As NPR aired Fresh Air here in DC on Thursday, an underwriting announcement said one foundation was funding the show for its "engaging in meaningful conversations." That's a clever term for "liberal trash talk."
Fresh Air is a daily talk show out of WHYY in Philadelphia (which airs nationwide) that has a serious tilt toward the left. A NewsBusters review of Fresh Air programs from January 1 through June 30 reveals there have been 36 interviews with liberal and leftist journalists, and precisely zero with conservative journalists. Just like PBS's Washington Week with The Atlantic, conservative journalists are never invited -- on something they call "public" broadcasting.
Some of the radical voices from MSNBC were granted most of an hour on this supposed oasis of "civic discourse," like Joy Reid and Molly Jong-Fast (about her memoir about her mother). Radical Elie Mystal of The Nation promoted his new book. As they explained, "In Bad Law, Elie Mystal argues that our country's laws on immigration, abortion and voting rights don't reflect the will of most Americans, and we'd be better off abolishing them and starting over."
One of the 36 was CNN's Jake Tapper, whose book Original Sin is very critical of Democrats who hid Biden's mental decline. Terry Gross wasn't thrilled. She asserted "Republicans, I think, are very happy with your book....Do you think that what you found in your book is worthy of a congressional investigation? Is that an appropriate response to what you found, in your opinion?"
Then Gross turned to the opposite view (the NPR audience view): Many Democrats are unhappy about your book, and this dates back to before the news of the past few days. A lot of Democrats feel like, why are you going back and talking about Biden and his problems? It distracts from putting the focus on how Trump is using or abusing his power."
Some liberal outlets were especially favored:
- The New York Times: 11
- The Atlantic: 8
- The New Yorker: 4
- The Washington Post: 3
- The Guardian: 2
- MSNBC: 2
These outlets drew one each:
- CNN
- Bloomberg News
- ProPublica
- The Economist
- The Nation
- NPR (I count their Lisa Hagen as a liberal journalist, some might discount the internal booking).
Today's guest was -- shocker -- another New York Times reporter, legal correspondent Adam Liptak, trash-talking the conservatives on the Supreme Court and discussing the wonders of liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
NPR's air will never be "fresh" enough for
- Fox News
- Newsmax
- The Washington Examiner
- The Washington Times
- The New York Post
- Washington Free Beacon
- Daily Caller
- Daily Signal
- Daily Wire
....okay, you get the point. We certainly would never expect a NewsBusters interview...because they can't handle the truth about what NPR is -- taxpayer-subsidized liberal PR for liberals.
Before this year, Fresh Air has routinely promoted authors of books savaging the Republican Party and expecting Republicans to pay for it.
- New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters for his book Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.
- Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank and his book The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party
- New York Times writer Robert Draper, who authored Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind
- The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, an MSNBC regular who authored Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell
