The Media Research Center cares nothing about NPR over its purported “liberal bias” — standards it will never apply to, say, Fox News. In fact, it hates them so much that it hoped that all of its employees would drop dead from COVID by demanding that funding for employee protective measures (a small fraction of a $2 billion relief bill) be denied to it and PBS, and it cheered when Elon Musk arbitrarily labeled it and PBS “state-affiliated media,” falsely suggesting it was like state-controlled media outlets in authoritarian countries. So it’s in that light that we have to evaluate any NPR campaign against public broadcasting.
When an NPR employee spouted right-wing talking points at a right-wing website, Tim Graham was quick to play concern troll in an April 9 post:
There’s a blockbuster article at Bari Weiss’s website The Free Press today, headlined “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” Will the writer still be at NPR after this article makes the rounds?
It’s Uri Berliner, a Senior Business Editor for the “public” radio giant. He begins by establishing that he’s a standard NPR-type liberal, but he’s concerned about the current tilt of NPR’s audience:
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, 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.
Berliner thinks NPR used to be more balanced (we’ll agree to disagree), but it all went awry with Trump, and collusion:
[…]Berliner also found this never-admit-error tendency with the Hunter Biden laptop (a “pure distraction”) and the Covid lab-leak theory, which had too much “Wuhan flu” energy. One colleague on NPR’s Science Desk “compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again.”
[…]Berliner thought NPR didn’t have enough fairness and balance of viewpoints. “Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.”
By contrast, Graham has never accused Fox News of having a “never-admit-error tendency” — even as it was forced to do exactly that with its $787 million settlement with Dominion for repeatedly lying to its viewers about election fraud, deception he gave Fox News a pass on — nor has he sought out the voter registrations of Fox News employees (which he should know since so many former MRC employees work there). Graham concluded:
Berliner is holding out hope now that Lansing stepped down as CEO and NPR selected Katharine Maher (not a journalist) as the new CEO. Most of us have no optimism about a Chris Licht-ian move toward fairness.
We don’t recall Graham ever complaining that longtime Fox News chief Roger Ailes was not a journalist — he built his career as a right-wing political operative — nor has he demanded that Fox News ever make a move “toward fairness.” Fox News right-wing bias is what he wants NPR and CNN to be, after all.
As this bogus concern-trolling became a full-blown right-wing narrative, Graham followed up the following day:
Joseph Wulfsohn at Foxnews.com explored what NPR senior editor Uri Berliner wrote about Israel in his bombshell expose at The Free Press, run by former New York Times editorial writer Bari Weiss. This may be the biggest insider story since Bernard Goldberg wrote about CBS News in his book Bias. But in this case, Berliner is still inside NPR….at least, for now.
First, he mentioned Israel on a list: “There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”
[…]Berliner’s page at NPR.org shows he helped with a 2022 story on how Adidas cut Trump-backing rapper Kanye West loose after anti-Semitic outbursts. But since October 7, NPR’s been more aggressive in promoting the Council on American-Islamic Relations (and their claims of exploding Islamophobia) than the Anti-Defamation League, and both are firmly on the Left.
Graham citing a story about Kanye West’s anti-Semitism is ironic because the MRC was extremely slow to criticize his anti-Semitic turn after years of praising him for spouting conservatively correct narratives. Needless to say, Graham is never going to demand that Wulfsohn turn the same critical eye to his own employer (and the former MRCers who now work there) instead of a designated right-wing enemy. He also didn’t explain why media outlets should deny the existence of Islamophobia.
Nicholas Fondacaro helped to ramp up the victimhood of Berliner in another April 10 post:
25-year NPR veteran Uri Berliner recently came forward to call out his employer and colleagues for being liberally biased in a way that was harming the credibility of their reporting. And in a Tuesday night appearance on NewsNation’s Cuomo, host Chris Cuomo shared his concern that NPR would target him and “kick [him] to the curb.” But Berliner said he was getting a lot of support from colleagues, including from surprising sources.
“On that issue of media trust, there was a bombshell today, a whistleblower in effect on bias in the media,” Cuomo announced at the top of the show. “Among his claims: NPR was stacked with like-minded people who appealed to an ever-narrow, progressive worldview catering to a select audience and losing its audience as a result.”
Cuomo agreed with Berliner’s assessment that “political diversity” was not something newsrooms prioritized, adding that it was one of the reasons he chose to join NewsNation:
[…]On how NPR had gotten so liberally biased, Cuomo wondered: “Are you saying that’s the truth or are you saying it’s something that has evolved? What do you want people to feel about NPR and what you feel about the media in general?”
Berliner felt that NPR had “a liberal orientation” at first but “evolved” to be a place of “much narrower kind of niche thinking, a group think that’s really clustered around various selective progressive views.” He added that “they don’t allow enough air and enough spaciousness to consider all kinds of perspectives.”
Neither Fondacaro nor Cuomo would ever so aggressively criticize the right-wing bias of Fox News. That’s the tell that this is nothing more than partisan concern-trolling. Indeed, the MRC pretends that Cuomo’s employer has no bias at all.
Graham summarized his concern-trolling narrative in his April 12 column:
Is National Public Radio fair and balanced? Do they care what you think?
NPR has a “Public Editor” to monitor listener complaints and concerns, but as we all know, the majority of their listeners are going to complain they’re not “progressive” enough. In 2021, Public Editor Kelly McBride appeared on Brian Stelter’s CNN podcast to praise NPR’s decision to allow their journalists to go to (leftist) public protests so they can “bring their full humanity to work with them.”
When Stelter asked about NPR’s critics, McBride dismissed any conservative complaints about a leftist tilt because they are not “genuinely interested in improving NPR.” McBride claimed her job was to coach NPR “to achieve its own internally stated goals. It doesn’t help to be magnifying disingenuous criticism.” To balance NPR is to harm NPR?
Graham has never criticized Fox News for never having a public editor, nor has it demanded that it listen to critics of its right-wing bias. He also whined about NPR media critic David Folkenflik (as he is wont to do):
Folkenflik has been an NPR media reporter since 2004, and he has never interviewed me or anyone else at the Media Research Center for one of his reports on media performance, including in his multitude of hostile stories on Fox News.
If Graham wants to play that game, it’s sorth noting that he has never interviewed us about our criticism of his employer, nor has he ever invited us to appear on his three-times-a-week podcast. If he wants an open discussion about the media, he has to show he wants one. Given that the MRC’s TV hits these days are almost exclusively on right-wing channels where people with differing views are forbidden from taking part, there’s no reason to believe Graham has any interest whatsoever in doing anything but spout right-wing talking points, which add nothing to any discussion of the media.
He also complained that CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy — whom the MRC also irrationally hates — accurately pointed out that “Fox News quickly pounced” on the story and that Berliner’s article is “nothing short but a massive gift to the right,” whose top priority is “vilifying the news media,” responding with only the lame whataboutism that Darcy “vilifies Fox News as fake news and argues it should be deplatformed by cable companies.”
This is why the criticism of Graham and the MRC fail — they refuse to apply the standards they demand that NPR follow to its fellow right-wing media, and they don’t respect the opinions of other media critics that don’t advance their preferred narratives.