NPR, the corrupt media, and why Trump needs to win

A senior editor at NPR reveals how the media outlet intentionally distorted or outright spiked three major stories in recent years, and how the newsroom has been transformed into a progressive advocacy group, aligned against Donald Trump, and willing to lie to get what they want.

Earlier this week, National Public Radio’s senior business editor Uri Berliner rocked the journalistic world by stating unequivocally that the media, including even taxpayer funded outlets like NPR, is irredeemably corrupt and has actively taken a partisan role to defeat Donald Trump.  To be sure, I used the phrase “rocked” in jest because it wasn’t covered at all outside of conservative outlets.  Regardless, the self-described “Sarah Lawrence–educated,” “raised by a lesbian peace activist mother,” Subaru driver, and Spotify listener detailed how the outlet actively exaggerated the Russia Collusion hoax, advocated for the unproven natural origin theory of the coronavirus, and actively suppressed the revelations on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the heat of the 2020 campaign.  He continued to explain how this could be the case for an organization that claims to be neutral arbiter of all things considered, both for each individual instance and the media in general.  On the Russia Hoax, “we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.  Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.”  Representative Schiff, of course, was a partisan actor himself with a lengthy history of stretching the truth or outright lying.  Taking his word on anything is the equivalent of taking Donald Trump’s.  On coronavirus, “Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage,” up to and including falsely claiming “the lab leak had been debunked by scientists” when “that wasn’t the case.”  So adamant were they in this false insistence, we “didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.  Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that ‘the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.’” When asked why the science desk chose to do so, a “colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again.”  On the emergence of Hunter Biden’s laptop during the campaign, the “laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.”  As the editorial staff characterized it at the time, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” 

Mr. Berliner attributes this corruption – he doesn’t use that word, but that is the only way to describe a media organization that refuses to report the facts and intentionally spikes stories for political purposes – to a combination of leadership at NPR and the evolving makeup of the staff during his tenure, all reacting to the menace that is Donald Trump.  As he described it, the media generally tilted left prior to the 2016 election, but “Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.”  The decision to transform journalists into advocates was supported and promoted by NPR’s leadership, a transformation that only accelerated during the summer of 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department.  “Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way. But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.”  “When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” then CEO John Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”  This was accompanied by a total embrace of the critical race theory and intersectionality inspired belief that all institutions and white people are part of the problem.  Though NPR had leaned left for years and was run mainly by progressives, Mr. Lansing declared that everyone “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

This commitment included reorganizing NPR to conform to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion principles.  “Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to ‘start talking about race.’ Monthly dialogues were offered for ‘women of color’ and ‘men of color.’ Nonbinary people of color were included, too.”  There was a corresponding explosion of so-called “affinity groups” that segmented staff members by race and other factors, an  “MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).”  Of course, NPR branded what amounts to segregation by race and ideology as merely a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” but it was much more than that.  Beyond fostering a corrosive mentality that prioritized victimhood above professional and journalistic principles, requirements for these and other groups somehow became a part of their collective bargaining contract along with their union, SAGAFTRA.  “The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to ‘keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups’ and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee. In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.”  I would add that the provision requiring disputes to be resolved by the “DEI Accountability Committee” strongly suggests they will be resolved in favor of the advocacy groups, rather than any mission to preserve journalistic integrity.

Throughout, Mr. Berliner makes it clear that his experience at NPR over the past 25 years is not unique and much the same has occurred across the mainstream media, as they transformed from exhibiting a left-wing bias to full on advocacy regardless of the facts.  “It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.  In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.  If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.  But it hasn’t.”  In 2011, NPR’s audience skewed liberal, but 26% of listeners still described themselves as conservative and 23% middle of the road.  By 2023, however, “the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.  An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.  That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.”  For some reason, Mr. Berliner refused to take this one step further:  It’s devastating for the country as a whole and a disservice to everyone regardless of your political alignment.  The free-press is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution because democracy requires the open exchange of ideas across a wide variety of viewpoints to succeed, allowing each citizen to gather the facts and make up their own mind based on what is most important to them.  As such, the press occupies, or at least used to occupy, an elevated position in society and enjoys special access to government affairs that are denied the average citizen.  They get to travel with the President, attend daily briefings at the White House, sit in on hearings in Congress and attend briefings there, access the courts, and other things the average person cannot do.  Their job first and foremost in these situations is to report on the facts, but on matters both big and small, they increasingly refuse to do so, preferring open advocacy of their political beliefs.

The three incidents described by Mr. Berliner were major stories, but there are dozens if not hundreds of other examples since where the media has refused to be anything remotely resembling objective.  As I have argued, the entire Biden Presidency has been an outrage, one where so-called journalists have completely lied to the American people at every turn, refusing to cover the President’s own tenuous relationship with the truth, the outright corruption in his family, his history of racial slurs, increasingly bizarre behavior, failure to deliver on his promises, accusations of sexual assault, and much more.  President Trump, meanwhile, is given the opposite treatment:  There is nary a story that doesn’t reach the conclusion that he’s doomed and anyone who supports him is damned.  Over just the past month, we were informed by the media and their army of experts that President Trump would be locked out of his own businesses for failing to post a bond to appeal an absolutely obscene verdict in a supposed fraud case where no one was actually defrauded, was managing a campaign plagued with money problems while his opponent was a fundraising superstar right up until Trump held the most successful fundraiser in world history, and that using the colloquialism “bloodbath” was a call for political violence when everyone making that claim had used the term themselves over and over again.

Throughout it all, they assure us that Trump is the one who isn’t normal, all while they exhibit abnormal, downright aberrant behavior at every turn, causing the very chaos they blame Trump for.  Yesterday, CNN’s Stephen Collinson claimed President Trump was “recreating a web of chaos.”  His evidence?  First, the former President has been instrumental in blocking a reauthorization of the secret FISA court that literally authorized spying on his campaign with no evidence any crime had been committed.  By any rational standard, no one interested in government transparency, accountability, privacy, or other freedoms should be advocating for a blanket continuation of his monstrosity after it authorized illegal spying on a sitting President.  Second, a supposed Trump ally, Marjorie Tayler Greene is threatening to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson over aid to Ukraine.  What Trump has to do with this is entirely unclear, except anyone who has been watching two years of war devolve into a stalemate should be reasonably concerned about continuing to spend tens of billions of dollars on a losing effort.  Third, there is apparently chaos over the abortion issue, though President Trump has personally urged a middle of the road approach and claimed the very situation he’s being blamed for in Arizona was an instance of the court going “too far.”  Fourth, he blames President Trump for the immigration crisis that has happened under President Biden, is entirely his fault, and is entirely intentional because the former President refuses to support a bill that would allow the current President to admit even more millions of supposed refugees.  Lastly, Mr. Collinson blames President Trump for exercising his legal rights to defend himself from indictments that are brought entirely by Democrats and feature novel interpretations of the law that no one has ever seen or heard of before. Who exactly is responsible for this chaos?  That’s why a vote for President Trump is a vote to defeat the rampant corruption in the media, putting them back in their place by rejecting the constant stream of lies in favor of political advocacy.  You might not like the former President personally, but you should like the media less and vote accordingly.