The Media Research Center’s hypocritical concern-trolling over an NPR employee who trashed his employer on a right-wing website continued when an MRC contributor appeared on a right-wing podcast on April 12:
MRC contributing writer Stephanie Hamill was a guest on “The Kimberly Guilfoyle Show” on Rumble with host Kimberly Guilfoyle on Thursday to discuss the latest trending news, including the latest scandal at NPR.
Uri Berliner, Senior Business Editor for the public radio giant, has come out publicly accusing the broadcaster of left-wing bias, basically confirming what we already knew.
Guilfoyle is a longtime Fox News employee, so Hamill would never issue a complaint about all the right-wing bias on that channel.
Tim Graham unsurprisingly devoted his April 12 podcast to the manufactured controversy:
This week, National Public Radio senior editor Uri Berliner sent shock waves through their staff by going public with an article on The Free Press website about how they lost the public’s trust due to an explicit animus against Donald Trump. Since Trump entered politics, the public radio network’s audience has become even more dominated by very liberal Americans.
But it didn’t start with Trump. NewsBusters can tell you NPR has demonstrated a leftist bent from the beginning. NPR legal reporter Nina Totenberg destroyed the Douglas Ginsburg nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, then tried again with Clarence Thomas in 1991. This animus against conservatives didn’t kick in suddenly in 2015.
[…]NPR executives tried to claim that “inclusion” of differing views is an NPR value — but anyone who listens to NPR on a regular basis quickly figures out that this is a taxpayer-funded liberal sandbox. There’s no real room for conservative views. When Republicans appear, NPR staffers are on the attack.
CNN’s Oliver Darcy complained that Uri Berliner’s article demanding more viewpoint diversity on NPR was a “massive gift to the Right.” On a daily basis, taxpayer-funded NPR is nothing short of a massive gift to the Left, pumping out progressive propaganda to over 1,000 stations. Because it has “public” in its branding, too many Americans still think it’s fair and balanced and a service to everyone, which only signals they’re not paying enough attention to the product.
Fox News long claimed to be “fair and balanced,” but Graham would never call that branding dishonest. He roped the new CEO of NPR into things in an April 13 post:
New NPR CEO Katherine Maher tried to rally the troops on Friday with a memo to staff that vaguely attacked NPR senior editor Uri Berliner’s expose of the taxpayer-funded network’s viewpoint diversity. She never actually mentioned Berliner, or seemed to engage with his overall argument.
Instead, she vaguely expressed insult at Berliner noting the existence of a pile of identity groups among the employees: “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”
[…]In the end, Maher just supports more internal talk, not an engagement with “the enemy,” the conservatives who are shut out. She announced they were “establishing quarterly NPR Network-wide editorial planning and review meetings, as a complement to our other channels for Member station engagement.”
By contrast, Graham and the MRC see us as “the enemy” for merely critiquing its work, and it absolutely refuses to engage with us, muting or blocking us on Twitter/X and declining to invite us to take part in any public discussions. Instead, Graham played gotcha with Maher by digging old tweets made well before she was employed by NPR. (Graham also touched on this in his April 15 podcast.)
The MRC published an April 15 column by Larry Elder taking a partisan whack at NPR, which was followed by another post by Graham touting Fox News attacking NPR again:
On Sunday’s MediaBuzz show on the Fox News Channel, host Howard Kurtz brought on ex-NPR reporter Juan Williams to recall his own in-house experience with the radical left inside NPR. Kurtz also noted most of the “mainstream” media have skipped any mention of the hubbub over NPR senior editor Uri Berliner’s expose.
KURTZ: You know, The New York Times waited the two days and then a did a sort of ‘NPR in Turmoil’ piece but didn’t get into any of the specifics. Nothing in The Washington Post,nothing at Politico, nothing on air at CNN or MSNBC. Doesn’t that prove Berliner’s point? If this had been a senior Fox person speaking out, I think it would have been covered nine seconds later!
WILLIAMS: Oh, I don’t think there’s any question, I can tell you that.
The liberal dissidents inside Fox News turn to anti-Fox authors like Brian Stelter or Michael Wolff instead of going public, and remain anonymous until they can dish to the next Fox-hater who comes along.
But, again, neither Graham nor Kurtz would ever hold fox News to the same standards of objectivity it demands of NPR — and it would attack any “dissident” as disloyal to Fox’s right-wing agenda, refusing to give that person the victimhood treatment they’re currently heaping on Berliner.
The fact that Kurtz does not hold his employer to those same standards is the reason he remains employed by Fox News. It’s the same reason Graham and his fellow MRC co-workers continue to appear on the channel, where their views are never challenged and no opposing viewpoint is allowed to take part.