Should NPR be defunded? Some are saying yes: Jim Beckerman

NPR — National Public Radio — is a public trust.

So naturally, one part of the public doesn't trust it. While another part, equally vocal, doesn't trust the distrusters.

What else is new, in these tetchy days?

What's new is the firestorm ignited last month, when a — now former — staffer wrote a piece for an outside website, Free Press, alleging liberal groupthink at the 54-year-old radio network. To conservatives, he was a "whistleblower." To NPR, he was a turncoat. He quit, arguably under pressure. And now a loud chorus of conservative voices is calling for NPR to be defunded.

Led, naturally, by Donald Trump, in all caps. “THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!” he posted on his Truth Social Network.

The "Defund NPR Act", introduced last month by Republican congressman Bob Good, a member of the hard-right "freedom caucus" of the U.S. House of Representatives, called NPR "woke, leftist propaganda."

“It is bad enough that so many media outlets push their slanted views instead of reporting the news, but it is even more egregious for hardworking taxpayers to be forced to pay for it," Good said.

On whose dime?

Hardworking taxpayers, in point of fact, fund less than 1% of NPR's budget directly, and less than 10% indirectly through federal, state and local governments. The vast bulk of its budget, 90% or more, comes from corporate support and listener fundraising.

It's also worth noting that Uri Berliner, the former business reporter whose more-in-sorrow-than-anger takedown of NPR sparked the crisis, has praised his former colleagues, and come down against defunding — though he had to have known that going public with his grievances would result in calls to do precisely that.

"There is and always has been a group of people who are willing to make National Public Radio a target because it gets public funding, and it has 'National' in its name," said Kevin Lerner, associate professor of journalism at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

"I'm sure Berliner knew that it was an inevitable outcome," Lerner said. "Or to be more charitable, a risk."

So what is NPR? And what is liberal bias?

And where — if anywhere — do the two things intersect?

The NPR difference

Listeners who relish such quirky, brainy shows as "This American Life" and "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me" love NPR for all the ways it differs from commercial radio. For the ways it isn't shallow, sound-bitey, geared to the lowest common denominator. For the ways that it can delve into niche subjects, tell long-form stories and be an on-air voice for people who don't otherwise have one.

All part of its mandate — when it was founded, in 1970, an outgrowth of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" program. It was educational radio, as PBS was educational television.

"These were to be more expressly non-commercial, and educational, than corporate, profit-driven media," said Matthew Pressman, an assistant professor of journalism at Seton Hall University. "You can see that in the prototypical example of PBS and 'Sesame Street' — a sort of wholesome alternative to Tom and Jerry bashing each other over the head with frying pans. That's more like the bedrock of what NPR tries to do."

NPR paid attention to stories other media didn't. A struggling farmer in Appalachia. An after-school program in a Latino neighborhood. Stories that seemed interesting or important, but that there was no "profit" in, from a commercial perspective.

Stories that made money for nobody — and therefore seemed suspicious to some. Just who was benefiting?

Obviously, the left must be benefiting. The progressive voting bloc must be benefiting. The "woke mob" — to use the current phrase — must be benefiting. It was political propaganda; it had to be. Why else would someone tell such stories?

Unless, of course, people just want to tell — and listen to — good stories.

"These are interesting stories that aren't being told," Pressman said. "I don't think that necessarily leads to a liberal bias, or a left wing perspective."

You know the type

But it's also true that the kind of person who seeks out such stories is liable to be curious, empathetic. A person who is interested in seeing justice done, and the truth come to light. The standard liberal traits (though hardly confined to those who vote Democratic).

Those are the kind of people who tend to listen to NPR. And to program it.

"There is a bias toward righting wrongs, that you should be changing things for the better," Lerner said. "Rather than, it's a sunny day, the banks are funded, there is no war. That's not news."

The role of the journalist, as Finley Peter Dunne said more than a century ago, is to "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable." (Donald Trump would probably argue that he is one of the afflicted).

That's not, however, to say that most reporters see themselves as activists. Or that they would deliberately falsify information to make a case — any more than most bankers would short a customer.

One of Berliner's most damning claims is that, in the D.C. bureau of NPR, he found "87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None." OK. But that refers only to one bureau, a small slice of the NPR staff (NPR has 17 domestic bureaus, 16 international bureaus). And how, in any event, could he know?

"It's not clear how he got the voter registrations of these people," Pressman said.

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Slant on the news

The real question is not what party which journalist belongs to. The question is whether it causes them — unintentionally or not — to skew stories, or skew the selection of topics. Here, the waters get murkier.

NPR, in a written statement, has vigorously defended its record. "We adhere to the highest editorial standards and have built in processes to ensure accuracy and balance, including a standards and practices editor as well as a public editor to stand in for the audience," said NPR's acting Chief Content Officer and Editor in Chief, Edith Chapin. (Berliner did not respond to our request for an interview).

It's also true that the last eight years have tested journalists — not just at NPR — and stretched the definition of Best Practices.

The 2020 murder of George Floyd by police, and the social upheavals that followed, challenged all newsrooms to do better — in terms of staffing, stories, and the way they're reported.

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"We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of our country and our world, and to meet our public service mission," Chapin said.

Then too, the spew of disinformation, coming with the rise of social media and the ascendancy of Trump, has challenged the old notion of "balanced coverage." There are not two sides to every story. The report that a pedophilia ring tied to Hillary Clinton was trafficking in kidnapped children out of a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., is not a matter of opinion. It is garbage. Full stop.

Is it possible that NPR and the rest of us — with the best intentions — have sometimes allowed such legitimate concerns to get in the way of sound news judgment?

Possible.

Getting down to cases

In his essay, Berliner cites three examples of what he considers liberal bias at NPR: their non-coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, their dismissal of the Wuhan lab-escape theory of Coronavirus, and their insufficiently skeptical take on Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

In the first two instances, Pressman believes, there may be some grounds for criticism. In both cases, NPR (and other media) may have been so fearful of being duped by right-wing propaganda that they shied away from a real story.

"I do think most of the media did not handle the Hunter Biden laptop thing well," Pressman said. "I think people were leery of it because they felt the mainstream media had been duped into going along with the Hillary email thing in 2016, and that this was a replay of that. But I don't think it was. I think it was legitimate."

Which is not to say — as many conservatives did — that the scandal is somehow directly linked to Joe Biden. "I don't think there's any solid evidence of that," Pressman said.

Both Pressman and Lerner think that NPR and much of the mainstream press too cavalierly dismissed the idea of the COVID-19 virus being the result of a lab leak in Wuhan. It sounded like another crazy conspiracy theory. But the World Health Organization, after thoroughly debunking it, then backtracked and said it could have happened (which NPR did acknowledge).

Take our word for it

That, Lerner says, may have less to do with ideology than with a different newsroom bias: a tendency to rely on official sources.

"For something like the Wuhan virus, there is very little evidence even a trained journalist can get on their own," Lerner said. "They're not going to be able to go to a Wuhan virology lab and poke around. China won't let them. So if you're a journalist covering this, you really are reliant on official sources. If it's coming from the CDC and they say there's nothing there, that's kind of your stopping point."

But Russia meddling in the 2016 election? That, says Pressman, is a different matter. In this case, it's the debunkers who need to be debunked. The evidence for it is overwhelming.

"I think that critique is way off base," he said. "That was a legitimate story, even if Trump wasn't indicted. The Mueller Report did not actually clear Trump, and there were a whole lot of shady dealings going on between his campaign and Russia. A whole bunch of people went to prison for it."

In short — to indulge in that most hated of journalistic sins these days, "both-siderism" — both sides here may have a point.

Yes, much of the criticism of NPR is bad-faith posturing. And yes, NPR might be a little too much inside its own bubble. "It's not great to have a staff whose views tend to be so similar," Pressman said.

The donor is always right

NPR's real problem — if it has one — may have less to do with its staff than its audience. And that comes down to its business model. Which, increasingly, is the business model of most media, including The Record.

Once, media was funded chiefly by advertisers. And advertisers, Pressman points out, tend to be ideologically neutral. A department store might complain if its ad was on the same page as as a story about a nude beach. But editors could buck the pressure. Advertisers needed them, they knew, as much as they needed advertisers.

But today, at NPR as in most print and online media, it's the consumer who funds the platform. And that means editors court them — and could be tempted to pander to their beliefs. The result, perhaps unintentional, is an echo chamber.

"This has been the cast at NPR for a long time, that they're heavily reliant on individual donors," Pressman said. "And now its even more so the case at newspapers, magazines and other publications that get their revenue from digital subscriptions rather than advertising. People are more likely to pay to subscribe, or donate, when they feel some kind of ideological kinship. That this is an organization that's on my side."

The solution to that problem, however, is not to cut NPR's government funding.

It would be to give NPR more government funding.

"The larger trend in today's media environment is that pivot to readers and audiences," Pressman said. "That's part of the bigger issue."

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Should we defund NPR radio? How the station works