No, but when much of corporate media, and nearly as much of academia as NPR, is similarly skewed to the left, NPR looks fair and balanced. Yet 14 years ago I warned that they skewed so heavily to rich, white, progressives they risked losing public trust.
A whistleblower with 25 years at NPR now says that has so obviously happened even progressives see it. That is not some disgruntled right-wing intern, Berliner proudly states he is a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence–educated white guy raised by a lesbian peace activist mother.
An insider saying what a lot of people long knew is going to lead to new calls to remove government funding from NPR and its television sibling PBS but white elites in northeast college towns can relax - career government employees are also dominated by the left.(1) Yet reflexively we will still get dreary odes telling us that without government, this vital "alternative" resource would be gone.
First, alternative to what? NPR is farther left than New York Times and Washington Post but does the left really feel under-represented? In corporate media? The first right-wing program to have true national success was Rush Limbaugh on the radio and the left was so outraged that they lobbied government for even more money - they couldn't let even one show on the radio not their party be successful.
Given their rich white demographics, they don't need government. PBS and NPR don't like to make their media kits public so I archived this one:
Listeners are affluent, active consumers, business leaders, and involved in their communities. Nearly 70% of all listeners are ages 25-54 with a median age of 42, they tell marketing departments.(2)
Smarter and richer than them dumb hicks in the Republican party is the real message.
The left-wing skew of government-funded media has become so problematic when the average American is paying $13,000 more a year for the things as they did in 2020 and food costs are up 44 percent while the national debt is now $34 trillion, thanks in large part to $5 trillion in a stimulus package that overwhelmingly went to government employees, that insiders are turning whistleblower. Uri Berliner, a 25-year NPR veteran, says he knows that NPR lost the public's trust - they cater to the kind of rich, white, progressives on the coasts. What I warned about 14 years ago here and a lot longer than that elsewhere.
Berliner feels like it's been a shift during his time but...well, not really. They were so "knee-jerk, activist, or scolding" about anyone outside their umbrella I was always genuinely shocked when they quoted me, a real alternative voice.
Shocking because instead of quoting moderates/independents like me, they only get voices from inside their tribe, which meant it fell on other journalists to give a voice to the actual group oppressed by NPR employees - centrists.(3)
NPR gets 26% of its budget from corporations and Mother Jones gets 84% of its budget from corporations so clearly left-wing people, organic shoppers, supplement buyers, etc. are not concerned about high levels of industry influence.
They are so far out of the American mainstream they don't even know the basics about Easter.
Or how to do the simplest math in science story, like claiming that Greece was 100% renewable when that was for 0.06% of the time people use electricity, and Greece is only 52nd in electricity needed due to low population. Even in a tiny country renewables are only viable for 6 hours. That is an important part of any serious journalism
Two nuclear plants could keep them green with affordable energy forever, a politically agnostic media outlet would have noted. Yet they are not. By his own reckoning, he says the missteps were too many to be lack of expertise, it was overt collusion. Russiagate (real!), the Hunter Biden laptop(fake!), the Wuhan lab leak possibility (fake!) all show it was engaging in political good works first and journalism...well, never.
Berliner says the change back to being trusted resources for all Americans must come from 'within' and not be due to defunding, but with 87 Democrats and 0 Republicans they will do what 1960s country clubs did to show they were not racist - let in one outsider that was only an outsider on the exterior and put him on all of their posters.
They cannot 'change from within' or they'd never have gotten to this state. Want to add conservatives? Change the company from 26% corporate-funded to 100%. That is guaranteed to make them want to reach all people, instead of everyone in a 5-mile radius of a Whole Foods.
NOTES:
(1) Right-wing people as career union bureaucrats is so rare that it made Ron Swanson the funniest part of the "Parks and Recreation" TV show.
(2)
(3)Forget Republicans outside tokenism, that will never be in the cards, the listener drop would cause their extinction. Conservatives listen to NPR but most NPR listeners reflexively call Republicans Fascists and Nazis, which shows they may be 'educated' but it must be 18th century French poetry degrees or some equivalent, because they have no idea that Fascists and Nazis were both left-wing centralized government parties.
Conservatives have also dropped as NPR raced farther toward the fringe. Berliner notes that it was only 60% truly left in 2011 but now only 11% are 'conservative.
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