NPR CEO Katherine Maher came for a 15-minute interview at a Semafor summit in D.C. on "trust in media," but it was a softball session. Instead of being pressed on NPR's liberal tilt, Semafor reporter Maxwell Tani was incredibly vague: "What have you done in your first year to build or restore trust in NPR?" I was in the room, and suppressed the desire to yell about the answer (and the question).
Tani didn't mention the name of longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner, or how he was effectively forced out for blowing the whistle on the leftist tilt. He didn't mention that Berliner found 87 registered Democrats in the NPR newsroom, and zero Republicans.
Now Tani might think hey, this is a room full of media reporters and critics, I don’t need to be specific. He didn’t ask about how NPR has covered Trump or Biden or Kamala Harris in the last year, or how they covered abortion or transgenderism or climate. So I’m just boiling in my seat. And then inevitably came the fog of an answer, all about process. We have a deeper process! So when your newsroom is all Democrats, who puts on the brakes on liberal bias?
This event was supposed to be about "trust in media." At the start of this, the Gallup Poll expert told the audience the media came in with 31 percent expressing a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the press. But the “great deal” number was 8 percent. A big part of that is the Republican half of America, the Trump-voter half, accurately thinks the media are a pile of butlers and maids for the Democrats and the Left.
The trust question is in large part about bias, but they don’t’ want to talk about bias, because they believe in bias. Bias is power. Bias favors the so-called right side of history, or bias favors the marginalized victims of American bigotry. This questioning would underline why Katherine would skip testifying before House Republicans last year, but said yes to this event. We could wonder whether she and her NPR team asked about how tough the questions were going to be, and there were assurances made. Certainly, none of us in the audience were getting questions in. I resisted the urge to disturb the peace.
I stood next to Maher at the reception afterward, but didn't horn in on the conversation she was having. Then I found NPR reporter David Folkenflik, and met him for the first time. Naturally, I told him her answer was terrible! It’s nice to be agreeable in public, even though no one’s budging on the job. Folkenflik’s been busy chronicling the latest freakout over Jeff Bezos moving The Washington Post editorial pages toward defending "personal liberties" and "free markets." More libs are cancelling their subscriptions! NPR and Folkenflik exist to channel the most left-wing factions in American news rooms. That tendency would have been a fun question for Katherine to answer.
Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
