NPR president and CEO Katherine Maher amazed the House Republicans when she testified to Congress on March 26 that she'd never witnessed any liberal bias on NPR, and that “We have a responsibility to serve Americans across the full political spectrum in a trustworthy, nonpartisan fashion.”
Maher laughably claimed to the Washington Post on August 6 that NPR had no “affinity for one party or one perspective over the other,” characterizing the organization as ideological only in that it supports “democracy and the Constitution and the role of the press and the right of every citizen to seek and receive information.”
Wrong. We studied the guests appearing on NPR’s two-hour afternoon news show All Things Considered during the two-month period between July 19, 2025, the day after Congress rescinded taxpayer funding for NPR, and September 18, 2025.
Liberal/Democrat-leaning guests outnumbered conservative-Republican-leaning guests by an astounding disparity of 53 to 3 -- and of those three, one was anti-Trump. The political partisanship was also more stark on NPR, with a 12-1 party breakdown of Democrats/liberal politician guests versus Republican ones.
Key Findings:
■ Liberal-leaning guests outnumbered conservative-leaning guests by 53-3, a ratio of 17.7 to 1.
■ Of 12 total appearances by Democratic officials, none were pro-Trump. There was only one single appearance by a Republican official (pro-Trump).
■ When elected officials and political appointees were removed from the guest count, the ideological disparity widened further, with liberal-leaning guests outnumbering conservative-leaning guests 41-2, for a ratio of 20.5 to 1.
■ Liberal journalists made six appearances as guests, compared to zero appearances by conservative journalists.
Liberal Guests Fearmongering Over Trump 2.0
Liberals were constantly allowed to make extreme statements without pushback from the rotating All Things Considered hosts, as Gov. JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, demonstrated while ranting about Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration on the September 9 episode (to promote a longer Morning Edition interview).
JB PRITZKER: …. I want to ask a question to everybody who's listening and to you. Do you carry with you citizenship papers? How do you prove to somebody that you're a U.S. citizen - your accent, the color of your skin? That's not the country we live in. You know, you shouldn't have to walk around with papers, the way that they did in the early days of Nazi Germany, to prove that you belong and that you're not one of them.”
Morning host Steve Inskeep didn’t challenge Pritzker’s “Nazi” comparison.
On July 23, All Things Considered hosted radical lawyer Benjamin Crump, representing the family of Breonna Taylor, killed in Louisville during an errant forced entry by local police. (Crump also represented the George Floyd family, and in 2023 attacked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over the state’s decision to reject a woke course on African-American culture and history in racially inflammatory terms worthy of Al Sharpton.) Trump’s Justice Department recommended no prison time for Brett Hankison, one of the officers involved in Taylor’s shooting. The judge instead sentenced Hankison to three years.
Crump argued: "It just goes to show you what this administration thinks about the killing of black people and how far they will go to protect police officers.” Host Ira Shapiro didn’t challenge Crump’s allegations.
On August 25, Summers talked about tennis star Serena Williams’ weight loss with author Chrissy King, author of a book whose title speaks for itself: The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism And Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy And Build Collective Freedom. Summers relished the liberal academic term “discourse”: “I mean, we know that the discourse, when we talk about our bodies, about black women's bodies, we know that the discourse is different. So it does make me wonder, Chrissy, do you think if the new face of these drugs had been a white woman rather than a black woman, the discourse, the reaction would be different?”
King responded: ….when you're a black woman that has been harmed by sexism, by fatphobia, by racism, you've had to, like, already face all of those things in your life….you've been the victim of this, all of these systems of oppression the entire time.” (“Black” and not "white" is capitalized in the original transcript.)
Journalists as Liberal Mouthpieces
All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly mourned the sudden retirement of Washington Post former fact-checker Glenn Kessler on July 31, who basically admitted during the interview of holding Donald Trump to a different standard from Democrat leaders like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, figures whom Kessler barely touched in favor of piling on his famed “Pinocchio” ratings on Trump.
Kessler: There was a very clear dividing line in the period, which was June 2015. And that's when Donald Trump took the escalator down and announced he was running for president. Before that moment, politicians paid attention to fact-checks. They would, you know, be shamed by the Pinocchios that I would award. And they tried to keep their claims tethered to the truth as much as you would expect a politician to do. But Trump really changed the dynamic, and he said many things that were false. And even though he was fact-checked as false, he would simply double down or triple down and keep saying them.”
New York Times columnist M. Gessen, the non-binary author of the subtly titled "Surviving Autocracy,” was invited on to discuss burgeoning authoritarianism under Trump with host Ailsa Chang. The online heading referenced Trump sending National Guard troops to fight crime in D.C.: “Do Trump's D.C. moves echo an authoritarian playbook?”
Host Ailsa Chang asked Gessen “what was your first reaction when you started watching what's been playing out in D.C. over the last week and a half?” leading to this exchange:
GESSEN: Oh, I don't know if you want me to say that on air. But...
CHANG: (Laughter) Please, feel free.
GESSEN: You know, so much of establishing autocratic rule is a matter of perception, because, you know, we tend to think of this as sort of a series of decrees and executive orders or court decisions. And all of that is very important. But there is something that Trump is extremely sensitive to, which is whether he looks like he's in control of everything. And to put it more bluntly, in an autocracy, ultimately, probably the most important thing is what people think about who is in charge of all the people in uniforms and carrying guns.”
Republican Party Poopers
In a period where Republicans control the House, Senate and presidency, somehow Democrats dominated the All Things Considered guest list, 12-1. (Two United Kingdom politicians were included in the 12, one from the Labour Party and one from the Liberal Democrats, each brought on to condemn Trump’s state visit to the UK.)
While 12 Democrats appeared on the show during the study period, all liberal/anti-Trump, only one pro-Trump Republican did, and it wasn’t a U.S. Congressman or Senator, but Tom Oliverson, chair of the Texas House Republican Caucus, to support Texas’s aggressive redistricting stance, favored by Trump. Oliverson was strongly challenged from the left by host Ailsa Chang with questions like “Democrats are saying that this proposed map from your party will disenfranchise Texas voters, especially voters of color.”
On the "conservative" side, we counted Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations on July 24. Since the Left so eagerly channels the viewpoints of Hamas and the United Nations, Israeli officials are treated with hardballs like American Republicans.
CONCLUSION:
As usual, the guest list for All Things Considered was dominated by disgruntled Democratic politicos, leftist professors, and legacy media liberals – an unwise stance for a previously tax-funded radio network that operated under a congressional mandate to maintain "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature,” and a major reason it lost that taxpayer funding.
Ironically, back in 2011, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik found a guest imbalance – at Fox News. Yet clearly NPR shouldn't ever try to lecture Fox News about excluding viewpoints it doesn't like.
COMBINED METHODOLOGY: We reviewed NPR's All Things Considered (two hours Monday through Friday) for a total of 45 episodes. (Not included: the truncated weekend version of All Things Considered.)
Guests were defined as interview subjects if they appeared in studio or talked to a host or in-studio reporter remotely. Guests were defined as either liberal or conservative based on the subject matter and content of the interview, or classified as non-applicable if neither designation applied. Elected officials and political appointees of both parties were also included -- defined as current or recently retired officeholders at the federal, state, and local level, as well as those who served in the Biden White House or served previously or currently in the Trump White House, or were appointed to their position during the Biden or Trump administrations. Regular show pundits and reporters from local NPR member stations were excluded from the tallies.
