Tag: npr

NPR journalist blows whistle on network’s obsession with DEI and progressive diktats and reveals how stories like Hunter Biden laptop were ignored: ‘Here’s how we lost America’s trust’

A veteran NPR editor has blown the whistle on how the publicly-funded broadcaster has become an activist organization obsessed with pushing progressive ideals. 

Uri Berliner, a business editor at NPR for 25 years, has offered a glimpse into his belief that NPR has gone from a respected information source to one that can’t be trusted to honestly cover the news. 

In an essay for The Free Press, Berliner notes that while NPR has always had a liberal bent, the publication was not ‘not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding’ – something he says changed when Donald Trump entered the political arena. 

Berliner uncovers how NPR knowingly kept information from its audience during the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. 

He says NPR editors were quick to jump on claims that Donald Trump was a Russian asset – but far more reticent to cover their subsequent debunking.

It was a similar story with the Covid lab leak theory, which NPR continues to discredit, as well as the Hunter Biden laptop, which bosses declined to cover, Berliner says.  

‘Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population,’ Berliner writes.

Berliner tracks the last days of the old NPR to 2011, when he says it still had a leftist tilt, but ‘still bore bore a resemblance to America at large,’ and an audience that described themselves as 26 percent conservative, 23 percent moderate and 37 percent liberal.

But by 2023, only 11 percent of listeners described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, while 21 percent said they were ‘middle of the road,’ and 67 percent reported they were very or somewhat liberal. 

‘That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model,’ the veteran editor says in his essay.

Berliner explains that Trump’s 2016 candidacy for presidency changed how NPR covered politics, writing: ‘what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.’

NPR, Berliner writes, became obsessed with rumors about Trump colluding with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton, repeatedly covering Representative Adam Schiff as he led the fight against Trump.

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NPR puff piece on Atlanta leftist gunman revealed to be written by Antifa supporter

NPR on Saturday published a “misleading” piece on the circumstances surrounding the Atlanta police shooting of Antifa extremist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, where Antifa-supporting journalist Kaity Radde claimed the accused cop-shooter had his hands up when he was killed, and promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that the officer shot by the gunman was supposedly hit by friendly fire.

“The Georgia Bureau of Investigation says officers killed [Terán] in self-defense after they shot a state trooper, but the City of Atlanta released videos in which an officer suggests the trooper may have been injured by friendly fire,” Radde wrote of the January 18 incident, referring to a claim made by Antifa sympathizers that investigators maintain is false.

As reported by FOX 5, the GBI said that law enforcement came across Terán camped out in a tent in the woods in the Antifa-controlled autonomous zone near “Cop City,” what rioters are calling the site of Atlanta’s future Public Safety Training Facility.

According to investigators, officers fired at the suspect in self-defense after he refused to follow verbal commands and shot a state trooper, who was injured and treated at an intensive care unit.

The GBI has said that no footage of the actual shooting exists, but video the Atlanta Police Department shared captured by one trooper who heard the shooting take place out of eyesight’s body camera has fueled conspiracy theories from supporters of the Antifa gunman, with the family’s lawyer saying it confirmed their “worst fears that Manuel was massacred in a hail of gunfire.”

In the footage, one of the officers heading towards the sound of several gunshots says to others in the group, “Did they shoot their own man?”

“We don’t know who he got shot by, if it was by a deputy,” another one responds.

In a statement regarding these comments, APD said these officers were simply speculating on what the multiple gunshots could’ve been.

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We Now Know Why NPR Called Hunter Biden’s Laptop a ‘Non-Story’

In October 2020 when news of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop broke, which contained salacious details about his close business partnership with his father Joe Biden, National Public Radio quickly worked to bury the story. In fact, the outlet issued a lengthy explanation about why the laptop was a “non-story” and “waste of time,” despite receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funding each year through as series of federal grants.

Now, thanks to Elon Musk, we know exactly why NPR refused to cover the story. They knew it was coming and planned damage control with the FBI. 

Making matters worse, the FBI was using taxpayer dollars to pay media outlets to censor the story. After the story was wiped from Twitter and the vast majority of media outlets, with bans issued on accounts that shared the original New York Post reporting, executives sent the FBI a note of thanks for their work. The gratitude was spearheaded by former FBI attorney James Baker, who was working as Twitter counsel until last month. During his time at the FBI, Baker was behind the infamous Steele Dossier and the false Russia collusion narrative used against President Donald Trump. 

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NPR Reminds Us Why It Needs to be Defunded With Its Latest Tweets

Before I begin this article, I want to give you a fun little fact about the National Public Radio (NPR) gets its funding.

According to The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which helps fund, they recently received a $50 million increase in funding support from the federal government, totaling out at $525 million, thanks to the House and Senate passing the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022.

Got it? Good.

The assassination of Shinzo Abe was shocking news, not just to the people of Japan, but to the entire world. He was the longest-serving Prime Minister in Japanese history and a great ally in the fight against the communist regimes of North Korea and China. World leaders began issuing statements remembering the man fondly and expressing their sadness that such a man was slain.

However, there were two entities that made statements that disgusted many. One was from President Joe Biden who decided to turn Abe’s death into a chance at pushing anti-gun narratives.

The other was from NPR, which first posted a tweet calling Abe a “divisive arch-conservative” but soon deleted it.

But NPR didn’t delete it because they felt shame over their hyper-partisan tweet about a slain man. They just needed to reword it so that Abe came off even worse by using buzzwords that they typically associate with white supremacists, “ultranationalist.” Now he’s not just a political figure that opposed the left in his country, but now he’s a crazed xenophobe.

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NPR Misleads Viewers With Claim Of ‘Over 240 Mass Shootings’ Halfway Into 2022

Do American citizens still believe that NPR is truly an “unbiased” news organization? A new report by the taxpayer-funded public radio recently raised alarm bells for Americans across the country after it announced that there have been “over 240 mass shootings” in the United States since the beginning of 2022.

According to the article, the United States endured  “at least 246 [mass shootings] in just over 22 weeks,” for an average of “just over 11 a week.”

Such a number was reached without looking at the FBI’s traditional definition of a mass shooting, which necessitates that 4 or more people other than the gunman are killed during the incident. NPR instead elected to utilize the Gun Violence Archive of four or more people being shot, regardless of survival.

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NPR Declares Using Wrong Colour Emojis is Probably RACIST

In another example of the establishment left’s obsessive grift with race and social segregation, publicly funded NPR published a story claiming that if you use the wrong colour emoji in text messages in relation to your own skin colour, you are probably a racist.

In the article titled  “Which skin color emoji should you use? The answer can be more complex than you think”, writers Alejandra Marquez, Janse Patrick Jarenwattananon, and Asma Khalid (it took three of them to take on this weighty subject) argue that choosing to use a yellow emoji, rather than a white, brown or black one is “the neutral option” that will leave the respondent free to “focus on the message” rather than race.

Of course, any rational person wouldn’t immediately see an emoji in a text and start thinking about race. Not these taxpayer funded hacks though.

They even went around interviewing people for the piece.

One interviewee said “I present as very pale, very light skinned. And if I use the white emoji, I feel like I’m betraying the part of myself that’s Filipino.”

The interviewee continued, “But if I use a darker color emoji, which maybe more closely matches what I see when I look at my whole family, it’s not what the world sees, and people tend to judge that.”

OMG, what a terrible dilemma to be in.

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About That ‘Man Died After Being Turned Away from 43 ICUs’ Over COVID Story

This is the latest round of fake news concerning COVID, huh? I’ve been told our hospitals are about to collapse. It hasn’t happened. In fact, this piece of fear porn has been manufactured before. It centers on Intensive care units, which are almost always near capacity, even prior to the pandemic. If they’re not, the hospital loses money.

Enter National Public Radio that peddled a story that wasn’t true at face value. The narrative was that the ICUs are so packed with COVID patients that it resulted in his death. He reportedly visited 43 and was turned away. It wasn’t COVID that killed him; it was a heart ailment. Yet, midway through the story, you can see where things go off the hinges. It’s classic misinformation (via NPR) [emphasis mine]:

Ray DeMonia, 73, was born and raised in Cullman, Ala., but he died on Sept. 1, some 200 miles away in an intensive care unit in Meridian, Miss.

Last month, DeMonia, who spent 40 years in the antiques and auctions business, suffered a cardiac emergency. But it was because hospitals are full due to the coronavirus — and not his heart — that he was forced to spend his last days so far from home, according to his family.

“Due to COVID 19, CRMC emergency staff contacted 43 hospitals in 3 states in search of a Cardiac ICU bed and finally located one in Meridian, MS.,” the last paragraph of DeMonia’s obituary reads, referring to the Cullman Regional Medical Center.

“In honor of Ray, please get vaccinated if you have not, in an effort to free up resources for non COVID related emergencies … ,” the obituary reads. “He would not want any other family to go through what his did.”

NPR was unable to reach the DeMonia family. A spokesperson for Cullman Regional Medical Center, who declined to give specifics of Ray DeMonia’s case, citing privacy concerns, confirmed to NPR that he was transferred from the hospital but said the reason was that he required “a higher level of specialized care not available” there.

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NPR Trashes Free Speech. A Brief Response

The guests for NPR’s just-released On The Media episode about the dangers of free speech included Andrew Marantz, author of an article called, “Free Speech is Killing Us”; P.E. Moskowitz, author of “The Case Against Free Speech”; Susan Benesch, director of the “Dangerous Speech Project”; and Berkeley professor John Powell, whose contribution was to rip John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty as “wrong.”

That’s about right for NPR, which for years now has regularly congratulated itself for being a beacon of diversity while expunging every conceivable alternative point of view.

I always liked Brooke Gladstone, but this episode of On The Media was shockingly dishonest. The show was a compendium of every neo-authoritarian argument for speech control one finds on Twitter, beginning with the blanket labeling of censorship critics as “speech absolutists” (most are not) and continuing with shameless revisions of the history of episodes like the ACLU’s mid-seventies defense of Nazi marchers at Skokie, Illinois.

The essence of arguments made by all of NPR’s guests is that the modern conception of speech rights is based upon John Stuart Mill’s outdated conception of harm, which they summarized as saying, “My freedom to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.”

Because, they say, we now know that people can be harmed by something other than physical violence, Mill (whose thoughts NPR overlaid with harpsichord music, so we could be reminded how antiquated they are) was wrong, and we have to recalibrate our understanding of speech rights accordingly.

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New NPR Ethics Policy: It’s OK For Journalists To Demonstrate (Sometimes)

NPR rolled out a substantial update to its ethics policy earlier this month, expressly stating that journalists may participate in activities that advocate for “the freedom and dignity of human beings” on both social media and in real life.

The new policy eliminates the blanket prohibition from participating in “marches, rallies and public events,” as well as vague language that directed NPR journalists to avoid personally advocating for “controversial” or “polarizing” issues.

NPR’s current ethics policy was first drafted in the early 2000s, and then given an overhaul in 2010-2011.

The new NPR policy reads, “NPR editorial staff may express support for democratic, civic values that are core to NPR’s work, such as, but not limited to: the freedom and dignity of human beings, the rights of a free and independent press, the right to thrive in society without facing discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, disability, or religion.”

Is it OK to march in a demonstration and say, ‘Black lives matter’? What about a Pride parade? In theory, the answer today is, “Yes.” But in practice, NPR journalists will have to discuss specific decisions with their bosses, who in turn will have to ask a lot of questions.

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Shaming Private Ryan

NPR, man. It used to be good, though liberal, until it was taken over by woke fanatics. Now NPR’s TV critic, Eric Deggans, is attacking Tom Hanks for not being woke enough. Deggans, who is black, praised Hanks for his recent op-ed about the Tulsa race massacre, and calling on Hollywood to tell more stories like it. But now Deggans wants Hanks to do penance for having made movies about white people. I kid you not. From Deggans’s essay:

[I]t’s wonderful that Hanks stepped forward to advocate for teaching about a race-based massacre – indirectly pushing back against all the hyperventilating about critical race theory that’s too often more about silencing such lessons on America’s darkest chapters.

But it is not enough.

After many years of speaking out about race and media in America, I know the toughest thing for some white Americans — especially those who consider themselves advocates against racism — is to admit how they were personally and specifically connected to the elevation of white culture over other cultures.

But in Hanks’ case, he is no average American. Or average Hollywood star, for that matter.

Over the years, he has starred in a lot of big movies about historical events, including Saving Private Ryan, Greyhound, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Bridge of Spies and News of the World. He has served as a producer or executive producer on even more films and TV shows based on American history, including Band of Brothers, The Pacific, John Adams and From the Earth to the Moon. He was an executive producer of documentaries such as The Assassination of President Kennedy and The Sixties on CNN.

In other words, he is a baby boomer star who has built a sizable part of his career on stories about American white men “doing the right thing.” He even played a former Confederate soldier in one of his latest films, News of the World, standing up for a blond, white girl who had been kidnapped and raised by a Native American tribe.

He’s not alone. Superstar director Steven Spielberg has a similar pedigree (notwithstanding occasional projects such as The Color Purple and Amistad). And fellow director Ron Howard. These stories of white Americans smashing the Nazi war machine or riding rockets into space are important. But they often leave out how Black soldiers returned home from fighting in World War II to find they weren’t allowed to use the GI Bill to secure home loans in certain neighborhoods or were cheated out of claiming benefits at all.

They don’t describe how Black people were excluded from participating in space missions as astronauts early in America’s space program. As the book and film Hidden Figures notes, even brilliant Black and female mathematicians faced discrimination in the space program during the 1950s and 1960s. If given better opportunities, perhaps they could have helped us get to the moon sooner, by putting our best minds on the problem, regardless of race.

Deggans is angry because these artists didn’t make the films he thought they should have made.

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