Is National Public Radio Biased?

Yes, but not in the ways you might thi..eh, its probably in the ways you think

NPR has been accused of being biased, a charge rebutted by two groups of people: 1) those within public radio who don’t want to hear it and 2) listeners to NPR who share the particular bias being alleged. This is an often overlapping coalition. But now, here comes the House Committee on Energy and Commerce to settle the question. But I’m worried that they might not be the fair arbiter we’ve been searching for. To quote from their request for testimony:

“NPR’s coverage of major news in recent years has been so polarized as to preclude any need to uncover the truth.

I can say that NPR has never aired a statement quite as inaccurate as that. So maybe those of us who love or loved NPR and public radio, but worry about their massive loss of audience shouldn’t turn to the House Energy and Commerce committee for deliverance. On the other hand I am currently taking bets about which of these old tweets by NPR’s new President will be enlarged and mounted on easels behind Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ head:

Article 1 Section 8 powers of Congress aside, something needs to be done about NPR. Listenership is off by a massive 30%. And while the broadcast media everywhere has dropped a bit, commercial radio’s falloff has not been as steep or as sudden as NPR’s. In 2019 Sean Hannity’s radio show was heard by 14 million listeners, today Sean Hannity’s radio show gets 16 million listeners.

NPR’s podcasts, once top in the field, are losing audience at a troubling pace. I could put together an entire post about the mistakes that public radio has made in developing and retaining talent, but if you look at the top 20 podcasters on the news or non-tawdry non fiction space you’ll notice a lot of public radio talent that’s left.

Last week I was on the Illinois public radio program The 21st talking about NPR and public radio’s steep falloff in listenership. My explanation for audience decline is pretty obvious, as I’ve discussed on the Gist . Public radio’s programming isn’t appealing to the public radio audience. This basic idea is still somehow stubbornly rebutted by people within public radio. This defensiveness is both sad and dire, if NPR won’t confront the weakness of their programming they’ll never win back the audience, or attract new listeners. NPR’s former head of programming

Eric Nuzum

gives the network a 5-7 years before the death spiral commences.

Former NPR Senior Editor Uri Berliner, in his essay in the Free Press places the blame on NPR’s ideological uniformity. I don’t disagree, but more specifically I point to the dominant role of a social justice lens and language informing so much of the programming. While examining the world using this frame has yielded some necessary stories and some interesting stories, its also generated many off-putting and uninviting stories to an audience that decided to opt out after a while.

On my podcast I’ve cited a couple of my findings which illustrate NPR’s biases and shortcomings as I see them. For instance:

The term “White Supremacy” was mentioned 37 times on NPR or on NPR.org in the past year. In the year 2020 the number of mentions was 215, almost double the number of mentions from 2017, which was the year of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The over 200 mentions of “white supremacy” on air or on-line in 2020 was more than for “global warming”, “gun control” or “homelessness” that year. Obviously, with the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, issues of race, policing, and inequality were on people’s minds and in the news, but those issues were also on people’s minds in 2017, the year that Donald Trump spoke of good people on both sides of the Charlottesville rally, as well as in 2022, the year of the mass murder of ten African-Americans in a Buffalo supermarket. What changed was that NPR had adopted a lens from academia and began using it to a degree that was wearying to listeners. The post-2020 pullback is indicative of changes in news coverage, but also, I believe, a realization that so many stories were being covered through this particular ideological framing.

Among the stories about white supremacy that aired in 2020 you’d find excellent discussions of economics, policing, and violence. But you’ll also find stories about taking the name Abraham Lincoln off of schools in order to combat white supremacy, how “Christian niceness is a product of whiteness, and it's just as deadly as any of the other manifestations of white supremacy”, a noose that was really a pull-tie, why certain signs held by white people at Black Lives Matter rallies “decenter the experience of Black people”, and how Doctors Without Borders “was built on a mindset of white supremacy". This last story, to NPR’s credit did include a quote from Africa Stewart, the president of Doctors Without Borders' U.S. board, who noted that she is the daughter of a Black Panther. There were stories about racist bird names and one offering a defense of looting. There was the story arguing that Asian students are "a mask that white privilege can wear in order to hide itself"which goes on to credulously quote a researcher who, in the face of overwhelming counter evidence declares that at Harvard “There is no evidence that there's a practice of anti-Asian discrimination."

None of these stories contained gross exaggerations or errors of fact that would require correction, though the claims, conclusions, and implications of a few were far-fetched. Many of the stories were covered elsewhere and sometimes, unlike as with NPR, with a “what are we doing here?” spin. My critique is of the news judgement that decided to serve listeners so very many stories faulting “whiteness” or focussing on the specific concept of white supremacy to the exclusion of other stories, and other ways of interpreting these specific stories.

I know how these arguments will be characterized by the kind of critic who dismisses Berliner’s points as racist, the kind of critic who evokes an ecosystem of “bigotry trees covered in microaggression moss.” It’s impossible for me to convince such a critic that I am but a humble cultural lepidopterist eager to account for the taxonomy of every phylum of the social experiment. It’s an argument dead on the page. But there is a limiting principle to all enthusiasms, trends, or ideologies. Sometimes a lens brings an issue into focus, and sometimes, depending on the lens, it obscures. NPR, by its own coverage choices seems to recognize that the audience has hit a limit. The network can rebut that conclusion all it wants but it will be preaching to a tertiated congregation.