Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is scaring the liberal media by demanding a hearing into the journalistic tilt at PBS and NPR before the House Oversight Committee’s subcommittee on government efficiency. Politico’s panicked headline was “NPR and PBS first target in MTG’s DOGE crosshairs.”
“As an organization that receives federal funds, both directly and indirectly through its member stations, NPR’s reporting should serve the entire public, not just a narrow slice of likeminded individuals and ideological interest groups,” Greene declared in a Monday letter sent to NPR CEO Katherine Maher, with nearly identical language sent to PBS.
“Public” broadcasting should labor intensely to be the most balanced branch of the media, since all taxpaying Americans fund it. They don’t see it that way, even though they preposterously claim they’re currently impartial.
NPR said in a statement, “We welcome the opportunity to discuss the critical role of public media in delivering impartial, fact-based news and reporting to the American public.” This is wrong on several levels. NPR CEO Katherine Maher failed to appear before a House hearing into NPR last May, and nobody familiar with NPR’s journalism would call it “impartial” and “fact-based.” It’s woke and very opinionated.
A PBS statement was just as brazen: “PBS and our member stations are grateful to have bipartisan support in Congress, and our country. We’ve earned this support from decades of noncommercial and nonpartisan work in local communities: providing all Americans with content they trust…” It’s shameless.
See our 'Public Broadcasting' tag for up-to-date examples
NPR also touted that “We constantly strive to hold ourselves to the highest standards of journalism, as evidenced by our publicly available standards and ethics guidelines, the presence of a Public Editor – a position relinquished by all other major news organizations.”
But “Public Editor” Kelly McBride made it plain in a Brian Stelter podcast that NPR doesn’t take conservative criticism seriously, assuming that no conservatives are regular listeners, so their reaction is "disingenuous."
Online on January 9, McBride addressed the issue of liberal bias by suggesting it’s fixed by more content from red-state NPR reporters. Like they’re not liberals in red states? Instead of discussing political coverage, she addressed....snow!
When people accuse NPR of being too liberal, they often say that NPR stories are too focused on D.C., New York and Los Angeles, which is where NPR's main offices are. Conversely, critics say that NPR doesn't cover issues that are central to less-populated states like Missouri, Indiana or Idaho. We've noticed this as well. In January 2022, for example, Iowa received a record amount of snow. New York and D.C. also got snow, but not as much. When we asked why the Iowa snowstorm didn't get any coverage, an editor told us it was because not as many people were affected in Iowa as on the East Coast.
This question of which snowstorm to cover is admittedly a small example. But it illustrates how difficult the task of providing news to all of America can be with finite resources.
No one with a functioning mind thinks that just reporting weather from Iowa is a "balance" in the political tilt of NPR. McBride later gives away that just because they're doing more on snow doesn't mean NPR won't compromise their DEI focus on race and gender (they let their journalists attend BLM protests):
To fulfill its mission and defend itself against its critics, NPR will have to do more than expand the topics it covers. It has to demonstrate a commitment to this level of geographic and cultural diversity across the entire news portfolio. And just to get it on the record, this new effort to expand coverage can't come at the cost of covering race, gender and other forms of diversity, which NPR also strives to do well. It's all important.
NPR should cover race and gender, but it's how they do it that demonstrates their left-wing orthodoxy.
