded, it ought to represent the viewpoints of a broader spectrum of taxpayers. NPR CEO Katherine Maher paid lip service to this at the latest hearing, even if NPR never seriously engages with that principle during their broadcasts.
Farhi could only concluded defunding NPR would be shameful, as if its existence was solely dependent on stealing tax money from the committed cadre of NPR haters:
Conservatives’ long-sought goal of severing public broadcasting from its federal lifeline could be imminent. As Oney writes, American journalism “is better for the existence of NPR.” When, or if, the hammer comes down, it will be a day of mourning, and a day of shame.
Sign the petition to help us defund another MSNBC in PBS and NPR at defundpbsnpr.org.
