The Media Research Center reserves much of its hatred of public broadcasting for PBS, but NPR gets its fair share of hate and scorn as well. Alex Christy grumbled about the head of NPR in a June 11 post:
NPR CEO Katherine Maher recently traveled to London for the city’s SXSW festival because, apparently, she thinks London is the place to be when she needs to convince American lawmakers not to rescind her federal funding. While in London, Maher sat down for an interview with CNN International’s Max Foster that aired on his Monday installment of What We Know, where she insisted that NPR wasn’t on the left because nobody really knows what “left” means. She also claimed NPR is needed in order for people to have safe drinking water after hurricanes.
After Marher noted that radio stations in Asheville, N.C., like the NPR affiliate helped residents find drinking water after Hurricane Helene devastated the region, Christy huffed: “Asheville is a city of nearly 100,000 people, and NPR is not the only radio station in town. Claiming NPR is necessary to direct people to safe drinking water after hurricanes is just emotional blackmail.”
Clay Waters whined that NPR told the story of an “elderly lefty protester” in a June 23 post:
In Friday’s online NPR piece “The story behind the arrest of 87-year-old veteran John Spitzberg at the Capitol,” Alina Hartounian, who edits and writes for NPR.org from Arizona, played up how a clip went viral on the Left of a protester getting arrested by Capitol Police next to his walker. NPR played up the feisty old man angle to an embarrassing extent.
This is a standard stunt: Police tell you not to cross a line, so all the protesters who want to get arrested quickly (or slowly) violate it.
[…]Video shows Spitzberg is wearing a shirt his group was sporting. It says “VETERANS AGAINST FASCISM.” It also shows the cops gently treating him.
So what sort of veterans groups protest a military parade? Leftist ones, of course, though NPR settled for the description “anti-war.” There was no use of potential ideological labels: liberal, leftist, progressive, radical, socialist, or even pacifist. Veterans for Peace recently held a fast “for Gaza.”
Waters further whined: “Needless to say, NPR gave Spitzberg far nicer treatment than the kind it meted out to those same January 6 rioters and protesters.” He didn’t explain why people who tried to overthrow the government by invading the Capitol at the direction of a man who still can’t emotionally handle that he lost the presidential election in 2020 deserved the kid-glove treatment he demands.
Tim Graham spent a June 28 post having a meltdown over a certain NPR segment featuring the type of person the MRC spends millions of dollars a year to hate:
As Congress debates defunding PBS and NPR in part because they are relentless liberal propaganda, Friday night’s All Things Considered newscast on NPR championed…drag queens for climate activism. It’s like Mad Libs for mad leftists.
The online headline was “These drag artists know how to turn climate activism into a joyful blowout.” As usual, conservative criticism of drag culture or climate panic was nonexistent. This was just a Pride Month pom-pom segment, as anchor Ailsa Chang announced:
Graham did not explain why this story must be censored, or why he’s so weirdly offended by its mere existence, or why acknowledging that existence equals “liberal propaganda.”