NPR's Death by a Thousand Decolonizations

The Stories that Lost NPR its Funding

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, one of 51 Republican senators who voted to defund public media, teed off on NPR’s CEO this week:

Kennedy linked to a speech he gave on the floor of the Senate criticizing 32 specific NPR and public radio stories for bias.

The collection of stories includes topics which are well within the purview of a journalistic organization, even if Kennedy disagrees with tone or phrasing, as well as stories that come off as parodies of progressive preoccupations to anyone in the middle 80% of the culture wars, (come for the section header “Bird-watching has a diversity problem,” stay for the call to “decolonize the birding experience”).

Counting the Bias

In an attempt at unbiased inquiry, sure to satisfy no one, I identified all of the stories that Kennedy cited as evidence of NPR’s bias. I have my own opinions of the bias of these stories, but I am biased. So in the best attempt to find a neutral arbitrator, I prompted CHAT GPT, which to be fair is itself just a reflection of algorithmic and mass-consensus bias, with the following prompt:

Put yourself in the mold of the editor of a newspaper who very much wants to be perceived as unbiased, or the dean of a journalism school who wants emphasize ideals of objectivity to students. Grade the following stories for bias.

Here are the findings about all 32 stories Kennedy cited as biased:

Bias Evaluation Report

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The most biased stories were

1. “Kids Will End Their Lives: Anti-Trans Legislation Is Impacting Mental Health In The Gulf South”
Bias Score: 8.5

Loaded emotional tone, Labeling bias.
Framing now appears alarmist amid ongoing debate over cause-effect claims in youth mental health.

2. “‘There Is No Neutral’: ‘Nice White People’ Can Still Be Complicit In Racism”
Bias Score: 8.5

Ideological framing, Minimal pushback, Loaded headline.
Overstates binary framing of complicity. Ignores evolving discourse on allyship, guilt, and moral psychology.

3. “Trump ‘Embodies Nearly Every Aspect Of A Racist’” (Interview with Ibram X. Kendi)
Bias Score: 8.5

Framing as fact, Labeling bias, Lack of challenge.
Would benefit from direct quote sourcing, clearer attribution, and acknowledgment of contested interpretation.

4. “Trump’s Anti-Trans Effort Is An Agenda Cornerstone With Echoes In History”
Bias Score: 8.0

Historical analogy bias, Loaded framing, Omission of GOP base dynamics.
Polarization deepened; framing still contentious but more clearly a defining GOP position.

5. “Arguments That Trans Athletes Have An Unfair Advantage Don’t Hold Up To Scrutiny”
Bias Score: 8.0

Framing, Source bias, Omission of complexity.
Framed debate as settled despite evolving sports science and ongoing policy changes.

Kennedy's Profiles in Coverage

Among the other stories deemed excessively biased was one that Kennedy described as “Country music is racist.” I expected the story to be much more nuanced than that shorthand, but the four-word summary is not far off. Sure, they interviewed an historian who said that country music was built on “multiracial diverse things” while at the same time being a “symbol of racism”. The host also talked about recently chart-topping country songs:

Luke Combs' "Fast Car," which is a shockingly derivative cover of Tracy Chapman's original. Tracy Chapman, of course, is a Black woman.

What does it say about our broader culture right now that for the first time in decades, country music, and specifically country music that is having overt tension, in some ways—some might even say opposition—music that is positioning itself in opposition to Blackness…

Host Brittany Luse also asks, repeatedly, “Is that what it takes to be a successful country artist today—racism?”

To earnestly ask the question is to necessarily insult the hundreds of millions of listeners of country music whose taxes fund NPR. The same dismissive tone pervades two stories Kennedy cited from Louisiana public radio station WWNO:

“How Illegitimate CRT Concerns Shaped Louisiana’s New Social Studies Standards”
Bias Score: 7.5

Loaded headline, Framing bias. Discredits one side of the debate rather than neutrally describing competing narratives.

Whatever one thinks of CRT, the headline itself forecloses debate rather than illuminating it. This is a story funded by the taxes of voters that tells these very voters that they are wrong. Of course, voters can be and often are wrong, and if that’s the case, it’s incumbent on an unbiased news organization to clearly demonstrate the illegitimacy. This story fails at that task. It falls back on the talking point that Critical Race Theory can't influence public school curricula because CRT is an advanced concept taught only in graduate school.

But of course, advanced concept—behaviorism, natural law theory, postmodernism— are imparted to high school students and younger because teachers and administrators are influenced by them. As this Georgetown professor of racial inequality in K–12 public education argues, CRT is, can, and should influence K–12 curricula because it is a practice. That’s a fair framing. This WWNO report is not.

“State Education Superintendent To Speak At ‘Extremist’ Moms For Liberty Chapter Meeting”

Bias Score: 7.0

Representative Quote:

Labeling bias,Framing, Omission: Critics of the group dominate the narrative; no statements from Moms for Liberty members are included to explain their mission or respond to the label.

There are lots of Louisianans in Moms for Liberty. The group might indeed be extremist (the quotes refer to a Southern Poverty Law Center designation, though the SPLC itself faces bias accusations from the right) but the report does not come across as making an effort to be fair to the positions of Moms for Liberty, or to explain to listeners what the group actually believes or why they believe it. Without bothering to quote a single member or even-handedly represent their positions, this story merely confirms the prejudices of those already convinced.

The positions stated in the report are defensible, there are no misstatements of fact, but the language and framing are all clearly hostile to Moms for Liberty. Maybe you are too. Maybe most NPR listeners are. And maybe more Americans should be. But if the goal is to be unbiased, this doesn’t achieve that goal.

The deeper problem is not that NPR occasionally produces biased stories, all news organizations do. Some stories on Kennedy’s hit list were actually quite fair, they just covered topics Kennedy doesn’t want covered with taxpayer money. NPR and its affiliates air tens of thousands of stories every year. A few are going to offend Republicans who are primed to be offended. But unlike commercial outlets, which can chase whatever audience they please, NPR and PBS are supposed to serve the entire public, including the vast middle of American life that finds itself increasingly unrepresented in elite media discourse. NPR signals that it has forgotten this basic obligation when it, over and over, runs stories like these as catalogued by former NPR editor Uri Berliner:

Microfeminism: The Next Big Thing in Fighting the Patriarchy

Which Skin Color Emoji Should You Use? The Answer Can Be More Complex than You Think

Black Women’s Groups Find Health and Healing on Hikes, But Sometimes Racism, Too

Bringing Diversity to Maine’s Nearly All-White Lobster Fleet

Diet Culture Can Hurt Kids. This Author Advises Parents to Reclaim the Word ‘Fat’

These Drag Artists Know How to Turn Climate Activism into a Joyful Blowout

And I’ve chronicled more than a few of the missteps of my former employer.

When Sloppy Journalism Meets Vicious Politics

This is all ill and bad for the broadcaster. Republicans have long sought NPR’s defunding; providing the fodder of dozens of embarrassing stories does not help public broadcasting’s cause, even if NPR feels righteous pointing out that some GOP accusations are themselves biased.

There exists no magic number of biased stories that transforms a news organization from 'fair' to 'unfair,' and even if such a threshold existed, the blood sport of contemporary politics would be the last place anyone should attempt to establish it. Given that Republicans have long sought to defund public media, handing them dozens of embarrassing stories amounts to political, and a bit of journalistic malpractice. It may feel satisfying to turn accusations of bias back on the accusers, but those accusers now control both chambers of Congress and answer to a president they dare not cross. The past tweets of NPR’s new CEO do not help, nor does the fact that the usual playbook of hiding behind the Big Bird Shield has molted in the face of the modern iteration of Republican. The GOP has decolonized Big Bird.

I feel bad for NPR. Their journalism does much more good than harm, and the argument that it could still be just as good absent taxpayer funding is belied, or at least called into question, by the overall dearth of sustainable quality journalism that relies solely on the market.

I also feel bad for PBS, which doesn’t have nearly the bill of particulars against it that NPR does. The main critique of the excesses of PBS falls back on the tendentious statistic that The NewsHour uses the phrase “far right” more than “far left,” when in fact most of those are useful descriptors for the very groups being discussed: January 6th protesters, QAnon, and the breakaway faction of Republicans withholding votes for the speakership of Kevin McCarthy.

Mostly, I feel bad for my friends and former colleagues at NPR who tell me that the tide has shifted away from the kinds of coverage and framing that put it in the crosshairs. The journalism was improving; now there may be firings, and I fear a return to poor practices, given that the threat of lost funding was actually a guardrail preventing NPR from careening completely over the activist cliff. Another possibility is that NPR and its affiliates, in an act of counter-mobilization, raise more private money than Republicans cut from their budget. If that’s the case—look out, Senator Kennedy — the daily accounts of decolonization won’t be just for the birds.