Ari Paul (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Going after public broadcasters is…part of the neo-fascist playbook authoritarian leaders around the world are using to clamp down on dissent and keep the public in the dark.”

The death of former 1960s radical turned right-wing provocateur David Horowitz brought to mind the time he called me “stupid” (Michigan Daily, 9/8/03) because he disliked a column (Michigan Daily, 9/2/03) I wrote about neoconservatism.

I was reminded of that again just days later when Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25), a journalist who left Occupy Wall Street populism for ruling class sycophancy, attacked my recent article, “Cuts to PBS, NPR Part of Authoritarian Playbook” (FAIR.org, 4/25/25). In his response, titled, “No, State Media and Democracy Don’t Go ‘Hand in Hand.’ Just the Opposite,” Taibbi asked, “How nuts do you have to be to think ‘strong state media’ doesn’t have a dark side?”

It’s a straw man argument, with a heavy dose of McCarthyism thrown in to boot. I’d encourage everyone to read both pieces in full, but here I’ll break down the main problems with Taibbi’s piece.

Public vs. state media

Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25): “The above is either satire or written by someone consciously ignoring the history of state media.”

Taibbi’s main trick is to pretend that “state media” and “public media” are interchangeable. They’re not. State media consists of government propaganda outlets that answer directly to executive authority, rather than independent editors. Public media are independent outlets that receive taxpayer subsidies. As I wrote in my piece, NPR “only gets 1% of its funding directly from the CPB,” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Obviously, if NPR and PBS were “state media,” Trump wouldn’t need to try to shut them down; he would already control them editorially. That’s not to say that they’re perfectly independent. FAIR writers, including myself (11/26/20), have for decades been critical of NPR and PBS political coverage. FAIR (e.g., 6/1/99, 9/17/04, 5/11/24, 10/24/24) has pointed out again and again that right-wing complaints about supposed left-wing bias in public broadcasting have repeatedly resulted in compromised coverage. (I noted in the very piece Taibbi purports to critique that Republican critics of public broadcasting “use their leverage over CPB funding to push NPR and PBS political programming to the right.”)

FAIR’s Julie Hollar (FAIR.org, 5/2/25) wrote just days before Taibbi’s post that NPR had downplayed the Trump administration’s attack on free speech, taking a false “both sides” approach to the issue. So, yes, FAIR is outspoken about the “dark side” of NPR and PBS, and Taibbi surely knows it. But he doesn’t seem interested in an honest argument.

His words, not mine

White House Wire (4/30/25) is already the kind of state media Taibbi warns PBS could turn into.

Taibbi used quotation marks around “strong state media” twice, when those aren’t the words I used—they’re his. He claimed that I was “consciously ignoring the history of state media,” though much of my piece concerned state efforts to force conformity on public outlets. While failing to engage with the rest of my article, he took the reader to Russia in the 1990s, when independent journalists (like himself) were working:

That period, like the lives of many of those folks, didn’t last long. Vladimir Putin sent masked police into the last independent TV station on May 11, 2000, capping less than ten years of quasi-free speech. “Strong state media” remained, but actual journalism vanished.

I’m very open about my opposition to the tyranny of autocrats shutting down and raiding journalistic institutions (FAIR.org, 5/19/21, 6/8/23, 8/14/23, 10/22/24). And my article noted that other wannabe autocrats are attacking public broadcasters, notably in Italy, Israel and Argentina, a fact that does not undermine but rather supports the idea that there’s a correlation between public broadcasting and democracy.

If Taibbi were truly worried about “state media,” he wouldn’t be mad at a meager government subsidy to NPR or PBS, but instead would show more concern for something like the Trump administration’s White House Wire, “a news-style website that publishes exclusively positive coverage of the president on official White House servers” (Guardian, 5/1/25). And mentioning Putin’s attacks on “independent TV” is certainly a better argument against Trump’s FCC investigations into private US outlets like ABC and CBS than it is against the existence of NPR or PBS.

Taibbi’s invocation of “Putin” and “Russia” as a reason why we should not be concerned about Trump’s attacks on public broadcasting is such an illogical non sequitur, it makes more sense to interpret it as standard-issue McCarthyism. This is bolstered by Taibbi’s invocation of more paranoia about any state subsidy for media:

Yes, Car Talk and the MacNeil/Lehrer Report were cool, but outlets like Neues Deutschland, Télé Zaïre and Tung Padewat more often went “hand in hand” with fingernail factories or firing squads than democracy.

He seemed to be trying to scare the reader into thinking that we are just one episode of Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! away from the Cambodian genocide.

The neo–Cold War trick is to just say “Putin” enough times in hopes that the reader will eventually realize that the US government funding anything is a sign of impending tyranny. It’s an old joke to accuse greying reactionaries of hating publicly funded snowplows because “that’s socialism,” but that appears to be where Taibbi is these days.

A sloppy attack

Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard (International Journal of Press/Politics, 7/24): “High levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.”

Taibbi pretended to refute my claim that “strong public media systems and open democracy go hand in hand,” but in his article’s large block quotation, he omitted two embedded citations to scholarly studies that support this assertion. One of those was from Political Quarterly (3/28/24), the other was an Annenberg School study (3/16/22) whose co-author, Annenberg’s Victor Pickard, has also written about the importance of public media for The Nation (4/15/25).

Taibbi could have challenged those studies if he wanted, and good-faith disagreement is welcome. Omitting them from the quotation, though, leaves out the critical part of my statement.

Taibbi continued:

People who grew up reading the BBC or AFP may imagine a correlation between a state media and democracy, but a more dependable indicator of a free society is whether or not obnoxious private journalism (like the Russian Top Secret, whose editor Artyom Borovik died in a mysterious plane crash) is allowed to proliferate.

I’ve written at length about that dangers that the Trump administration poses when it comes to censorship, intimidating journalists, lawfare against media and using the power of the state to chill speech (FAIR.org, 12/16/24, 1/23/25, 2/18/25, 2/26/25, 3/28/25, 4/29/25). Taibbi ignored this part of my record, which is referenced in part in the very article to which he’s responding. This is crucial, because my defense of PBS and NPR in this instance is part of a general belief that the government should not attack media organizations, public or private.

As someone who read Taibbi enthusiastically when he was a Rolling Stone and New York Press writer, it’s sad to see someone I once admired so sloppily attack FAIR’s defense of press freedom against anti-democratic state power. But on the bright side, his outburst acts as an inspiration for a place like FAIR to continue defending free speech and a free press, while mercilessly calling out state propagandists who disguise themselves as journalists.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Green Card–holding students are being abducted from the streets by agents of the state for attending protests and writing op-eds. News outlets are being investigated by the FCC for reporting that displeases the president. Federal web pages are being scrubbed of a lengthy list of words, including “race,” “transgender,” “women” and “climate.”

“Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to it since the McCarthy Era?” NPR (Morning Edition, 4/7/25) asked—with the argument for the former position being that “conservatives are just, in general, much more willing to speak their mind.”

NPR responded to this shocking government attack on free speech with a Morning Edition series on “The State of the First Amendment,” whose introductory episode’s headline (4/7/25) declared freedom of speech to be “shifting under the Trump administration”; it promised that the show would be “exploring how.”

The wishy-washy language wasn’t a promising start, and the segment only went downhill from there, taking an “on the one hand/on the other hand” framing to an assault on core democratic rights.

Host Leila Fadel explained: “All this week, we are going to look at the state of free speech in the United States. Who feels more free to speak? Who feels silenced?” After offering soundbites from people on “both sides” of this debate, she asked:

Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to it since the McCarthy era in the 1940s and ’50s, when fearmongering around Soviet and Communist influence led to the political persecution of academics and leftists?

It’s a vital question with a very clear and obvious answer—one that NPR, facing an investigation from the FCC into its corporate funding and a drive by Trump to end its federal funding, and laboring under ideological overseers installed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (FAIR.org, 10/24/24), refused to offer its listeners. (Trump signed a new executive order last night to attempt to defund NPR and PBS, accusing them of “radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.'”)

‘Too early to tell’

NPR‘s Leila Fadel (4/7/25): “Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump, or is censorship shifting?” (Photo: Mike Morgan/NPR)

After airing Trump’s claims to have “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” Fadel offered brief descriptions of “attacks on the press” and actions that have “broken other norms as well, often in legally questionable ways.” (The first example: “Universities face uncertain futures as they become targets of the Trump administration.”)

The episode then took its balanced framing to an interview segment featuring two legal scholars, Lee Bollinger, former Columbia University president, and Jonathan Turley, a Fox News regular. Fadel introduced the two by noting that “they see the threats to [the First Amendment] in this moment differently. Bollinger sees danger under Trump,” while “Turley says he thinks this president could be an unexpected advocate.”

In her questioning of Turley, Fadel did rebut his claim that the Biden administration and social media companies colluded to censor conservative speech. She then brought up “actions by this administration that seem to be chilling speech,” citing “college professors warning students not to discuss or post opinions about Israel’s war in Gaza or Russia’s war in Ukraine for fear of deportation or arrest.” She noted as well that “government websites have taken down thousands of pages featuring information on vaccines, hate crimes, diversity.” She asked: “Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump, or is censorship shifting?”

It’s perhaps meant to be a tough question to make him admit that calling Trump a protector of free speech would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. (Turley responds, “Well, it’s too early to tell whether the Trump administration will make free speech truly part of its legacy in the second term.”) But Fadel’s language—”is censorship shifting?”—turns around and concedes the right’s false claims of censorship under the Biden administration (which she’d just rebutted!). Fadel and NPR offer only two ways of looking at the situation: Trump is increasing free speech, or censorship is just a swinging pendulum whose victims change as administrations change.

The segment wraps up with Bollinger and Turley finding at least one point of agreement: that the arrest and attempted deportation of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil violates, in Turley’s words, “part of the core protections that define us as a people.”

‘They feel more free’

NPR (4/7/25) framed the First Amendment question  as “who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now.”

The online version of the show (4/7/25), in which the audio transcript is condensed  into an article format, bent even further backwards to find balance. It explained that the series “will explore who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now.”

That exploration started by naming real censorship that has already taken place: “scrubbing reports and federal grant applications of words the Trump administration has banned,” fears that “participating in protests could lead to deportation,” an online portal where people can “file complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion lessons in class with the US Department of Education.”

If this were a report on a foreign country, it’s hard to imagine NPR offering an “on the other hand” to that list of clearly authoritarian crackdowns on speech. But here comes the next paragraph, trotting out the obligatory balance:

Yet plenty of others—including anti-abortion activists, the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty and members of university Republican clubs—say they feel more free today to express views without fear of a backlash now that President Trump is back in office.

The article eliminates references to Turley and Bollinger, but includes two quotes. One is from a history teacher who feels afraid to answer student questions related to the Trump administration. That’s “balanced” by one from the president of the College Republicans at the University of California, Berkeley, who says they have more members willing to “be outwardly and openly conservative than we did before the election.”

Orwellian redefinition

When you define the threat to free speech, as the New York Times (3/18/22) does, as “being shamed or shunned”—that is, criticized by others’ speech—it opens the door to suppressing speech in the name of free speech.

This absurd and harmful false balance NPR creates is predicated on the idea that “free speech” can mean simply how unconstrained a person feels to speak what might be unpopular opinions, including the various forms of bigotry and disinformation that have been unleashed by the Trump administration. But free speech is not, in fact, about feelings; it’s about consequences. It’s one thing to feel less afraid that your peers will criticize or even yell at you for speaking your opinions on campus. It’s another to fear that expressing your opinions will bring down official sanction, up to and including banishment from the country.

Free speech is not the freedom from “backlash” from those who disagree with your views, despite the MAGA movement’s best efforts to convince people of that—aided and abetted by many “liberal” elites and pundits who feel they have been “canceled” by left-wing criticism of their own (often bigoted) views. If college Republicans, anti-abortion activists or the Moms for Liberty feel constrained by peers harshly criticizing them or not inviting them to speak at public events, that’s not censorship; that’s ideas being contested in the public arena. Their right-wing perspectives still have many, many places to be heard, including the huge right-wing media ecosystem.

NPR concluded its article, “[Trump’s] critics say his concern for free speech is only for speech his administration finds acceptable.” That is, in fact, the only way you can make sense of the claim that Trump stands for “free speech”—by defining it as the ability of the approved people to speak, while those who would criticize (and thereby “cancel”) them are silenced (FAIR.org, 3/4/25).

The Trump administration is bringing the power of the state down on people who express opinions and ideas it finds objectionable. The consequences of that power, for both individuals and democracy, are quite dire. When NPR talks about “who feels more free to speak” and “who feels silenced,” it’s defining free speech the way MAGA wants it to be defined—as a vibe, not as a right. Ultimately, though, NPR‘s complicity in this Orwellian redefinition will not protect them from Trump’s vendetta.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR public editor Kelly McBride here, or via Bluesky: @kellymcb.bsky.social. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

In April, the White House revealed a plan to ask Congress to claw back nearly $1.1 billion in already-approved federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the entity that provides federal support for NPR and PBS affiliates. Thursday night’s executive order instructs the CPB to cease funding the two entities by June 30.

Free Press Co-CEO Craig Aaron said:

“Trump’s attack on public media shows why our democracy is on life support. Healthy democracies have independent, well-funded and robust public-media systems. At their best, noncommercial media put the public interest before profits and hold power to account. Trump’s outrageous order to end federal support for NPR and PBS takes U.S. media in the opposite direction. It’s riddled with falsehoods and disinformation about public media, much of it seemingly cribbed from right-wing blogs and newsletters. Despite the president’s twisted claims, public broadcasting remains an incredibly popular use of taxpayer dollars, and local stations provide trustworthy news and cultural programming, as well as lifesaving coverage during emergencies.

“The order’s legality is dubious at best — Congress appropriates funds for public broadcasting, and the president doesn’t get a magic eraser for programs he doesn’t like. The government’s unhinged attempt to defund news outlets they deem biased is blatant censorship. This represents a dangerous assault on independent journalism and public accountability — and it’s not happening in isolation. The Trump administration is also pushing Congress to rescind public media’s already-approved budget and is trying to remove board members at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for no legally justifiable reason. Brendan Carr, Trump’s top censor at the Federal Communications Commission, has also launched an investigation into the underwriting practices of NPR and PBS, using it as a pretext to call for an end to funding.

“After years of attacking journalists and lying about their work, it’s no surprise that Trump and his minions are trying to silence and shutter any newsroom that dares to ask him questions or show the devastating impact of his policies on local communities. Yet in many of those communities, the local public-media station is the only source of independent reporting. Trump, of course, prefers fawning propaganda — which too many commercial TV and radio broadcasters are willing to provide in exchange for regulatory favors, or to stay off the president’s target list. Since Trump can’t shake down NPR and PBS the same way he’s doing to CBS and ABC, he’s trying to starve them of the resources they need to survive.

“Attacking journalists and the media is on page one of the authoritarian playbook. This is why everyone who cares about accountability and democracy should be deeply concerned about public media’s future. The current system is far from perfect, and for too long public broadcasting’s leaders have cowered and conceded when they should have been pushing back. But all of us who care about an independent press, an informed populace, a responsive government and a thriving democracy have a stake in the outcome of this fight. If we unite to defend public media — and I believe we can and will prevail — then we might just save our democracy, too.”

Background: In February, Craig Aaron testified before the House Judiciary Committee about the Trump administration’s campaign of censorship against media viewpoints the president doesn’t like, calling it a “free-speech emergency.” In May 2024, he testified about false claims of bias at NPR and PBS. Free Press Action is leading grassroots efforts to craft public policy that supports local noncommercial news and information.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

NPR CEO Katherine Maher (center) testifies in Congress against cuts to public broadcasting (NPR, 4/15/25).

NPR (4/15/25) found itself having to write its own obituary recently when it reported that the “Trump administration has drafted a memo to Congress outlining its intent to end nearly all federal funding for public media, which includes NPR and PBS.”

The White House declared in a statement (4/14/25) that

American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as “news.”

It said the administration would ask Congress to rescind $1.1 billion, or two years’ worth of approved funding, from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the federally created and funded organization that channels money to both national and local public broadcasters.

‘Finally get this done’

Fred Rogers defends the Corporation for Public Broadcasting before Congress (5/1/69).

Republicans have been threatening to defund public broadcasting since its inception. Fred Rogers, known for his children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, testified in support of PBS before Congress in 1969 in the face of attempted cuts to the fledgling CPB during the Nixon administration (PBS, 11/22/19).

After the 2010 Republican congressional takeover, the House of Representatives under then–President Barack Obama voted to defund NPR and prohibit “public radio stations from using federal grant money to pay dues to NPR,” according to PBS (3/17/11). This came “a week after conservative activists secretly recorded an NPR executive making derogatory comments about Tea Party supporters,” leading to the “resignation of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller.”

But even when Republicans have had full control of Washington, the GOP has backed down from destroying public broadcasting generally, recognizing the popularity of shows like Sesame Street with constituents—and the ease with which they have wrung content concessions from the networks.

Indeed, while some right-wing critics seem truly opposed to public broadcasting, the repeated retreats from following through suggest that more of those critics preferred to simply use their leverage over CPB funding to push NPR and PBS political programming to the right. (See FAIR.org’s critical coverage of NPR here and PBS here.)

Times may be different now, though. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy book that guides much of this administration’s actions, says forcefully:

All Republican presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake…. The next conservative president must finally get this done and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary.

With Voice of America journalists fighting in court against the broadcaster’s closure (LA Times, 3/19/25; AP, 3/28/25), and the administration’s weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission to chill speech of private and public broadcasters (FAIR.org, 2/26/25), the threat against PBS and NPR is very real.

Unpopular cuts

The right is loving the news. The New York Post (4/14/25) reported:

The White House memo notes that NPR CEO Katherine Maher once called Trump a “fascist” and a “deranged racist”—statements that Maher told Congress last month she now regrets making—and cites two recent PBS programs featuring transgender characters.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) applauded the plan Monday, tweeting: “NPR and PBS have a right to publish their biased coverage—but they don’t have a right to spend taxpayer money on it. It’s time to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

More broadly, however, the proposed cuts aren’t popular, as only “about a quarter of US adults (24%) say Congress should remove federal funding from NPR and PBS,” according to Pew Research (3/26/25), while a “larger share (43%) say NPR and PBS should continue to receive funding from the federal government.”

Where CPB’s money goes (from its financial report).

While the cut wouldn’t decimate NPR, which only gets 1% of its funding directly from the CPB, the impact on its member stations could be significant, especially in minor media markets. (And NPR also gets 30% of its funding from those member stations’ programming and service fees.) Seventy percent of CPB funding goes directly to local public radio and public television stations. As Maher explained on NPR’s All Things Considered (4/16/25):

So the big impact would be on rural stations, stations in geographies that are quite large or complex in order to be able to receive broadcasts, where infrastructure costs are very high.

This could result in “those stations really having to cut back services or potentially going away altogether.”

The blow to public television, which faces higher costs and gets a much bigger chunk of its funding from the CPB, would be more dire—again, especially in smaller media markets. Both PBS NewsHour (4/16/25) and the New York Times (4/1/25) noted that Alaska Public Media, an NPR and PBS affiliate, could shutter entire stations in what is already a news desert.

Even if Congress manages to muster the votes to block the rescission of funds for now, Trump’s knives are clearly out for public broadcasting. Earlier this year, Inside Radio (1/31/25) reported, FCC chair Brendan Carr launched an investigation into

whether NPR and PBS stations are violating the terms of their authorizations to operate as noncommercial educational stations by running underwriting announcements on behalf of for-profit entities.

As FAIR (Extra!, 9–10/93) has long pointed out, the “underwriting announcements” on public broadcasting are commercials under a different name, and they violate the noncommercial promise of both PBS and NPR. But the Trump administration is not offering to increase public funding so these outlets can be less dependent on corporate sponsorship; to the contrary, it’s trying to take both federal and corporate money away in hopes of destroying public media altogether.

Clamping down on dissent

Victor Pickard (Annenberg, 3/16/22): “A robust public media system is beneficial—perhaps even essential—for maintaining a healthy democratic society.”

One could look at this threat as part of Trump’s general distrust of major media and desire to seek revenge against outlets he believes have been unfair to him (AP, 12/14/24; Fox News, 4/14/25). Another way to look at the situation is that cuts to public broadcasting send a message to the Republican base that the administration is serious about reducing federal spending generally—a purely symbolic message, of course, since CPB funding amounts to 0.008% of the federal budget.

But going after public broadcasters is also a part of the neo-fascist playbook authoritarian leaders around the world are using to clamp down on dissent and keep the public in the dark, all in the name of protecting the people from partisan reporting  (Political Quarterly, 3/28/24). That’s largely because strong public media systems and open democracy go hand in hand (Annenberg School, 3/16/22).

In Argentina, President Javier Milei has moved to shut down media seen as too left-wing, including the national news agency Télam. The move was blasted by press advocates and trade unionists (Página 12, 3/1/24; Reason, 3/4/24). “Télam as we knew it has ceased to exist. The end,” a presidential spokesperson reportedly said last year (Clarín, 7/1/24).

The Guardian (5/6/24) reported that journalists at the Italian state broadcaster RAI have struck “against the ‘suffocating control’ allegedly being wielded by Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government over their work,” which included allegations that the network censored “an antifascism monologue that was due to be read on one of its TV talkshows by the high-profile author Antonio Scurati.”

After Meloni took power in 2022, according to Le Monde (7/23/24), RAI,

considered a bastion of the left, faced show cancellations, strategic personnel changes and program restructuring, all seen as part of a far-right cultural conflict under the pretext of promoting diversity.

The union representing RAI journalists warned (La Stampa, 1/26/25) that the broadcaster’s editorial control has shifted from hosts to a shadowy new management, which “risk[s] wiping out the work that over 150 journalists have been doing for years in network programs.”

The far-right Israeli government is pushing a bill to privatize the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC), which the nation’s attorney general warned threatened to silence criticism of the government and create a “chilling effect” on other media outlets (Jerusalem Post, 11/24/24). The attack on Israeli public media comes as Netanyahu’s government has sought to curtail press freedom generally in Israel since the nation invaded Gaza in 2023 (Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24), including a government boycott of the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz (Guardian, 11/24/24), and intensified military censorship of the press (+972, 5/20/24). The death toll among Palestinian journalists in the Israeli invasions of Gaza and Lebanon has been catastrophic (FAIR.org, 10/19/23, 5/1/24, 3/26/25).

What these figures have in common with Trump is that they aren’t just extreme in their conservatism, they are actively opposed to democracy (New Yorker, 3/7/23; Foreign Policy, 12/9/23; Jacobin, 6/14/24).

While the US right has no shortage of TV networks, radio shows, websites and podcasts, the attack on public broadcasters, widely regarded as Blue State media, tells the MAGA movement that the government is working to cleanse society of any remaining opposition to its illiberal takeover (CNN, 3/26/25). Trump’s move against PBS and NPR is in line with these other anti-democratic regimes, attempting the same kind of transition to autocracy. His administration is a part of a global authoritarian movement that wants less media, academia and other democratic institutions, because these can be incubators of critical dissent against the government and corporate elite.

NPR and PBS don’t always live up to that mission. But cutting their ability to operate makes politics more opaque by limiting news consumers’ options beyond privately owned right-wing broadcasters. And that appears to be the point.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

“Millions of Americans from major cities to rural areas rely on NPR and PBS for news and information on natural disasters, political developments, and so much more,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg in New York. “NPR and PBS provide an essential public service. Casting them as propaganda machines undeserving of taxpayer support is a dangerous mischaracterization that threatens to rob Americans of the vital reporting they need to make decisions about their lives.”

The hearing was chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who has accused the two networks of liberal bias, and throughout the hearing referred to NPR and PBS as “radical left-wing echo chambers” with “communist” programming. Taylor Greene called for the “complete and total” defunding and dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps to fund NPR and PBS.

The Federal Communications Commission ordered an investigation into the two broadcasters’ airing of commercials in January.

Ahead of the hearing, CPJ and several other press freedom organizations sent a letter to the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, urging the committee to recognize the critical role of a free and pluralistic press and cautioning against rhetoric that undermines journalism.     

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

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The post Marjorie Taylor Green leads DOGE subcommittee calls to defund NPR, PBS; Democrats blast cuts to National Institutes for Health – March 26, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

In the letter, the press freedom advocates urged the subcommittee to recognize the critical role of a free and pluralistic press. They cautioned against rhetoric that undermines journalism, warning that such language can encourage hostility toward reporters and media outlets and increase the risks journalists face, especially when covering public officials from across the political spectrum.

Public broadcasting is a trusted source of fact-based local reporting for millions of Americans, particularly in rural communities. To effectively serve the public, it must remain independent from political or governmental influence—an obligation that Congress is responsible for upholding. With many local news outlets struggling financially, leading to widespread “news deserts,” public media often steps in as the only reliable provider of local news and emergency information. Public stations continue to invest in their newsrooms, filling gaps that the private sector is unlikely to address. A recent CPJ report highlighted growing threats to journalists in the U.S., including violence, harassment, legal challenges, and criminalization. This hearing is taking place amid an increasingly hostile climate toward the media. For these reasons, the tone and conduct of the March 26 hearing are crucial.

Read the letter here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

NPR (2/1/25) investigates how a politician who surrounds himself with fellow billionaires can “work for the working class.” NPR‘s suggestion: tax cuts for the very wealthy.

“Can Trump’s Second Act Work for the Working Class While Giving Back to His Super Donors?” asks NPR.com (2/1/25). The answer, from NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving, is a resounding—maybe!

Elving presents the politics of the second Trump administration as a perplexing paradox:

Today we are confronted with an alliance between those whom political scientists might call plutocrats and those who are increasingly labeled populists. The contrast is stark, but the symbiosis is unmistakable. And we all await the outcome as the populist in Trump tries to co-exist with his newfound ally Musk, the world’s richest man with abundant clout in the new administration.

After a meandering tour of US history from Andrew Jackson to William Jenning Bryan to Ross Perot, Elving concludes: “We may only be at the beginning of an era in which certain political figures can serve what are plausibly called populist causes by calling on the resources of the ultra-rich.” Huge, if true!

Elving’s evidence that Trump is a “populist”—or at least has a populist lurking inside him—is remarkably thin, however:

Trump has shown a certain affinity with, and owes a clear debt to, many of the little guys—what he called in 2017 “the forgotten men and women.”… With his small town, egalitarian rallies and appeals to “the forgotten man and woman,” he has revived the term populism in the political lexicon and gone further with it than anyone since Bryan’s heyday.

Trump “made a show of working a shift at a McDonald’s last fall,” Elving notes. And he “used his fame and Twitter account to popularize a fringe theory about then-President Obama being foreign born and thus ineligible to be president,” which “connected him to a hardcore of voters such as those who told pollsters they believed Obama was a Muslim.” Elving suggests that this is the sort of thing populists do.

But when it comes to offering examples of actual populist policies from the first Trump administration, Elving admits that there aren’t many to speak of:

If Trump’s rapid rise as a Washington outsider recalled those of 19th century populists, Trump’s actual performance as president was quite different. In fact it had more in common with the record of President William McKinley, the Ohio Republican who defeated Bryan in 1896 and again in 1900 while defending the gold standard and representing the interests of business and industry.

In fact, says Elving, “Trump in his first term pursued a relatively familiar list of Republican priorities,” with “his main legislative achievement” being “the passage of an enormous tax cut…that greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth.” For genuine journalists, for whom politicians’ actions are more significant than their words, that would be the most meaningful predictor of what Trump is likely to do going forward.

But Trump’s second term, Elving suggests on the basis of nothing, could be quite different: “As Trump’s second term unfolds, the issues most likely to be vigorously pursued may be those where the interests of his populist base can be braided with those who sat in billionaire’s row on Inauguration Day.” Such as? “The renewal of the 2017 tax cuts is an area of commonality, as is the promise to shrink government.”

So—a restoration of the same tax cuts that “greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth”? That how NPR thinks Trump in his second term “can serve what are plausibly called populist causes”?

All hail the unmistakable symbiosis!

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR public editor Kelly McBride here. or via Bluesky: @kellymcb.bsky.social. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

FEATURED IMAGE: NPR depiction of candidate Donald Trump as a tribune of the working class.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Jim Naureckas.

NPR‘s interview (11/18/24) with far-right pro-Trump Republican Marc Lotter appeared to be offered as balance to its interview (11/14/24) with far-right anti-Trump Republican John Bolton.

Donald Trump hasn’t taken office yet, but he has wasted no time naming cabinet members and other nominations for his incoming administration. They must be confirmed by the Senate—unless Trump manages an unprecedented end run around the Senate’s power to advise and consent—which means the media play an important role in helping bring to light their records and qualifications.

Clearly Trump is trying to see how far he can push the limits of the country’s democratic institutions with these nominations, which include an anti-vaxxer to oversee the country’s public health infrastructure, and a congressmember investigated for sex trafficking to be attorney general. A look at NPR‘s coverage so far suggests that the public radio network has no interest in using the power of the so-far-still-free press to preserve those limits.

In its reporting on Trump’s picks over the seven days from November 13 through November 19, NPR‘s Morning Edition has featured eight guest sources offering commentary, in the form of either soundbites or lengthier interviews, according to a FAIR search of the Nexis news database. All but two were current or former Republican officials, including one current Trump adviser. The other two were a representative from the right-wing Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, and a political risk consultant (who offered a perfectly neutral assessment). All of them were white men.

As a result, the most forceful denunciations of Trump’s parade of shockingly unqualified nominees that Morning Edition listeners were permitted came from one of the most right-wing members of the George W. Bush administration, John Bolton (11/14/24). And the show made sure to explicitly balance his interview by also giving one a few days later to Trump adviser Marc Lotter (11/18/24).

The dearth of nonpartisan experts and utter absence of any progressive or even mildly liberal voices also meant that only Trump’s most outrageous picks thus far—Matt Gaetz (who has since withdrawn), Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—were subject to “expert” criticism on the show. Meanwhile, most of his other picks weren’t even mentioned, let alone scrutinized.

One guest, a former George W. Bush official, made the only mention of Mike Huckabee, Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz as picks, calling them “leaders who have to be taken seriously” (11/13/24). But in a sane democracy, the media would be taking a close look at these candidates, too, who have more polished resumes but similar levels of extremism: Huckabee, picked as ambassador to Israel, has argued repeatedly that the West Bank is Israeli territory, and that “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.” Waltz, for national security advisor, wants Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. Stefanik, tapped to be UN ambassador, led the congressional witch hunt against college presidents last spring.

‘Look at the positives here’

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “knit together an unlikely coalition—some from the left and some MAGA supporters—eager to take on the establishment,” NPR (11/15/24) declared.

It wasn’t just Morning Edition sanewashing Trump’s picks at NPR. In a piece (NPR.org, 11/15/24) about Trump’s selection of RFK Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, NPR‘s headline and opening framed the anti-science conspiracy theorist as just a guy who “Wants to ‘Make America Healthy Again,'” but who “Could Face a Lot of Pushback.”

It took seven paragraphs for reporters Will Stone and Allison Aubrey to mention that scientists are “deeply worried about Kennedy’s history of questioning scientific consensus on vaccines and his antagonism to mainstream medicine more broadly.”

After quoting one public health expert who expressed strong fears about the serious damage Kennedy could do to the country’s public health system, NPR cheerfully offered the other side of things:

And yet there’s no denying there are areas of substantial overlap between the goals of MAHA and scientists who have long advocated for tackling the root causes of chronic illness.

The reporters did point out the contradictions between Kennedy’s regulatory goals, which would take on “big food and big pharma,” and the GOP/Trump war on government regulation of big corporations. But they gave the last word to Kennedy adviser Calley Means to argue, without rebuttal:

“I would tell anyone skeptical about this, to look at the positives here,” he says. “This MAHA agenda is one of the golden areas for true bipartisan reform.”

He says Kennedy’s approach will be to insist on what he terms “accurate science.”

In total, the piece gave more time to Kennedy allies with products to sell than to actual public health experts.

‘Expressed doubts’—or lied?

NPR (11/16/24) led with Trump’s claim that energy secretary nominee Chris Wright will usher in a “Golden Age of American Prosperity and Global Peace”; the one quote from a critic came ten paragraphs later.

In a piece on Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, oil executive Chris Wright, NPR (11/16/24) offered a textbook example of sanewashing that ought to have jarred any editor:

Wright has also expressed doubts about whether climate change is driving extreme weather events.

“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either,” Wright said in a video uploaded to LinkedIn.

“We have seen no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods despite endless fearmongering of the media, politicians and activists,” he also said in the video. “The only thing resembling a crisis with respect to climate change is the regressive, opportunity-squelching policies justified in the name of climate change.”

Those quotes do not illustrate “doubts about whether climate change is driving extreme weather events,” they illustrate anti-science climate denialism in the form of flat-out lies.

‘Backstop’ in action?

As we reported last month (FAIR.org, 10/24/24), NPR recently installed a “Backstop” editorial team to review all content prior to airing or publishing, after the latest round of right-wing complaints of bias. When the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it would be funding that team, it explained the purpose was to help NPR achieve the “highest standards of editorial integrity,” including “accuracy, fairness, balance, objectivity and transparency, and the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.”

The incredibly lopsided “balance,” lack of actually diverse viewpoints, and dubious fairness and accuracy displayed in the network’s nomination coverage reveals what the CPB was really going for with the new oversight it installed.

Not all NPR cabinet reporting has been spineless. A team of reporters led by Shannon Bond, for instance, published an in-depth piece (11/14/24) on Defense nominee Pete Hegseth that probed his strong links to extremist white Christian nationalism.

The problem with Trump’s nominees, NPR (11/17/24) reports, is that they might provoke “negative media coverage.”

But three days later, another NPR report (11/17/24) talked about Hegseth as if the biggest problem with him is simply that senators simply “have come to expect” nominees with a different “background”:

Real trouble started brewing with Pete Hegseth, an Army vet known for his weekend commentary on Fox News, being named secretary of Defense. Although a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan missions, he does not have the background that senators have come to expect of someone appointed to head up the Department of Defense. Hegseth’s frequent attacks on the uniformed leadership of the armed services has included talk of firing current generals, including at the highest levels.

Similarly, on All Things Considered (11/16/24), NPR senior political editor Domenico Montanaro explained the “difference” between Trump’s 2016 picks and those this year, saying the 2016 nominations

sometimes stood in the way of things he wanted to do that broke with the normal way…that things had been done for years. This time around, he’s really surrounding himself with a team of loyalists.

What former cabinet members did was stop Trump from doing things that were unconstitutional or abuses of power. For NPR to minimize them as “the way things had been done for years” indicates that the network is currently more concerned with preserving its CPB funding than sustaining democracy.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR public editor Kelly McBride here. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

NPR is adding a new team of editors to give all content a “final review”—thanks to the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

After the public broadcaster came under right-wing scrutiny in the spring for supposed left-wing bias, NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin (NPR.org, 5/15/24) announced the organization would be adding 11 new oversight positions, though she wouldn’t say who would be funding them. The hires include six editors for a new “Backstop” team that will give all content, including content from member stations, a “final review” before it can be aired.

The CPB announced its role in a press release (10/18/24) that declared it was giving NPR $1.9 million in “editorial enhancement” funding to help NPR

further strengthen its editorial operations and meet the challenges of producing 24/7 news content on multiple platforms that consistently adheres to the highest standards of editorial integrity—accuracy, fairness, balance, objectivity and transparency, and the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.

‘You push people away’

A disgruntled NPR employee’s ax-grinding (Free Press, 4/9/24) prompted CPB to give nearly $2 million to keep an eye on NPR‘s politics.

That language reads as a direct response to the recent right-wing criticism. In April, former NPR business editor Uri Berliner published a lengthy essay in Bari Weiss‘s Free Press (4/9/24; FAIR.org, 4/24/24) arguing that NPR‘s “progressive worldview” influenced its journalism. Berliner’s essay centered around what he claimed was the “most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.”

Berliner was referring to the viewpoints of NPR journalists—he claimed he looked up the voter registration of NPR‘s Washington, DC, staff, and found no Republicans—but suggested that led to skewed reporting, including “advocacy” against Donald Trump.

NPR alum Alicia Montgomery (Slate, 4/16/24) penned a lengthy response to Berliner, noting, among other things, that staffers were “encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” Indeed, during Trump’s presidency, NPR senior vice president for news Michael Oreskes (WUNC, 1/25/17; FAIR.org, 1/26/17) announced that NPR had decided not to use the word “lie”: “I think the minute you start branding things with a word like ‘lie,’ you push people away from you.”

Montgomery wrote that the real problem with NPR was

an abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice. NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity.

‘Intractable bias’

NPR‘s editor-in-chief Edith Chapin spun the installation of government-funded commissars  as “something positive for journalism” (Current, 5/20/24).

Despite the lack of merit to Berliner’s arguments, the GOP jumped at the opportunity to engage in their time-worn ritual of investigating public broadcasting’s “intractable bias,” demanding that NPR CEO Katherine Maher document and report the partisan affiliations of all news media staff of the past five years, as well as all board members (FAIR.org, 5/11/24).

Chapin, who in an internal email (X, 4/9/24) about Berliner’s attack stressed the need to serve “all audiences” and “[break] down the silos,” said Berliner’s piece and the scrutiny it prompted was “a factor” in her decision to add the editorial positions (Current, 5/20/24).

Under the new editorial organization, it appears that all reporting, whether produced by NPR or its member stations, will have to undergo final review by the “Backstop” team (which reports to Chapin herself) before it can be aired or published—which has some staff worried about bottlenecks as well as bias (New York Times, 5/16/24).

Survival through capitulation

Looking at NPR‘s sources (e.g., FAIR.org, 9/18/18) consistently finds a bias not to the left, but to the center and right.

The CPB was created to insulate public broadcasters from political intimidation, offering a degree of separation from government pressures. But since its inception, it has instead been used as a political tool to push PBS and NPR to bend over backwards to programming demands from the right, which has developed a winning formula: accuse public broadcasters of liberal bias, threaten to cut CPB funding, allow it to be “saved” by extracting programming concessions—rinse and repeat (FAIR.org, 2/18/11).

As FAIR wrote 20 years ago (Extra!, 9–10/05), in the midst of that year’s right-wing assault on PBS:

With each successive attack from the right, public broadcasting becomes weakened, as programmers become more skittish and public TV’s habit of survival through capitulation becomes more ingrained.

Public broadcasting’s founding purpose was to promote perspectives that weren’t already widely represented in the media, yet it has consistently failed to live up to that mission. Some PBS and NPR programming tries to be faithful to that standard—particularly local programming from member stations—but FAIR studies (e.g., Extra!, 11/10, 11/10; FAIR.org, 9/18/18) have repeatedly shown that PBS viewers and NPR listeners often get the same, government-dominated voices and ideas they hear on other major media outlets.

Conservative voices in particular, in part because of right-wing pressure, have long found a welcoming home in public broadcasting, hosting PBS shows such as Firing Line, McLaughlin Group, Journal Editorial Report, Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered and In Principle. NPR focuses much more on straight news and cultural programming; a FAIR study (7/15/15) of NPR commentators found them to be almost entirely apolitical.

No help seeing America whole

Sarah Jaffe (FAIR.org, 2/1/17): “The norms of ‘balance’ that for-profit media have relied on to avoid offending news consumers…seem utterly useless under an administration that considers lies simply ‘alternative facts.‘” 

Now we have the CPB providing funding to NPR to hire editors that will make sure its programming adheres to standards that include “objectivity,” “balance” and “the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.” NPR staffers have every right to be worried about that.

How will the new editors define these terms? FAIR has repeatedly pointed out that objectivity is a journalistic myth; subjective decisions are made every time one story is greenlighted over another, and one source is selected over another.

And if objectivity were possible, it certainly wouldn’t square with a journalistic notion of balance that orders offsetting coverage of Trump party lies with coverage of Democratic lies. It’s not hard for politicians to realize that if “balance” and “objectivity” mean passing along whatever powerful voices say without scrutiny, media will serve as a frictionless delivery system for whatever reality you choose to make up.

Public broadcasting was indeed created to promote diverse viewpoints. The 1967 Carnegie Commission that launched public broadcasting wrote that it should “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard,” and air programs that “help us see America whole, in all its diversity.” But as we’ve shown over and over, it’s not GOP viewpoints that are missing—it’s the perspectives representing the public interest, which are largely absent in corporate media, and which the new CPB funding is not designed to address.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR‘s public editor here. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

FEATURED IMAGE: NPR headquarters, Washington, DC (Creative Commons photo: Cornellrockey04)

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

Republicans made it clear that they wanted to defund NPR because they didn’t like the viewpoints they thought it aired—calling it “a progressive propaganda purveyor” (WBMA, 5/8/24).

Every so often, Republicans in Washington engage in the ritual of shouting about public broadcasting’s supposed left-wing bias, usually threatening to cut its federal funding.

It’s been happening nearly from the moment the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established in 1967 to provide federal funding for public radio and television. Nixon went after the CPB in 1969, leading to Fred Rogers’ famous congressional testimony that helped protect it. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump all launched attacks on public broadcasting. GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich attempted to eliminate the CPB in the mid-’90s, and congressional Republicans sought to do it again in 2005 and 2011. (See Politico, 10/23/10; FAIR.org, 2/18/11; HuffPost 3/16/17.)

It’s hardly surprising, then, to find public radio in the GOP’s crosshairs again this year (WBMA, 5/8/24), since congressional Republicans have been spending most of their time launching McCarthyist hearings into the Biden administration and elite institutions they accuse of “liberal” or “woke” bias (FAIR.org, 4/19/24).

This time, the attack was spurred by former NPR business editor Uri Berliner’s lengthy Substack essay (Free Press, 4/9/24; FAIR.org, 4/24/24) arguing that the outlet’s “progressive worldview” had compromised its journalism. The right gleefully pounced, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee called a hearing to investigate, among other things, “How can Congress develop solutions to address criticism that NPR suffers from intractable bias?”

A voice for the heard

By the time of FAIR’s 2015 study (7/15/15), NPR had almost completely barred political commentary from its major shows, in a futile hope of not angering censorious lawmakers.

As FAIR has documented throughout the years, the primary “intractable bias” public broadcasting suffers from is a bias toward the same corporate and political elites that dominate the rest of establishment media—despite the fact that it was created to “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard.”

We conducted our first study of the sources on NPR‘s main news programming in 1993 (Extra!, 4–5/93), when Democrats controlled the White House and Congress. Republican guests nonetheless outnumbered Democrats 57% to 42%. Public interest voices made up 7% of sources; women were 21% of all sources.

When we revisited the guest lists in 2004 (5/04), partisan control in Washington had flipped, but little changed at NPR. Republican guests outnumbered Democrats by slightly more (61% to 38%). Public interest voices were slightly lower, and only a few percentage points more than on commercial networks (6% compared to 3% of sources). Women were still 21% of all sources.

When FAIR (7/15/15) looked at NPR‘s commentators in 2015, we found that 71% of its regular commentators (i.e., who gave two or more commentaries in the five-month study period) were white men. Eight percent were men of color, and 21% were white women; no women of color were regular commentators during the period studied.

Led by private elites

The overwhelming domination of public radio’s boards of directors by the corporate elite (FAIR.org, 7/2/15) is a consequence of the strategy of relying on the wealthy for financial support.

FAIR has also looked at the governing boards of the eight most-listened-to NPR affiliate stations (7/2/15). Of the 259 board members, 75% had corporate backgrounds (e.g., executives in banks, investment firms, consulting companies and law firms). They also lacked ethnic diversity and gender parity, with 72% non-Latine white members and 66% men. In other words, legal control over public radio in this country is firmly in the hands of the privileged few.

NPR‘s national board of directors is a mix of member station managers and so-called “public members.” At the time of our study, there were ten station managers and five public members, who in fact represented the corporate elite. Shortly after FAIR’s study, NPR expanded its board to include nine public members; members today include bigwigs from Apple, Yahoo, Hulu, Starbucks, consulting firm BCG and investment bank Allen & Company.

And the percentage of NPR‘s revenues that comes from corporate sponsors continues to increase over time. In 2009, that number stood at 24%; today it is 38%.

Meanwhile, NPR receives less than 1% of its funding from the federal government. But nearly a third of its revenue does come from member stations’ programming and service fees—and the CPB accounts for approximately 8% of those stations’ revenues. (Other federal, state and local government funding contributes another 6%.) That’s why NPR calls continued federal funding “critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR.”

Dampening critical coverage

NPR adopted a definition of “lying” that required telepathy (FAIR.org, 3/1/17).

There is no current threat to public broadcasting funding, with Democrats in control of the Senate and White House. Even when Republicans have controlled Washington, they’ve always backed down in the end. While that’s not inevitable, defunding isn’t necessarily the ultimate goal: The mere threat of defunding is generally sufficient to reinvigorate public media’s efforts to prove their non-liberal bona fides, pushing them to the right.

In one remarkable example, shortly after the 2011 attack on NPR, the outlet stopped distributing an opera program when its host participated in an Occupy protest.

This week’s hearing comes after months of GOP House committee hearings on campus antisemitism, in which leaders of universities (and even city K–12 schools) have been repeatedly hauled before Congress to explain why they aren’t clamping down harder on freedom of speech and assembly. Disturbingly, the committee investigating NPR has demanded that NPR CEO Katherine Maher document and report the partisan affiliations of all news media staff of the past five years, as well as all board members.

As always, these attacks are very useful in dampening critical public media coverage of even extreme right-wing rhetoric and actions. During Trump’s presidency, for instance, NPR refused to call Trump’s lies “lies” (FAIR.org, 1/26/17, 3/1/17) and uncritically used far-right think tanks to defend him (FAIR.org, 2/7/17).

It’s because of public broadcasting’s serious vulnerability to both political and corporate pressure that FAIR has long argued (e.g., Extra!, 9–10/05; FAIR.org, 2/18/11) that we need truly independent public media—public media that don’t take corporate money, or have corporate leadership, and that don’t have to appease political partisans.

In the meantime, it’s critical that NPR stand up to the GOP’s McCarthyism and refuse to accept federal funds when they come with political strings attached.

Featured image: NPR‘s DC headquarters (Creative Commons photo: Todd Huffman).

The post GOP Grilling NPR Is a Tired Ritual That Needs to Be Rejected appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

Uri Berliner (Free Press, 4/9/24) blamed what he saw as NPR‘s problems on the way that “race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

“I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” reads the headline of a recent essay in the Free Press (4/9/24), a Substack-hosted outlet published by former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss. The author, senior NPR business editor Uri Berliner, argued that the broadcaster’s “progressive worldview” was compromising its journalism and alienating conservatives, including Berliner himself—who subsequently resigned.

Berliner’s screed was the latest instance of a trend in which legacy-media staffers publicly grouse that their workplaces are overrun by left-wing firebrands. Former New York Times assistant opinion editor Adam Rubenstein recently did so in the Atlantic (2/26/24). Two months before that, James Bennet, previously the editorial page editor at the Times, spent 16,000 words lamenting that the Times had “lost its way” in the Economist’s 1843 supplement (12/24/23).

Readers were invited to view these critics as brave iconoclasts at odds with the radical doctrines of their former employers. But the records of NPR and the New York Times show just how misleading this characterization is.

Right-wing embrace

The tirades shared several themes, including resentment of the 2020 protests against police violence following the murder of George Floyd. Rather than letting “evidence lead the way,” Berliner complained that NPR management “declared loud and clear” that “America’s infestation with systemic racism…was a given.” He rebuked NPR for supposedly “justifying looting” in relation to the demonstrations, citing an interview (8/27/20) with In Defense of Looting author Vicky Osterweil. Conveniently, Berliner didn’t note NPR’s repeated scolding of looters (6/2/20, 8/11/20, 10/28/20) before and after that interview.

Adam Rubenstein (Atlantic, 2/26/24) presents his career at the New York Times—where he was hired to seek out “expressly conservative views” because he had “contacts on the political right”—as evidence of the paper’s left-wing bias.

Both Rubenstein and Bennet condemned the Times’ handling of an op-ed (6/3/20) by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) that they took part in publishing. Appearing during the uprisings, the op-ed called for the deployment of the military to suppress protests. (In Bennet’s view, Cotton wanted to “protect lives and businesses from rioters.”) After much reader—and staffer—outrage at the bald incitement of racist violence, the Times appended a note stating regret over the piece, and both editors left the newspaper.

Embittered by the Times’ response, neither Rubenstein nor Bennet paused to consider that a paper that had not only commissioned a fascistic op-ed by a neocon senator, but had published that same senator multiple times before—in one case, to celebrate the Trump-ordered assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani (1/10/20)—might not be beholden to the left.

Bennet also complained that the Times was “slow” to report that “Trump might be right that Covid came from a Chinese lab”—which is true; the Times‘ coverage of the lab leak theory in 2020 was decidedly (and appropriately) skeptical (2/17/20, 4/30/20, 5/3/20; see FAIR.org, 10/6/20). The paper did eventually jump on the bandwagon of the evidence-free conspiracy theory, with David Leonhardt promoting it in his popular Morning newsletter (5/27/21).

James Bennet (1843, 12/24/23) blames the rise of Trump on journalists’ forfeiting “their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas”—which is odd, because his argument is that journalists shouldn’t arbitrate truth or broker ideas.

Berliner, too, took umbrage at his employer’s treatment of the lab theory:

We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

But NPR did budge. An episode of Morning Edition (2/27/23) featuring Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Gordon promoted the Energy Department’s admittedly shaky assertion, lending credence to a hypothesis informed far more by anti-China demagoguery than by scientific evidence (FAIR.org, 6/28/21, 4/7/23). This wasn’t the first time NPR had advanced the theory: In a 2021 segment of Morning Edition (6/3/21), media correspondent David Folkenflik suggested that news organizations publicizing the lab-leak claim were “listen[ing] closely.”

‘Good terms with people in power’

Alicia Montgomery (Slate, 4/16/24) diagnosed NPR‘s actual problem: “NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity.”

The perceived lack of lab-leak coverage was one of many examples Berliner cited to make the case that NPR sought to “damage or topple Trump’s presidency.” Yet, as NPR alum Alicia Montgomery wrote for Slate (4/16/24):

I saw NO trace of the anti-Trump editorial machine that Uri references. On the contrary, people were at pains to find a way to cover Trump’s voters and his administration fairly. We went full-bore on “diner guy in a trucker hat” coverage and adopted the “alt-right” label to describe people who could accurately be called racists. The network had a reflexive need to stay on good terms with people in power, and journalists who had contacts within the administration were encouraged to pursue those bookings.

Contrary to Berliner’s allegations, Montgomery noted that staffers were “encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” When a colleague “asked what to do if one candidate just lied more than the other,” they were met with silence.

On the subject of Israel and Palestine, Berliner condemned what he perceived as NPR’s “oppressor versus oppressed” framing. Rubenstein, meanwhile, remarked that a colleague once told him, “The state of Israel makes me very uncomfortable.” It’s possible that a New York Times journalist said this, even if Rubenstein’s anecdotes elicited skepticism. But the coverage of the Times, and of NPR, contradict this sentiment.

Indeed, it’s hard to believe that media platforms resemble, in Rubenstein’s words, “young progressives on college campuses,” when they soften Israeli militarism through human-interest stories (NPR, 12/27/23; FAIR.org, 1/25/24), deem Israeli sources more worthy than Palestinian ones (FAIR.org, 11/3/23) and discourage the use of words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” to refer to Israel’s Gaza assault (Intercept, 4/15/24; FAIR.org, 4/18/24).

Warmly welcomed rebukes 

Politico (12/14/23) accepted Bennet’s depiction of a struggle at the Times between “traditional journalistic values like fairness, pluralism and political independence,” and “the ideological whims of the paper’s younger, left-leaning staffers.”

Undermining the self-assigned pariah status of Berliner, Rubenstein and Bennet, corporate media have normalized, even endorsed, the authors’ polemics.

The New York Times (4/11/24) reported that NPR had been “accused of liberal bias”—the word “accused” implying that insufficient appeal to the far right was a misdeed. The Chicago Tribune’s editorial board (4/14/24) called Berliner’s essay “nuanced and thoughtful,” and commended his “courage” in adopting what the Tribune considered a dissident stance among news organizations. Berliner offered “good lessons for all news organizations,” the paper concluded.

A month prior, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait (3/1/24) defended Rubenstein’s rant, breezing past its disdain for racial justice activists to insist on the veracity of a detail about a Chick-Fil-A sandwich. Chait wrapped the piece with a grumble about the “left-wing media criticism” that dared to doubt Rubenstein; right-wing media criticism, of course, was safely in Chait’s good graces.

The day 1843 published Bennet’s harangue, Politico (12/14/23) ran a splashy profile portraying Bennet as the victim of left-wing tyranny. The publication described Bennet as “armed” with damning email correspondence and verbatim quotations from the end of his tenure at the Times, depicting him as a lone soldier battling those who “pushed the paper to elevate liberal viewpoints and shun conservative perspectives.”

The real heretics

Criticism from the left is something the New York Times won’t tolerate (New York Post, 2/16/23).

NPR and the Times themselves, while articulating some disagreement with their critics, largely accepted those critics’ premises. In an internal email, NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin indulged Berliner’s demands to appeal to the right, stressing the need to serve “all audiences” and “[break] down the silos.” (NPR staffers have since written an internal letter urging a more forceful defense of the outlet.) Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s response to Bennet sympathized further, presenting a rightward shift as a point of pride: “Today we have a far more diverse mix of opinions, including more conservative and heterodox voices, than ever before.”

The New York Times’ message stands in stark contrast to one it sent not long before. In February 2023, over 1,200 Times contributors signed an open letter expressing alarm about the paper’s demeaning coverage of transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people, noting that three Times articles had been referenced as justification in anti-trans legislation. Rather than taking these concerns into consideration, or even recognizing their legitimacy, the paper declared it was “proud of its coverage.” Sulzberger went on to exalt said reportage as “true” and “important” (FAIR.org, 5/19/23).

In this media milieu—in which it’s more acceptable to support reactionaries in power than the people whose lives they attempt to destroy—the real “heretics” prove not to be those issuing critiques from the right, but from the left.

The post Right-Wing Critiques Miscast NPR, NYT as Lefty Bastions appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julianne Tveten.

NPR (9/10/23) describes correspondent Eyder Peralta as “the first foreign journalist to make it into the country in more than a year,” which would come as a surprise to numerous independent foreign journalists.

NPR began its report “A Rare Look Inside Locked-Down Nicaragua” (9/10/23) with the demonstrably false claim that Nicaragua has “kept all foreign journalists out for more than a year.” This led into a harrowing story of how its reporter arrived in Nicaragua…and reported without incident.

In 2023 alone, numerous foreign journalists from press outlets from all parts of the world have reported from Nicaragua. Broadcast outlets based in the United States, China, Russia, Iran and around Latin America have regularly filed reports in both English and Spanish. Independent reporters from the United States, Canada and Britain have reported in outlets such as the Morning Star, Rabble and Black Agenda Report.

Most of the international journalists who have reported from Nicaragua in recent years have not been openly biased against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, which perhaps disqualifies them as reporters in NPR‘s eyes. But the Associated Press, whose main correspondent for Nicaragua, Gabriela Selser, calls its government “a perverse and cruel system that exceeds all limits” (Pledge Times, 6/23/23), has published at least two stories bylined Managua this year (2/11/23, 3/12/23), though most of Selser’s Nicaragua reporting seems to be done from Mexico City. (Selser, who previously held both Nicaraguan and Argentine passports, had her Nicaraguan passport revoked by Managua.)

Steve Sweeney, former international editor of Morning Star, was prevented from reporting on the Nicaraguan presidential election in 2021—not by Managua, but by the United States and Mexico. It’s not clear that his blocked travel was connected with his attempt to cover the election—Sweeney was not given an explanation for the denial of transit—but at the least his exclusion suggests that the US government has priorities higher than allowing journalists to travel freely to do their jobs.

Ayesha Rascoe, host of NPR’s Sunday Story, nevertheless said the Sandinista government of Nicaragua “has basically banned foreign journalists,” reiterating this claim on social media. Throughout the 39-minute podcast, Rascoe and correspondent Eyder Peralta didn’t name the foreign journalists who had been barred from entering, despite their emphasis on the claim.

Covid-19 entry requirements came into effect with heightened travel regulations in 2021–22, and slowed travel for all purposes to Nicaragua. A Washington Post correspondent (11/5/21) said she was unable to board her flight to Nicaragua from Mexico, after the airline informed her that she did not appear on the list provided by Nicaraguan authorities of passengers who had been approved for travel.

Similar experiences were reported by travelers who had inadequately followed the new pre-travel procedure. Nicaraguan health authorities strictly enforced the Covid-19 test requirement and even withheld approval, causing travelers to submit new tests with correct specifications and reschedule flights.

Getting in

NPR (9/14/23) complains of a speech by President Daniel Ortega, “only a select group of people were invited to hear the president’s speech in person”—in apparent contrast to free countries, where all presidential addresses are always open to the public.

Peralta recounted his entry through a “remote” border crossing from Honduras, where he got through the immigration checkpoint within “maybe five minutes” and entered Nicaragua: “And that was it. I was in. I was about to walk into one of the most authoritarian countries in the world, and I didn’t get asked a single question.” To his surprise, he found that “everything points to normal…. People are out shopping. They’re going to work, to school. On the Saturday that I was there, the bars were packed!”

Peralta—who at one point described at length his own family’s souring on the Sandinista movement and consequent flight from the country in the 1980s—clearly came in with preconceived notions of what he would find. Barring his own paranoia and his references to the Soviet Union, nothing about his actual experiences offered evidence of authoritarianism.

Life in what NPR (9/14/23) dubbed “a country steeped in fear” is in fact quite similar to other countries of the region that I’ve visited. Young people crammed into arenas to see popular Latino musical artists Christian Nodal, Camilo Echeverry and Olga Tañón in recent months. Bars and nightclubs are popular destinations for students and young people on weekends around the country, as are neighborhood block parties.

Nevertheless, NPR referred to the country as a “dictatorship” five times, “authoritarian” five times and, in the spirit of anti-Communism, linked it to the Soviet Union three times.

“Fear runs so deep that even the president and vice president don’t trust their countrymen enough to hold a real public rally,” Peralta reported. Peralta seemed to base this claim on the very basic security measures taken around the perimeter of a stadium on July 19 in preparation for the official act to commemorate the 44th anniversary of the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution. “Suddenly, a city that had seemed normal now has police officers on every corner,” Peralta dramatically related. He described “checkpoints” around the stadium and told listeners: “It becomes clear that only a select group of people are invited to hear the president’s speech.”

His dire portrayal of an event that he did not attend—but which I did—seemed to falsely suggest that only in an authoritarian country would an event with high-level officials and foreign government representatives have guestlists and other security measures in place.

Contrary to the claim that President Daniel Ortega is unable to hold “real” public events, he presided over multiple public events in the past few weeks, including a police parade, a military parade and a Central American Independence Day parade, which were held in the center of Managua with the attendance of the public. The open events were promoted in advance by major outlets like Canal 6.

The sources

NPR (9/14/23) depicted “supporters…of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega” in a photograph—but did not seem to think it journalistically to speak with any of them.

Though the segment ran 39 minutes long, it didn’t manage to interview a single supporter of the Nicaraguan government. The report relied heavily on perspectives from the exterior, despite the emphasis NPR put on Peralta’s travel to Nicaragua. Peralta interviewed three sources in the United States: an anonymous State Department official; Carolina Jiménez Sandoval of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA); and Félix Maradiaga, a former prisoner now released to the United States, who declared he “had always been anti-Sandinista and anti-socialist.”

Maradiaga was convicted of inciting foreign interference against Nicaragua’s sovereignty; he had appeared before a US congressional subcommittee in June to seek support for overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. His wife, Berta Valle, who is also Nicaraguan, was part of self-styled Venezuelan “president” Juan Guaidó’s delegation to Joe Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” in 2021.

A FAIR report (6/4/20) called WOLA “the Western media’s go-to source for confirming the US elite’s regime change groupthink.” Jiménez Sandoval is WOLA’s president, and her bio touts her record of  “addressing grave crimes under international law in Venezuela and Nicaragua.”

In Nicaragua, the only sources given airtime were located in Masaya, which saw a concentration of violence during the destabilizing protests of 2018. One was a woman Peralta described as “one of the organizers” of 2018 protests there; the other was a hospital employee who, among other things, talked about the lack of supplies at the hospital, and how he is “expected to stay quiet” about them. He also said that “the economic situation is tough.” Neither he nor Peralta offer the crucial context of US sanctions on Nicaragua that are precisely intended to worsen the economic situation.

Despite being in Masaya, Peralta’s report managed to omit the stories of victims whose lives were forever changed, such as Reynaldo Urbina, whom I interviewed, among many others.

No pro-government sources were featured or even mentioned in the NPR segment, aside from two short soundbites of public speeches from President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo.

The piece aired two days after affluent opposition figure Gioconda Belli, who since 1990 has lived in the United States and, more recently, Spain, took to NPR’s airwaves on Latino USA. She and other opposition celebrities have been featured in spreads in Western corporate media, which has platformed several former allies of the Sandinistas’ FSLN party; the party’s more than 2 million members and leadership have not gotten similar exposure.

Belli broke with the FSLN in the 1980s, around the same time that she married NPR‘s Central America correspondent. A member of WOLA’s Honorary Council, she has been interviewed numerous times on NPR since the early ’90s, and is frequently referred to as a leftist when she’s criticizing the governments of Cuba and Venezuela.

Confirmation bias

NicaNotes (3/23/23) published the open letter to the UN Human Rights Council, along with photos of buildings said to have been set on fire by the opposition.

In his 15 years with NPR, Peralta was based in Africa before specializing in Latin America. At the height of the corporate media’s interest in Venezuela, as the Trump administration was tightening sanctions and threatening military intervention, Peralta sought interviews with opponents of the government rather than supporters. Following NPR’s airing of his latest report, he sat down for an interview with the Nicaraguan opposition outlet Confidencial, run by Carlos Chamorro, the son of Nicaragua’s neoliberal former President Violeta Chamorro.

Peralta had previously framed arrests and convictions as a “crackdown” on “political opponents” and dissent, without reference to the charges brought against them based on the country’s laws. The reporting downplays the armed attacks carried out in 2018, and the crimes of money laundering and treason committed by individuals who received large sums of money from the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID. These entities poured money into Nicaraguan NGOs after President Daniel Ortega was voted back into office in 2007, with the specific aim of training people to oppose his government and create the conditions for regime change (FAIR.org, 6/16/22).

The accusations of a “political crisis” and “constant turmoil” echo claims made in an update from the UN high commissioner for Human Rights that was presented before the UN Human Rights Council on September 12.

Professor Alfred de Zayas, a former UN independent expert on international order, objected to a similar UN report on Nicaragua released in March, as the lead signer of a statement that called the report “fatally flawed.” De Zayas and other critics called the human rights report “biased” and an “abuse of the UN system,” saying it

completely fails to address the enormous damage done to ordinary people, businesses, and public services by violent protesters in 2018, perpetuating a gross injustice against the human rights of thousands of Nicaraguans.

What’s missing

An account in MR Online (7/15/23) describes how violent opposition tactics eroded support for the opposition, as anti-government roadblocks “not only strangled the country’s transport system but became the scene of intimidation, robberies, rape, kidnappings and murder.”

NPR‘s report omits two important issues in understanding Nicaragua today. First, violent protests in 2018, funded by the US in an effort to overthrow the government, killed a large number of innocent civilians and police. The majority of the arrests and charges that were widely reported by corporate press during and following 2018 were either directly related to acts of violence carried out during the months of terror, or to  subsequent investigations that revealed the foreign financing of the anti-government riots. As is standard in US establishment media, NPR showed no interest in the victims of the violent coup efforts, only in the plight of the people who were punished for allegedly instigating them.

Second, as mentioned above, coercive sanctions have been rolled out by the US, Canada and the EU in recent years. The latest US sanctions bill currently before Congress would extend the US government’s ability to impose economic punishment until 2028. Such sanctions were the subject of protest in the Havana Declaration of the G77 + China Summit, for their “devastating impacts on the realization of human rights, including the right to development and the right to food.”

At the end of Peralta’s report, back in the studio, he told host Ayesha Rascoe that the government has “closed the Jesuit University in Managua,” without mentioning that it was being reopened as a public and tuition-free institution. Classes are set to commence soon at the recently nationalized Casimiro Sotelo University, in a country whose hallmark policy since the Sandinistas returned to office in 2007 has been expansion of access to and improvement of public education at all levels.

The post NPR Falsely Claims Its Reporter Is the Only One to Visit Nicaragua appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Camila Escalante.

In its fundraising promotions, NPR touts shows like Morning Edition as providing listeners a “deeper look” at complicated stories.

Sometimes that is the case, but not this month, in its coverage of an announced decision by the Biden administration to further escalate the violence in Ukraine by supplying that country’s military with controversial depleted uranium (DU) anti-tank shells. Morning Edition (9/8/23) glossed over the reason many nations consider their use an atrocity. In fact, many commercial news organizations did a much better job in reporting in depth on this story.

‘Not nuclear or radioactive’

NPR‘s one source for its story (9/8/23) on depleted uranium (DU) munitions falsely assured listeners that “these are not…radioactive weapons.”

Morning Edition co-host Leila Fadel had one source for the three-and-half-minute report: Togzhan Kassenova, a senior research fellow at SUNY Albany’s Center for Policy Research, whom she introduced as “an expert on nuclear politics.” (The Center describes itself as having “a long and notable history of managing and implementing grants and sponsored programs for the government of the United States, including projects for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Naval Research.”)

Kassenova, responding to questions from Fadel, misrepresented what DU is and what its risks are when used in battle. “Anti-tank rounds with depleted uranium are not nuclear or radioactive,” she claimed, adding without any further detail that “there are some safety implications that need to be kept in mind.”

In fact, as the US Environmental Protection Agency’s website explains, “Like the natural uranium ore, DU is radioactive.” DU is a mix of U-238 and some other, rarer uranium isotopes that are left after the fissionable U-235 used in nuclear bombs and as reactor fuel has been refined out. All uranium isotopes are significant releasers of alpha particles as they decay; in other words, they’re radioactive. These low-energy but relatively large particles, not even mentioned by Kassenova, are essentially helium nuclei, composed of two protons and two neutrons. They can do serious cellular and genetic damage when uranium dust is ingested or inhaled.

Fadel didn’t question her guest’s effort to minimize the risk posed by uranium projectiles, though even the most cursory attempt to research the issue would have disclosed these problems.

‘A serious health risk’

The EPA’s website warns that “if DU is ingested or inhaled, it is a serious health hazard.”

Pentagon apologists for DU weapons typically note that alpha particles are so low-energy they “fail to penetrate the dead layers of cells covering the skin, and can be easily stopped by a sheet of paper.” True enough, but when introduced into the body, where the tiny alpha-particle-emitting particles can become lodged in lung or kidney tissue, they prove to be quite good at killing or damaging adjacent cells.

Critics of DU weapons, whom Fadel only mentioned in passing, explain that it’s not the shiny uranium tip of a DU shell that poses a risk. The risk comes when that shell penetrates tank armor and explodes in the interior at a searing temperature of over 2,000 degrees, reducing the entire vehicle and the soldiers in it to cinders. At that point, the uranium has become uranium oxide dust, and that radioactive dust blankets the target and a wide surrounding area. Given that its constituent isotopes have half-lives ranging from 170,000 to 4.5 billion years, the DU residue will effectively remain there forever, until blown, washed or carted away, or until it migrates down into the water table.

Had Fadel bothered to check with the EPA, instead of just adopting the Pentagon’s self-serving line that DU is no big deal as far as radiation risk is concerned, she’d have learned that the agency’s website states: “If DU is ingested or inhaled it is a serious health risk. Alpha particles directly affect living cells and can cause kidney damage.”

Competitors more complete

Popular Science (9/8/23): “While depleted uranium poses some risk from radiation if ingested, the primary harms come from it being a heavy metal absorbed into a human digestive, circulatory or respiratory system.”

One-source reports on a controversial story like this one—where there is a long-running dispute about the use of a weapon—are lazy journalism, especially for a news organization that touts itself as providing more “depth” in its reports than its more openly commercial competition. (NPR gets 39% of its funding from corporate sponsorship, so it’s a stretch to call it “noncommercial.”)

Some of those competitors, in fact, ran more complete stories on the DU decision than Morning Edition did. The magazine Popular Science (9/8/23), for example, mentioned the EPA’s warnings about DU, even including a link to the agency’s article.

So did Associated Press (9/6/23) in an article by Tara Copp, at least when her article initially appeared on September 6. Unfortunately, Copp said she cut that paragraph in later revisions to make room for other background about DU.

The story by Copp, a former Pentagon correspondent, nonetheless stands out in corporate media coverage, providing a detailed account of where the US has been using DU weapons since Cold War days when the metal was first put into anti-tank shells and some rocket warheads.

She also mentioned reports of deaths, cancer and upsurges in birth defects that have sprung up in places where such weapons have been used in quantity. This information was left out of many other pieces on the Biden decision, including the one run by NPR.

Copp quoted a Russian source, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, who called  the US decision to supply depleted uranium ammunition to Ukraine “very bad news,” and said its use by the US in the former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Kosovo) had produced “a galloping rise” in cancers and other illnesses. “The same situation will inevitably await the Ukrainian territories where they will be used,” he added. (His points are backed up by reports in the Lancet—7/8/21—and Declassified UK: 7/13/23.)

Copp followed these claims with Pentagon denials about DU health risks. Its flacks for decades have denied that there is any evidence that the uranium oxide produced by DU weapons when exploded and burned pose cancer or birth-defect risks in impacted communities or among US troops. Given the history of misinformation from US government sources about US military atrocities over the years, it’s bracing to see a Russian source included in a US-based news article, even if that source might not be very convincing to US readers in the current political environment.

While there’s not enough evidence to draw ironclad conclusions, what’s available points to Peskov’s claims about Yugoslavia being at least arguable. Moreover, a 2013 article in Al Jazeera (3/15/13) by US journalist Dahr Jamail, based on data provided by the Iraqi government health department, showed that in Fallujah, where an all-out US destruction of that city of 200,000 people included significant use of DU shells, the cancer rate in Iraq before the two wars on Iraq had been 40 per 100,000, but jumped to 1,600 per 100,000 by 2005.

As Copp also noted, “US troops have questioned whether some of the ailments they now face [such as Gulf War Syndrome] were caused by inhaling or being exposed to fragments after a munition was fired or their tanks were struck, damaging uranium-enhanced armor.”

‘Adds to environmental burden’

Citing the UN Environment Program, the Wall Street Journal (6/13/23) reported that “the metal’s ‘chemical toxicity’ presents the greatest potential danger, and ‘it can cause skin irritation, kidney failure and increase the risks of cancer.'”

In a September 6 article reporting on the Ukraine DU decision, written by Andrew Kramer and Constant Méheut, the New York Times acknowledged some controversy, saying, “Some advocates have expressed concerns that prolonged exposure could cause illness, or that spent ammunition could cause environmental contamination.” However, it dismissively concluded, “The Pentagon says those fears are unfounded.”

The Washington Post’s September 7 article on the depleted uranium weapons, by Adam Taylor, gave a voice to those “activists,” quoting a statement from the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons that called the US decision “self-destructive and deceptive.” The organization added that the new anti-tank weapon “adds to the war-related environmental burden of Ukraine, damaging its legal integrity as victim of aggression and illegal attacks.”

The Wall Street Journal, in a June 13 article disclosing the US was about to approve depleted uranium shells for delivery to Ukraine’s military, highlighted health and environmental concerns in its subhead: “The armor-piercing ammunition has raised concerns over health and environmental effects.”

Meanwhile, while Morning Edition host Fadel deserves a raspberry for her one-source, one-sided piece, her guest, research fellow Kassenova, at least should get credit for honesty in stating where her priorities lie. Asked by Fadel what her position was on the US provision of DU weapons, she said:

It is an important practical and symbolic action of support. Ukraine is losing people—both military and civilian—every day. So I think whatever can happen right now should be provided to the extent possible. So I am in support of the provision of these weapons.

Efforts by phone and email to obtain comments from NPR’s Fadel and from the University of Albany’s Kassenova went unanswered.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR‘s public editor here (or via Twitter: @NPRpubliceditor). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

The post NPR Report on Depleted Uranium Shells for Ukraine Was a One-Source Dud  appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Dave Lindorff.

NPR (4/5/23) rebuked the label, and major media rushed to the public broadcaster’s defense. “Twitter Slaps NPR With a Dubious New Tag: ‘State-Affiliated Media,’” read a Washington Post headline (4/5/23). Vanity Fair (4/5/23) lambasted the “false equivalence between NPR and state propaganda agencies.” CBS News (4/5/23), AP (4/5/23) and CNN (4/5/23) emphatically quoted NPR’s self-description as a purveyor of “independent, fact-based journalism.” The New York Times (4/5/23) offered an oblique criticism of Twitter’s labeling schemes under Musk as “unevenly enforced.”

The issue soon reached the White House. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre avowed in a briefing (Forbes, 4/5/23) that “there’s no doubt of the independence of NPR’s journalists.” Reading from a script, Jean-Pierre continued: “NPR journalists work diligently to hold public officials accountable and inform the American people.”

All are right to impugn the whims of Musk, who, to all appearances, harbors a personal animus against NPR. Still, the outrage against Twitter’s policy is highly selective.

Double standards

Twitter introduced the “state-affiliated media” tag in August 2020, defining “state-affiliated media” as

outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.

This would have measurable effects on tagged media. As Twitter explained in August 2020:

We will also no longer amplify state-affiliated media accounts or their Tweets through our recommendation systems, including on the home timeline, notifications and search.

Subsequently, Chinese accounts with the “state-affiliated media” label “saw drops of over 20% per tweet” (Hong Kong Free Press, 1/21/21), while Twitter boasted that marked Russian accounts lost up to 30% of their circulation.

This was hardly unforeseeable. Yet leading US and UK media, far from their reproachful stances of recent days, offered little to no objection to Twitter’s initial labeling rubric. While Reuters (8/6/20) quoted one Russian official’s critique, CNN (8/6/20), Axios (8/6/20) and others saw no need to include the perspectives of impacted outlets and countries in their reporting, nor to underscore the blatant double standard. And, rather than condemn the policies as “unevenly enforced,” the New York Times didn’t publish the news at all. After all, Twitter’s algorithm was now further skewed in these outlets’ favor.

Thin defenses

The 1% figure reverberated throughout major media outlets, and prominent US journalists took to Twitter to cite the number as evidence that NPR was not “state-affiliated.” (Technically, the statistic is accurate, though a bit cherry-picked; on its website, NPR confirms the 1% figure, but states that its member stations, which contribute heavily to NPR’s operating budget, received a total of 13% of funding from federal, state and local governments in fiscal year 2020.)

One might wonder, though, how an organization can receive federal funding, even if a comparatively modest amount, and not be “state-affiliated.” One might also wonder whether these journalists would apply the same logic to an Iranian, Chinese or Russian outlet receiving the same portion of federal funding as NPR.

Moreover, contrary to NPR’s argument, a low federal funding total hardly proves “editorial independence.” Regardless of its financial breakdown, NPR’s body of reporting shows that the broadcaster is exactly the “mouthpiece” and “propaganda outlet” it so indignantly claims not to be.

State (and corporate) affiliations

Over the years, FAIR and other media critics have catalogued dozens of instances of NPR’s advancement of official state narratives.

In the early 1980s, under pressure from the Reagan administration, NPR gave a jingoistic slant to its coverage of the US’s war against Nicaragua, reassigning reporters who were “too easy on the Sandinistas,” and hiring a right-wing pundit, as Greg Grandin wrote in his 2007 book Empire’s Workshop.

But the broadcaster needed “no state coercion to toe Washington’s regime change line on Venezuela” (FAIR.org, 8/5/19) when it omitted mentions of devastating US sanctions in order to blame the country’s economic woes on “authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro,” and exalt US puppet and former self-declared president of Venezuela Juan Guaidó (NPR, 5/30/19). (Never mind that Maduro was democratically elected.)

And NPR has no problem explicitly endorsing the US’s economic system. Ira Glass, host of NPR program This American Life, declared in 2015: “I think we’re ready for capitalism, which made this country so great. Public radio is ready for capitalism.”

If, say, a Cuban radio-show host beamed that “socialism” made Cuba “so great,” it would be hard to imagine the New York Times and company publishing fervent defenses of the associated broadcaster’s editorial independence.

Additionally, even when it’s not advancing official US narratives directly, NPR should raise eyebrows for its reliance on another, much greater, source of funding: corporations.

In 2022, NPR projected corporate sponsorship to be its largest source of revenue, providing nearly 42% of its income (Current, 11/30/22). And NPR’s corporate funders as of 2021 include a number of entities that often workintandem with US intelligence agencies: Amazon, Facebook and Google, to name a very small fraction. To suggest that the broadcaster could be “editorially independent” simply because of minimal public funding—with no accounting for corporate influence—is misleading at best.

Right move, wrong reasons

Were Twitter genuinely interested in educating the public about the influence of power on media, it might not award government-funded US and US-friendly publications their own label, separate from that attached to Official Enemies.

And it might account for the fact that the Washington Post’s and New York Times’ records of parroting US officials (Extra!, 3/14; FAIR.org, 5/24/19) should qualify those newspapers, too, as “state-affiliated media.”

It very likely won’t. Twitter’s decision to call attention to Western government–funded outlets is valid. But it’s also nothing more than a product of arbitrary, petty far-right grievance politics, curtailed only by the self-serving demands of corporate news outlets—the last thing that a true reckoning with the ideology of major US media needs.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julianne Tveten.

NPR on Wednesday announced plans to leave Twitter—the social media platform now owned by billionaire Elon Musk—after being branded last week with a "state-affiliated media" label that, after backlash, was replaced with "government-funded media."

"NPR's organizational accounts will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent," the media organization said in a statement.

"We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public's understanding of our editorial independence," the statement added. "We are turning away from Twitter but not from our audiences and communities. There are plenty of ways to stay connected and keep up with NPR's news, music, and cultural content."

After the platform's initial decision last week, NPR president and CEO John Lansing said that "we were disturbed to see... that Twitter has labeled NPR as 'state-affiliated media,' a description that, per Twitter's own guidelines, does not apply to NPR."

Others also criticized applying that specific label to NPR—including Liz Woolery, PEN America's digital policy leader, who called it "a dangerous move that could further undermine public confidence in reliable news sources."

In an email exchange, an NPR reporter informed Musk that—like other U.S. public media—only about 1% of NPR's budget comes from the government, while about 40% is from corporate sponsors and 31% is from local stations' programming fees.

Musk reportedly wrote to the journalist that "the operating principle at new Twitter is simply fair and equal treatment, so if we label non-U.S. accounts as [government], then we should do the same for U.S., but it sounds like that might not be accurate here."

Twitter then updated the label on NPR's main account—which has 8.8 million followers—to government-affiliated, a label that has also been applied to the BBC, which has disputed the platform's decision.

"The BBC operates through a Royal Charter agreed with the U.K. government, which states the corporation 'must be independent,'" the British outlet explained Wednesday. "Its public service output is funded by U.K. households via a TV license fee, as well as income from commercial operations."

In a wide-ranging Tuesday interview with the BBC, Musk said: "We want [the tag] as truthful and accurate as possible. We're adjusting the label to [the BBC being] publicly funded. We'll try to be accurate."

Since Musk finalized his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October, when he was the world's richest man, "it has been quite a rollercoaster," Musk admitted to the BBC. "It's been really quite a stressful situation."

The billionaire has come under fire for various platform policy and business decisions, from suspending journalists reporting on the movements of his private jet to laying off Twitter staff. While there was an initial exodus of advertisers, Musk said Tuesday that "I think almost all advertisers have come back or said they are going to come back."

However, the battle over how or even whether to label publicly funded media and NPR's decision to become the first major media outlet to ditch Twitter have some users, such as the U.S.-based advocacy group Free Press, asking, "Should we all join them?"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

The Washington Post (4/5/23) questioned “the unsavory suggestion that [NPR‘s] reporting is tainted.”

NPR (4/5/23) rebuked the label, and major media rushed to the public broadcaster’s defense. “Twitter Slaps NPR With a Dubious New Tag: ‘State-Affiliated Media,’” read a Washington Post headline (4/5/23). Vanity Fair (4/5/23) lambasted the “false equivalence between NPR and state propaganda agencies.” CBS News (4/5/23), AP (4/5/23) and CNN (4/5/23) emphatically quoted NPR’s self-description as a purveyor of “independent, fact-based journalism.” The New York Times (4/5/23) offered an oblique criticism of Twitter’s labeling schemes under Musk as “unevenly enforced.”

The issue soon reached the White House. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre avowed in a briefing (Forbes, 4/5/23) that “there’s no doubt of the independence of NPR’s journalists.” Reading from a script, Jean-Pierre continued: “NPR journalists work diligently to hold public officials accountable and inform the American people.”

All are right to impugn the whims of Musk, who, to all appearances, harbors a personal animus against NPR. Still, the outrage against Twitter’s policy is highly selective.

Double standards

Twitter introduced the “state-affiliated media” tag in August 2020, defining “state-affiliated media” as

outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.

Without being directly controlled by the state, CNN (8/6/20) knew not to quote the reaction of official enemies who were marginalized by Twitter.

The label disproportionately impacted countries the US deems adversarial, as numerous critics have observed, including Bryce Greene for FAIR (1/6/23). Upon implementing its labeling policy, Twitter identified platforms like Iran’s PressTV; Russia’s RT and Sputnik News; and China’s China Daily, Global Times, CGTN and China Xinhua News as “state-affiliated.” Meanwhile, legions of US and British media networks that met Twitter’s definition—among them the BBC, PBS, Voice of America and, of course, NPR—were spared the label on grounds of “editorial independence.”

This would have measurable effects on tagged media. As Twitter explained in August 2020:

We will also no longer amplify state-affiliated media accounts or their Tweets through our recommendation systems, including on the home timeline, notifications and search.

Subsequently, Chinese accounts with the “state-affiliated media” label “saw drops of over 20% per tweet” (Hong Kong Free Press, 1/21/21), while Twitter boasted that marked Russian accounts lost up to 30% of their circulation.

This was hardly unforeseeable. Yet leading US and UK media, far from their reproachful stances of recent days, offered little to no objection to Twitter’s initial labeling rubric. While Reuters (8/6/20) quoted one Russian official’s critique, CNN (8/6/20), Axios (8/6/20) and others saw no need to include the perspectives of impacted outlets and countries in their reporting, nor to underscore the blatant double standard. And, rather than condemn the policies as “unevenly enforced,” the New York Times didn’t publish the news at all. After all, Twitter’s algorithm was now further skewed in these outlets’ favor.

Thin defenses 

NPR (4/5/23) objected to being lumped in with “official state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets in countries such as Russia and China.”

In its response to Twitter, NPR (4/5/23) vehemently disagreed with the decision, arguing that the label would liken the organization to “official state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets in countries such as Russia and China.” The broadcaster insisted that it “gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources.”

The 1% figure reverberated throughout major media outlets, and prominent US journalists took to Twitter to cite the number as evidence that NPR was not “state-affiliated.” (Technically, the statistic is accurate, though a bit cherry-picked; on its website, NPR confirms the 1% figure, but states that its member stations, which contribute heavily to NPR’s operating budget, received a total of 13% of funding from federal, state and local governments in fiscal year 2020.)

One might wonder, though, how an organization can receive federal funding, even if a comparatively modest amount, and not be “state-affiliated.” One might also wonder whether these journalists would apply the same logic to an Iranian, Chinese or Russian outlet receiving the same portion of federal funding as NPR.

Moreover, contrary to NPR’s argument, a low federal funding total hardly proves “editorial independence.” Regardless of its financial breakdown, NPR’s body of reporting shows that the broadcaster is exactly the “mouthpiece” and “propaganda outlet” it so indignantly claims not to be.

State (and corporate) affiliations

Over the years, FAIR and other media critics have catalogued dozens of instances of NPR’s advancement of official state narratives.

In the early 1980s, under pressure from the Reagan administration, NPR gave a jingoistic slant to its coverage of the US’s war against Nicaragua, reassigning reporters who were “too easy on the Sandinistas,” and hiring a right-wing pundit, as Greg Grandin wrote in his 2007 book Empire’s Workshop.

But the broadcaster needed “no state coercion to toe Washington’s regime change line on Venezuela” (FAIR.org, 8/5/19) when it omitted mentions of devastating US sanctions in order to blame the country’s economic woes on “authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro,” and exalt US puppet and former self-declared president of Venezuela Juan Guaidó (NPR, 5/30/19). (Never mind that Maduro was democratically elected.)

NPR public editor Alicia Shepard (6/21/09) defended the use of euphemisms to describe torture committed by the US government, in part because “both presidents Bush and Obama have insisted that the United States does not use torture.”

NPR similarly echoed Washington when it ignored Seymour Hersh’s report that the US destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline, promoted baseless “Chinese spy balloon” conspiracy theories, minimized the US starvation of Afghan people after the US military’s withdrawal, obscured Israel’s ongoing violence against Palestinian people after journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s murder, and euphemized US-committed torture post-9/11. (This summary is far from exhaustive; four of these examples are from just the last ten months.)

And NPR has no problem explicitly endorsing the US’s economic system. Ira Glass, host of NPR program This American Life, declared in 2015: “I think we’re ready for capitalism, which made this country so great. Public radio is ready for capitalism.”

If, say, a Cuban radio-show host beamed that “socialism” made Cuba “so great,” it would be hard to imagine the New York Times and company publishing fervent defenses of the associated broadcaster’s editorial independence.

Additionally, even when it’s not advancing official US narratives directly, NPR should raise eyebrows for its reliance on another, much greater, source of funding: corporations.

In 2022, NPR projected corporate sponsorship to be its largest source of revenue, providing nearly 42% of its income (Current, 11/30/22). And NPR’s corporate funders as of 2021 include a number of entities that often work in tandem with US intelligence agencies: Amazon, Facebook and Google, to name a very small fraction. To suggest that the broadcaster could be “editorially independent” simply because of minimal public funding—with no accounting for corporate influence—is misleading at best.

Right move, wrong reasons

Tweets from NPR now bear the designation “government-funded media.”

Following media’s outcry, Twitter edited NPR’s label from “state-affiliated media” to “government funded,” then “government funded media,” and affixed these labels (in the same sequence) to other qualifying Western outlets, including the BBC, PBS and Voice of America. But this softer descriptor is still selectively applied: Outlets in Iran, China, Russia, Cuba and other official enemies didn’t receive this update.

Were Twitter genuinely interested in educating the public about the influence of power on media, it might not award government-funded US and US-friendly publications their own label, separate from that attached to Official Enemies.

And it might account for the fact that the Washington Post’s and New York Times’ records of parroting US officials (Extra!, 3/14; FAIR.org, 5/24/19) should qualify those newspapers, too, as “state-affiliated media.”

It very likely won’t. Twitter’s decision to call attention to Western government–funded outlets is valid. But it’s also nothing more than a product of arbitrary, petty far-right grievance politics, curtailed only by the self-serving demands of corporate news outlets—the last thing that a true reckoning with the ideology of major US media needs.

The post US Media Denounce Twitter’s ‘State Media’ Label—When It Affects NPR appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julianne Tveten.

The post NPR and the Bad Economy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

More than 50 years on, it's easy to wonder what went wrong with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the legislation that created public media as we've come to know it in the United States. Despite the popular understanding that a healthy democracy requires a free press, the U.S. Congress remains reluctant to offer public subsidies for any journalism that doesn't operate under the dictates of the commercial marketplace.

Nowhere is this more evident than in news from earlier this week that NPR plans to cut 10% of its staff to make up a budget shortfall of $30 million. The reason NPR's chief executive gives for the layoffs is not the routine failure of Congress to fund public radio journalism at the level it needs, but a "sharp decline in our revenues from corporate sponsors."

Say what?

"Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the United States impoverishes its public media infrastructures," writes professor Victor Pickard, co-director of the Media, Inequality, and Change Center at the University of Pennsylvania (and Free Press' board chair). This has left nominally public media outlets to fend for themselves in the marketplace. Outlets like NPR and PBS—as well as the many local stations affiliated with them—receive the "bulk of their funding in the form of private capital from individual contributors, foundations, and corporations," he adds.

The net effect of this private sector dependency is a public media system that is by definition not noncommercial. And that affects not just the future of journalism in the United States but our democracy as well.

The Public Broadcasting Act is very clear on the matter: It amends a section of the 1934 Communications Act by inserting the word "noncommercial" to describe the type of radio and television outlets that would receive public funding from the newly created Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

It's an insertion that underscores the act's goals: to set up a free and functional noncommercial media sector that could counterbalance the market-driven media that dominated the public sphere then as it dominates it now.

The poor antidote

The CPB was supposed to fund this antidote to profit-driven news and information. In the words of President Johnson, who signed the Public Broadcasting Act, this was about offering public support for media that serve "great and not the trivial purposes."

But such greatness is hard to achieve with Congress' paltry annual offering to the CPB: At $465 million in FY 2022, the public allocation boils down to a little more than $1.40 per capita in the United States. By comparison, the United Kingdom spends more than $81 per person, and France more than $75. Head further north and the numbers head north as well: Denmark's per-person spending is more than $93, Finland's more than $100, and Norway's more than $110. And it isn't just a European trend: Japan (+$53/capita) and South Korea (+$14) show their appreciation for publicly funded media at levels that put the U.S. outlay to shame.

This bleak math is all too familiar to those who follow public media policy in the United States. Lawmakers here continue to believe that publicly funded media should remain subordinate to its corporate counterpart—and that the work of journalism is best suited to the private sector.

That doesn't make sense. Commercial journalism has been in crisis for decades now, as popular news consumption habits have changed and advertisers have had to find new ways to reach these consumers—including ways that don't help fund the sorts of journalism democracies need to stay healthy. Between 2008 and 2020, more than 1,000 U.S. newspapers ceased printing, and the number of newspaper newsroom employees shrank by more than half.

As the commercial model for news production falters, the last thing we should be doing is funding public interest journalism at levels that force noncommercial outlets like NPR to mimic the for-profit news business. "Allowing our public media to become so dependent on advertising revenue (and other sources of private capital and 'enhanced underwriting') was always bad social policy," Pickard wrote in response to my online comments about NPR's current dilemma.

A 2021 study co-authored by Pickard and professor Timothy Neff of the University of Leicester finds that more robust funding for public media strengthens a given country's democracy—with increased public knowledge about civic affairs, more diverse media coverage, and lower levels of extremist views.

Conversely, the loss of quality local journalism and investigative reporting has far-reaching societal harms. Josh Stearns of the Democracy Fund (and a former Free Press staff member) has cataloged the growing body of evidence showing that declines in local news and information lead to drops in civic engagement. "The faltering of newspapers, the consolidation of TV and radio, and the rising power of social media platforms are not just commercial issues driven by the market," Stearns writes. "They are democratic issues with profound implications for our communities."

Innovations in noncommercial media are poised to help fill the massive local news-and-information gap that the collapse of market-driven news models has created. But these innovative outlets require help via local, state, and federal policies.

Global policies, local examples

As a start, Free Press Action has called for a quadrupling of public funds for noncommercial news and information. This kind of congressional commitment would recognize that depending on the private sector and emulating commercial models isn't a viable approach for the longevity of local news and information. To get there at the federal level, Free Press Action has proposed a new tax on digital advertising to fund the kinds of innovative news production that are now needed. A tax of 2% would generate more than $2 billion annually, enough to support new noncommercial media models, and lessen any dependence on corporate underwriters for revenue.

Dramatically increasing public investment in locally engaged reporting would help support the wide array of new nonprofit outlets that are focused on meeting the information needs of communities that commercial media too often ignore. Many of these new models are profiled in The Roadmap for Local News, an actionable plan to ensure that every U.S. community has access to necessary public interest news and information.

Co-authored by Elizabeth Green of Chalkbeat, Darryl Holliday of City Bureau, and Mike Rispoli of Free Press, The Roadmap expands journalism's forms into new and previously underserved communities while sharpening the definition of what it is for. It calls on lawmakers to cultivate and pass public policies that support the expansion of civic information while maintaining editorial independence.

In New Jersey, Free Press Action helped conceive and create the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, an independent nonprofit funded by a state budget appropriation. The consortium, whose board includes representatives from public colleges and universities across the state, supports inventive local news projects like the Newark News & Story Collaborative and the Bloomfield Information Project, which train local residents to report the news from their own perspectives.

In California, Free Press Action supported state legislation that dedicated $25 million to fund local reporting in underserved and underrepresented communities statewide. The money will be distributed through a fellowship program housed at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. (Free Press' Rispoli will serve on the program's Advisory Board).

More than 50 years after the Public Broadcasting Act, Free Press is also looking 50 years into the future. Through the work of the Media 2070 project, Free Press envisions ways the media can serve as levers for racial justice. This includes engaging policymakers in the repair and reconciliation needed to redress centuries of harm news outlets have inflicted on Black communities.

As NPR struggles to find the revenue to keep its reporters on their beats, it shouldn't see the problem as a failure to raise advertising revenue from corporate underwriters. It's a failure to advocate for policies that would increase the public funding it and other noncommercial media outlets need to thrive.

If we're serious about the future of journalism and civic information in the United States, we need to look locally for innovations in not-for-profit news production, and abroad for examples of more robust ways to fund it.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Tim Karr.

The post The Anti-Oliver: NPR Sandpapers FIFA and Qatar Human Rights Abuses appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Fred Baumgarten.

The post Why Real Artists Don’t Like Capitalism Or Identity Politics, And Other Things You’ll Never Hear On NPR appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Rovics.

NPR ran several stories on Afghanistan to mark the anniversary of the August 2021 US withdrawal, even sending host Steve Inskeep to the country to produce a series of pieces. His visit happened to coincide with Biden’s claimed assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri; Inskeep says that he and his team were staying in close proximity to the Al Qaeda leader.

With the anniversary and assassination providing a renewed focus on Afghanistan, NPR could have used this opportunity to call attention to the US policy of starving Afghanistan by restricting its international trade activity and seizing its central banking reserves. Instead, it briefly mentioned the catastrophe only one time, devoting a mere 30 seconds to it over two weeks. The reserve theft was mentioned once as well, and for less than 10 seconds.

Over the course of the series, between August 5 and August 19, 2022, NPR‘s two flagship shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, aired 18 Afghanistan segments, amounting to some 114 minutes of coverage:

• We Visited a Taliban Leader’s Compound to Examine His Vision for Afghanistan (Morning Edition, 8/5/22; 11 minutes)
• Ackerman’s ‘Fifth Act’ Focuses on the Final Week of US Involvement in Afghanistan (Morning Edition, 8/5/22; 7 minutes)
• Kabul’s Fall to the Taliban, One Year Later (All Things Considered, 8/8/22; 8 minutes)
• Hamid Karzai Stays On in Afghanistan—Hoping for the Best, but Unable to Leave (Morning Edition, 8/8/22; 8 minutes)
• Inside a TV News Station Determined to Report Facts in the Taliban’s Afghanistan (All Things Considered, 8/8/22; 7 minutes)
• In Afghanistan, Why Are Some Women Permitted to Work While Others Are Not? (Morning Edition, 8/8/22; 6 minutes)
• A US Marine’s View at the Kabul Airport When the Taliban Took Over (All Things Considered, 8/10/22; 8 minutes)
• A Marine Who Helped Lead Afghanistan Evacuations Reflects on Those Left Behind (All Things Considered, 8/11/22; 8 minutes)
• What Remains of the American University of Afghanistan? (Morning Edition, 8/11/22; 4 minutes)
• After Decades of War, an Afghan Village Mourns Its Losses (All Things Considered, 8/12/22; 4 minutes)
• Remembering the Day the Taliban Took Control of Afghanistan (All Things Considered, 8/14/22; 5 minutes)
• Biden’s Approval Ratings Haven’t Recovered Since the US Withdrawal in Afghanistan (All Things Considered, 8/15/22; 4 minutes)
• After a Year of Taliban Rule, Many Afghans Are Struggling to Survive (All Things Considered, 8/15/22; 5 minutes)
• What did Afghans Gain—and Lose—in a Region That Supported the Taliban? (Morning Edition, 8/15/22; 7 minutes)
• A Year After the Taliban Seized Power, What Is Life Like in Afghanistan Now? (Morning Edition, 8/15/22; 4 minutes)
• An Afghan Opposition Leader Builds on His Father’s Efforts to Oust the Taliban (Morning Edition, 8/17/22; 7 minutes)
• A Year Later, Former Afghanistan Education Minister Reflects on Her Country (All Things Considered, 8/18/22; 8 minutes)
• Canada Is Criticized for Not Getting More Endangered Afghans Into the Country (Morning Edition, 8/19/22; 3 minutes)

NPR focused almost no attention on the hunger crisis and the US role in exacerbating it. The series instead focused on a question that’s important, but far less relevant to NPR‘s US audience: “Who is included in the New Afghanistan?”

FAIR (8/9/22) has already criticized the initial piece (8/5/22) for the historical framing NPR used to contextualize the current situation in Afghanistan. Host Steve Inskeep misleadingly said that the Taliban refused to turn over Al Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden after 9/11, and this “led to the US attack.” In reality, the Taliban repeatedly offered to put Bin Laden on trial or give him up to a third country both before and after the attacks.

‘Tantamount to mass murder’

Afghanistan is currently enduring misery under the onslaught of drought, famine and economic collapse: 95% of Afghans don’t have enough to eat, while acute hunger has spread to half the population, an increase of 65% since last July. Conditions are so dire that some are being forced to boil grass to sustain themselves.

Throughout NPR’s series, which centers mostly on the “inclusivity” question, the dire toll on Afghan civilians was an afterthought. None of the above stats were mentioned on air, and there was little attempt to connect the Afghan plight to deliberate US policy.

Intercept (2/11/22): “The decision puts Biden on track to cause more death and destruction in Afghanistan than was caused by the 20 years of war that he ended.”

The omission is glaring, given the enormity of the Afghan crisis and the direct role the US plays in making it worse. The Intercept has covered the toll of sanctions over the years, even calling Biden’s policy “tantamount to mass murder” (2/11/22). This disaster is actually recognized by some of the establishment press. Even the New York Times editorial board (1/19/22) issued a plea to “let innocent Afghans have their money.” But this central fact fails to occupy central attention.

These events were set in motion almost immediately after the US withdrawal. Before its collapse, the US-backed Afghan government relied on foreign aid for most of its annual budget. After the overthrow, those funds were no longer available, since the US refused to deal with the Taliban.

While numerous human rights organizations called for an increased flow of aid, and warned of an impending humanitarian crisis, US policymakers decided to exacerbate the situation by freezing the Afghan’s central bank reserves, hamstringing the Afghan banking system, and thus the economy. $9 billion of reserves were inaccessible to the Taliban, an amount that equates to half of the entire economy’s GDP. As a result, the new government was unable to fund critical governmental infrastructure, including salaries for nurses and teachers.

At the US behest, the IMF froze about a half billion dollars in funds designated to help poor countries during the pandemic. Relatives living outside the country have been able to send far less money, as the traditional banking avenues have collapsed—leaving MoneyGram and Western Union as some of the only viable alternatives. Both services had temporarily halted services upon the Afghan government collapse. Since the Taliban is designated as an enemy of the US, many companies still avoid doing business in Afghanistan, further compounding the collapse.

Shortly after the withdrawal, the media often recognized these increasingly horrid conditions, but either decoupled them from US policy, or framed the oncoming crisis as “leverage” for the West to reshape the Afghan government.  The “hunger crisis,” wrote the Associated Press (9/1/21), “give[s] Western nations leverage as they push the group to fulfill a pledge to allow free travel, form an inclusive government and guarantee women’s rights.” Others took a similar line (New York Times, 9/1/21; Wall Street Journal, 8/23/21).

The economy has since fallen into a tailspin. The humanitarian aid the US still sends to Afghanistan does little to stop the economic free fall. By March, aid agencies were warning of “total collapse” if the economy wasn’t resuscitated, a prospect that has only grown more likely over the last few months.

‘A new US-backed free Afghanistan’

Morning Edition‘s  profile (8/8/22) of former Afghan President Hamid Karzai omits details found in a Washington Post report (12/9/19)—such as that he “won reelection after cronies stuffed thousands of ballot boxes,” and that “the CIA had delivered bags of cash to his office for years.” 

The only mention of the reserve theft was during Inskeep’s interview with former Afghan President Hamid Karzai (Morning Edition, 8/8/22). The interview started off with another instance of mythologizing history, similar to the previous misframing of the origins of the war (FAIR.org, 8/9/22). Inskeep told his audience that “Karzai once personified a new, US-backed free Afghanistan,” marveling at how his name remained on the international airport.

Inskeep’s lauding description of Karzai leaves out the massive, US-financed, heroin-fueled reign of corruption that was endemic to US occupation. Karzai himself stood at the center of it all, financed by CIA cash and retaining power through an openly stolen election that saw nearly a quarter of all votes cast later declared fraudulent. Such facts were well-documented, even by establishment press (notably the Washington Post—12/9/19—in the fourth part of its Afghanistan Papers series).

Inskeep was certainly aware of this endemic malfeasance, because he later acknowledged that the Afghan government was “discredited by corruption.” He didn’t let this tarnish the image he presented of Karzai, however.

It’s subtle erasures and omissions like this that define the process of rewriting history. When something as clear and well-documented as Karzai’s blatant corruption can be so easily swept under the rug, it’s obvious that the goal isn’t to give context to the audience.  Instead, we’re listening to mythmaking and historical revision in real time.

A willful omission

On air, Inskeep referenced Karzai’s call for the US to change its policy. Inskeep said: “He wants the US to return Afghan central bank funds, which it froze to keep the money away from the Taliban.” Karzai reiterated: “Americans should return Afghanistan’s reserves. The $7 billion. That does not belong to any government. They belong to the Afghan people.”

NPR (8/8/22) quoted from this Human Rights Watch report—but its message that “international economic restrictions are still driving the country’s catastrophe and hurting the Afghan people” does not seem to have sunk in.

Neither Inskeep nor Karzai stated or implied a causal relationship between the US actions and the hunger crisis; in fact, the hunger crisis wasn’t mentioned at all in the segment as it aired. In an online article based on the segment, NPR (8/8/22) wrote just two sentences:

Western aid has largely dried up, and the US froze some $7 billion of funds from Afghanistan’s central bank to keep it out of the Taliban’s hands. The economy has collapsed, and unemployment and food insecurity are widespread.

Here, the crisis is mentioned, but the causality is obscured. However, it’s clear that NPR is aware of the connection. The piece linked directly to a Human Rights Watch report (8/4/22) whose first sentence reads:

Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis cannot be effectively addressed unless the United States and other governments ease restrictions on the country’s banking sector to facilitate legitimate economic activity and humanitarian aid.

Later in the article, HRW Asia advocacy director John Sifton said that “Afghanistan’s intensifying hunger and health crisis is urgent and at its root a banking crisis”:

Regardless of the Taliban’s status or credibility with outside governments, international economic restrictions are still driving the country’s catastrophe and hurting the Afghan people.

So NPR is aware of the US role in exacerbating the crisis, but decided that its listeners didn’t need to hear about it.

Covering malice with ‘apathy’ 

NPR Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent Diaa Hadid.

The only actual discussion in the series of the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan came on Morning Edition (8/15/22), and only consisted of 30 seconds, when Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent Diaa Hadid said this:

Well, Leila, it’s been a year of hunger. Sanctions that were meant to punish Taliban leaders have battered the economy. They’ve plunged Afghanistan into a humanitarian catastrophe. More than 90% of Afghans don’t eat enough food. There’s not enough aid to go around. And you can see it on the streets. People are gaunt. Men, women and children plead for money. But the UN’s appeal to deal with this crisis is underfunded. And I’m reminded of something that a Human Rights Watch researcher said in a statement a few days ago. She said the Afghan people are living in a human rights nightmare; they are victims of both Taliban cruelty and international apathy.

Here NPR acknowledged that US sanctions “battered the economy,” and that they are responsible for “humanitarian catastrophe,” but claimed that they were “meant to punish Taliban leaders,” rather than the people of Afghanistan. Later Hadid cited a Human Rights Watch researcher attributing the suffering in part to “international apathy.”

This wording significantly downplays the deliberateness of the US economic war. There is no doubt that given the ample warnings about the oncoming catastrophe and hunger crisis, the US was aware that sanctions and freezing assets would only wreak havoc on the population. No serious journalist should take the US government at its word that its intentions were benevolent, especially when the evidence points in the opposite direction.

The rest of the series looked at the sensational days of the US military withdrawal, the stripping of rights from women under Taliban rule, and even how Afghanistan affects Biden’s approval ratings. NPR hosts continued to ask, “Who is included in the Taliban’s Afghanistan?” deploying the contemporary liberal ideal of inclusivity to criticize the Taliban. But when 95% of the population isn’t getting enough food, is “inclusivity” really the proper framework to analyze a country facing a historic famine deliberately exacerbated by the US?

Hadid’s mention of the crisis, along with Inskeep and Karzai’s mention of the central bank reserves, amount to less than 40 seconds over two weeks, in 18 segments that amount to over 100 minutes of coverage of Afghanistan.

A disoriented case

NPR (8/29/22) ran with this bizarrely glass-half-full headline: “In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, the Near-Broke Central Bank Somehow Still Functions.”

The Wednesday after the two-week nonstop coverage,  August 24, NPR’s Morning Edition (8/24/22) ran a segment headlined “Frozen Afghan Bank Reserves Contribute to the Country’s Economic Collapse.” Here Inskeep acknowledged that “the absence of the money has contributed to Afghanistan’s economic collapse.” He then replayed the snippet from Karzai about the need to return Afghanistan’s central bank reserves.

But even in that segment, the hunger crisis was only loosely connected to the US sanctions against the Afghan people.

Inskeep interviewed Shah Mehrabi, a member of Afghanistan’s central bank board under the US-backed government. Mehrabi, who has been living near Washington, DC, since the Afghan government collapse, in part endorsed Washington’s sanctions regime, saying that the US concerns about Taliban misuse of the funds were “legitimate.” In fact, Inskeep strangely noted that Mehrabi was “less upset about [the US freezing Afghan assets] than you might think.”

Mehrabi did note, somewhat indirectly,  that US sanctions were contributing to Afghanistan’s crises:

Isolation from international financial system will have to be ceased in one way or another to address the issue of poverty and mass starvation that this country is experiencing and will continue to experience, especially in the winter, harsh months that lies ahead and in front of us.

This brief mention, at the tail end of this six-minute piece, did little to raise important questions of US policy to the NPR audiences. A more coherent formulation of the problem would be that the US doesn’t want the Taliban to have the $7 billion, and is willing to starve the Afghan people for it. That can be gleaned from the piece, but only in a piecemeal fashion.

If we include the segment with the Afghanistan series, and if we (quite generously) say the whole segment is talking about the starving Afghans, then that means that NPR spent just seven minutes on the economic collapse and hunger crisis over three weeks, 19 segments and 120 minutes. Still shameful for one of the most pressing humanitarian catastrophes on Earth today.

On Monday, NPR (8/29/22) published an online text version of the August 24 segment under the confoundingly optimistic title, “In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, the Near-Broke Central Bank Somehow Still Functions.” The title choice is odd, given that Mehrabi explicitly stated that the bank’s current balances are “not adequate to be able to perform the necessary function of the central bank.”

If NPR cared about the Afghan people, its coverage would be aimed at informing listeners about how their country’s policies are dramatically hurting Afghans. US citizens may have differing opinions about these disastrous policies, but the facts need to be adequately discussed in the media. Instead, NPR’s coverage divorced the misery of Afghans from anything having to do with its audience, directing attention to the flaws in the Taliban rather than a violent US policy of deliberately starving the Afghan people.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR‘s public editor here (or via Twitter: @NPRpubliceditor). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

The post NPR Devotes Almost Two Hours to Afghanistan Over Two Weeks—and 30 Seconds to US Starving Afghans appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Bryce Greene.

Last week, two media polls announced results that seemed almost willful efforts to portray the public as extremists.

The Economist/YouGov poll (8/18/22) announced that “Most Americans see the US/Mexico border situation as a crisis,” with 59% of Americans accepting that characterization, with just 22% who do not. The same day, NPR/Ipsos (8/18/22) reported that “a majority of Americans see an ‘invasion’ at the southern border.”

Both of these polls reinforce the larger narrative being promoted by Fox News and Republicans that the increased number of migrants being stopped at the border represents a serious threat to the United States. And Biden and the Democrats are to blame. Yet the poll results are based on faulty polling questions that seem designed to produce extreme results.

Unbalanced questions

Economist (8/18/22)

The question posed in the Economist/YouGov poll was simple: “Do you think the current situation at the US/Mexico border is a crisis?”

For any experienced pollster, that wording screams of malfeasance. First of all, it is “unbalanced” because it provides no negative counter.

In his 1951 book, The Art of Asking Questions (Princeton University Press), Stanley Payne showed how much an unbalanced question can distort results. In one poll, half the sample of respondents were asked whether in general, manufacturers could avoid laying off workers during slack periods. The other half of respondents were read the same question, but with the added line, “or do you think the layoffs are unavoidable?”

With the unbalanced question, respondents agreed by a margin of almost three-to-one that companies could avoid the layoffs (63% said they could, 22% disagreed). With the balanced question, the margins changed in the opposition direction: 35% said the companies could avoid layoffs, 41% said the layoffs were unavoidable.

That represented a 47-point swing in opinion (41 points in favor to 6 points against), simply by changing the question wording to make it balanced.

And pollsters have known about the problem of unbalanced questions for the past seven decades.

Ensuring an extreme response

The Economist (8/18/22) showed that you can get most people to describe the border situation as a “crisis”—if you don’t offer them any other way to describe it.

But the Economist/YouGov question is also so vague, we really don’t know what people might mean when they agree there’s a crisis.  As opposed to what? Do the reporters want to know if people think there is a crisis as opposed to just “serious problems”? If so, they need to provide both options and ask which one the respondents think is more applicable. But they didn’t do that.

They could have asked if people thought there were “serious problems” at the southern border. But how exciting would the resulting headline be? “A majority of Americans think there are serious problems at the US/Mexican border!!”

No. Not worth a screaming headline. Better to ask if there’s a “crisis.” By not providing a counter factual option (such as, “there are problems but no crisis”), the pollsters all but ensured a majority choosing the extreme response.

When I was the managing editor of the Gallup Poll in the early 1990s, we wanted to know how seriously the public viewed the healthcare issue in the country. In 1994, we asked three questions to address that concern, with the results below:

• In your opinion, is there a crisis in healthcare in this country today, or not?

It was an ostensibly balanced question, because it added the “or not” phrase. But it, like the Economist/YouGov question, provided no context. The results showed 84% saying yes to the “crisis.”

• Which of these statements do you agree with more: 1) the country has a healthcare crisis, or 2) the country has healthcare problems but no health care crisis?

Here 53% chose “crisis.”

• Which of these statements do you think best describes the US healthcare system today: 1) the healthcare system is in a state of crisis, 2) it has major problems, 3) it has minor problems, or 4) it does not have any problems?

Just 17% chose “crisis.”

The number of Americans believing the health system was in a crisis went from 84% to 53% to just 17% as respondents were provided with alternative ways of looking at the issue.

The people at the Economist/YouGov poll aren’t necessarily aware of the Gallup results just cited, but they should be aware more generally of the problems with unbalanced and vague questions as outlined decades ago, and certainly included these days in any basic lessons on poll question design.

What is the best way to measure the public’s opinion about the problems at the southern border? The four-part Gallup question about healthcare is a good model for the border issue, because it provides for a fuller understanding of the varieties of views that Americans might hold. Getting at the nuances of public opinion may not provide dramatic headlines, but it’s a more honest way of reporting what Americans are actually thinking.

NPR manipulation

NPR (8/18/22)

The NPR/Ipsos poll is perhaps worse than the one just analyzed. It reeks of manipulation. The question is written in a true/false format, which itself is problematic. And it clearly favors the “true” option.

The poll question: “To what extent, if any, do you believe the following are true? — The US is experiencing an invasion at the southern border.” The answers provided were: “Completely true, Somewhat true, Completely false, Don’t know.”

True/false questions are inherently biased in favor of true, because of a phenomenon called “response acquiescence.” As described in this carefully researched Wikipedia article:

Acquiescence bias, also known as agreement bias, is a category of response bias common to survey research in which respondents have a tendency to select a positive response option or indicate a positive connotation disproportionately more frequently. Respondents do so without considering the content of the question or their ‘true’ preference. Acquiescence is sometimes referred to as “yea-saying” and is the tendency of a respondent to agree with a statement when in doubt….

Acquiescence bias can introduce systematic errors that affect the validity of research by confounding attitudes and behaviors with the general tendency to agree, which can result in misguided inference. Research suggests that the proportion of respondents who carry out this behavior is between 10% and 20%.

In addition, the NPR/Ipsos question is unbalanced, providing two responses for “true” (completely, and somewhat), while only one response for “false” (completely). It’s not at all clear what “somewhat true” means, but if that option is given, a balanced approach would also offer the option of “somewhat false.” But for the “false” option, the question included only the “completely” category.

And then the media pollsters combined the “completely true” percentage (28%) with the “somewhat true” responses (25%) to produce a “majority” of Americans saying there is an “invasion.”

Designed to support a view

NPR (8/18/22) counted people who said it was “somewhat true” to say that there was an “invasion” at the border as agreeing that there was an invasion—although their answer implies that it’s also somewhat false to call it an invasion.

Why did the pollsters ask the question in this biased way? It appears to me as though they wanted to show that “extreme rhetoric” about the border issue has become widespread.

According to the NPR report (italics added):

Republican leaders are increasingly framing the situation as an “invasion.” Immigrant advocates say the word has a long history in white nationalist circles, and warn that such extreme rhetoric could provoke more violence against immigrants.

Still, the polling shows that the word “invasion” has been embraced by a wide range of Americans to describe what’s happening at the border.

Note I said the pollsters wanted to “show” that extreme rhetoric has become widespread, not that they wanted to find out if it was actually the case. They seem to have had their minds made up before the poll was conducted, and designed a questionnaire that would support their view.

Had they wanted to investigate whether most people embraced “invasion” as a way to describe what’s happening at the border, the pollsters could have avoided the simplistic and biased true/false format, and the unbalanced question construction that favored “true,” and instead asked a more objective question.

One such series of question could have been worded this way:

How much would you say you know about what’s happening at the US/Mexico border these days: a great deal, a moderate amount, not much or nothing at all?

From what you’ve read or heard, which do you think better describes what’s happening at the southern border: 1) There is an invasion of immigrants into this country; or 2) There is not an invasion of immigrants into this country, but rather an unusually large number of immigrants seeking legal asylum – or 3) are you unsure?

The first question would allow an analysis to see whether people’s perceived knowledge of what’s happening is correlated with people’s use of “invasion” to describe the border events. The “unsure” option is to let respondents know that it’s okay to admit they don’t know.

In 1994, when Gallup’s polling partners were informed that the percentage of people saying the healthcare system was in “crisis” was only 17% (with the new wording format), the on-air pundit at CNN said he didn’t want to use that question. He wanted a simple result—crisis or no crisis. It was easier, he said, to describe on air. It mattered not that the question forced respondents into extremist positions, even though few people felt that way.

That seems to be the problem with the two polls analyzed here. Dramatic results showing an extremist public are far more “newsworthy” than what the public is really thinking.

The post Manufacturing ‘Crisis’: How Polling on the Border Exaggerates Extreme Opinions appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by David W. Moore.

The post NPR Host and NYT Guest Stress that Russia is Communist While Vilifying Uninformed Republicans appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Husseini.

NPR (8/5/22) revises Afghan history.

In the first part of a series of reports on Afghanistan, NPR host Steve Inskeep (Morning Edition, 8/5/22) interviewed current Afghan Defense Minister Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid. In introducing Yaqoob on air, Inskeep referenced Yaqoob’s father, the former head of the Taliban, Mullah Muhammad Omar: “He was the leader who refused to turn over Osama bin Laden in 2001, a refusal that led to the US attack.”

In the online version of the article, NPR wrote: “Omar also sheltered Osama bin Laden, and refused to turn over the Al Qaeda leader when the United States demanded him after 9/11.”

This line that the Taliban “refused to turn over Osama bin Laden,” and that this “led to the US attack,” though part of the commonly accepted chronology of the war, is a gross distortion of history. The truth is almost the exact opposite: The Taliban repeatedly offered to give up Bin Laden, only rejecting George W. Bush’s demands for immediate and unconditional acquiescence without discussion.

‘There are no negotiations’

The series of events leading up to the US Afghanistan invasion were laid out recently in a Current Affairs essay by Nathan Robinson and Noam Chomsky (8/3/22), titled “What Do We Owe Afghanistan?”

Even before 9/11, the Taliban—who already had a “deeply contentious” relationship with Al Qaeda—repeatedly signaled their willingness to work with the US in bringing Bin Laden to justice. Former Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil told Al Jazeera (9/11/11) that for years, they had used unofficial channels to present ways to  “resolve the Osama issue.” “One such proposal,” Muttawakil said, “was to set up a three-nation court, or something under the supervision of the Organization of the Islamic Conference [OIC].”

Robert Grenier, former CIA station chief in Pakistan, confirmed US receipt of these proposals to Al Jazeera, but dismissed them as a “ploy” to be ignored. According to Grenier, the US “did not trust the Taliban and their ability to conduct a proper trial.”

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the US demanded that the Taliban immediately hand over Bin Laden. The Taliban responded by offering to put Bin Laden on trial if they were shown evidence of his involvement in the attacks. The US refused to share proof, rejecting any diplomatic option.

Bush announced, “There are no negotiations,” then proceeded to bomb Afghanistan, despite numerous warnings from both humanitarian organizations and anti-Taliban forces in the country that their actions would only hurt the Afghanistani people. Even after the bombs began to fall, the Taliban repeated their offers to give up Bin Laden—even dropping the requirement for actual evidence. The US continued its onslaught, initiating the 20-year odyssey of occupation that unraveled last year.

‘Preponderance on the Eurasian continent’

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s vision of the “Grand Chessboard” included a prospective pipeline across Afghanistan.

It’s abundantly clear that US aims in the country transcended capturing Bin Laden and obtaining justice for 9/11 victims. Some, like Chomsky and Robinson, attributed the hasty invasion to Bush’s personal bloodlust.

Others trace US policy in Afghanistan to longstanding geopolitical imperatives for military influence and control of the world’s natural resources. Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of the “Afghan Trap,” wrote in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard that “America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” The book even contained a map of a proposed pipeline through Afghanistan.

The Bush administration’s ranks were pulled in large part from the neoconservative think tank, the Project for a New American Century. In PNAC’s now infamous 2000 document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the overtly imperial organization called for the establishment of “forward-facing bases” in Central Asia, calling these “an essential element in US security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region.”

Of PNAC’s 25 founding members, ten went on to staff the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The day before 9/11, the Bush administration had already made a decision to eventually attack Afghanistan, using Bin Laden as a pretext.  On September 12, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were trying to initiate a wider war by attacking Iraq, despite nothing linking Iraq to the attacks.

‘An illegal war’

Nathan Robinson and Noam Chomsky (Current Affairs, 8/3/22) : “Long before 9/11, the Taliban had reached out to the United States and offered to put Bin Laden on trial under the supervision of a ‘neutral international organization.'”

Whatever the Bush administration’s motivations, it’s clear that the reality is a far cry from NPR’s propagandistically simple formulation that the Taliban simply refused to hand over Bin Laden, and this is what led to the US attack on Afghanistan.

However, it should be noted that even in Inskeep’s version of events, the US invasion would still be an unlawful and unnecessary act of aggression. As Chomsky and Robinson wrote in Current Affairs (8/3/22):

The 9/11 attacks could have been dealt with as a crime. This would have been sane and consistent with precedent. When lawbreaking occurs, we seek the perpetrators, rather than starting wars with unrelated parties.…

If the Bush administration had wanted to “defend Americans from another terrorist attack,” it would have pursued the criminal network responsible for the original attack. Instead, it wanted vengeance, and launched an illegal war that killed thousands of innocent people.

NPR’s historical framing is an attempt to paint the Taliban as prepared to defend Bin Laden to the death, and thus complicit or supportive of the 9/11 attacks. This inaccurate portrayal serves to retroactively justify the US assault on one of the poorest countries in the world.

Despite Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan after a brutal 20-year occupation, the US continues to attack the population today. Earlier this year, the Biden administration directly invoked the horrors of 9/11 to justify robbing the Afghans of $7 billion in central bank reserves.  In some twisted form of justice, the Biden administration decided to keep the stolen funds and distribute half of it to families of 9/11 victims.

The other half was to be redistributed to Afghanistan in the form of humanitarian aid, though experts warn that this is far from a substitute for restarting the economy.  This despite outrage from several 9/11 families over the violence committed in their name. As the Afghan economy collapses, nearly the entire country is being plunged into misery on a mass scale, and the US is intent on making it worse (FAIR.org, 2/15/22).

In future reporting,  NPR should present a clearer picture of historical events to provide proper context for their listeners, and to avoid legitimizing the ongoing, massively destructive policies of the United States by promoting official state mythology.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR‘s public editor here (or via Twitter: @NPRpubliceditor). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

Featured image: NPR depiction (8/5/22) of a Taliban compound in Afghanistan (photo: Claire Harbage/NPR).

The post NPR Distorts History of US Invasion of Afghanistan appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Bryce Greene.

This hostility spread after the Henan Communist Youth League, a lower-level official organization of the Chinese Communist Party that saw international news coverage of the flooding as derogatory, put out a call on microblogging platform Weibo for its followers to report on the whereabouts of BBC correspondent Robin Brant. 

Instead of calling for calm, the Chinese Foreign Ministry accused Brant of “distorting the real situation of the Chinese government’s efforts to organize rescues and local people’s courage to save themselves, and insinuating attacks on the Chinese government, full of ideological prejudice and double standards.”

The threats to foreign correspondents covering last year’s flood were an early example of what has now become part of the Chinese playbook: state-linked entities publicly chastise foreign journalists, leading to massive online and in-person harassment campaigns. Recently, the harassment cropped up at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Washington Post China bureau chief Lily Kuo received so much blowback on Twitter over her story on China’s promotion of previously-mocked mascot Bing Dwen Dwen that she was forced to make her tweets temporarily private.

“These kinds of nationalistic attacks against people seen as criticizing China have happened for years, against journalists, human rights activists, and others, in different ways,” said Sophie Beach, operations and communications manager at the China Digital Times, a U.S.-based media organization that archives and translates content censored on China’s internet. “But it does seem that the online attacks have become more frequent and more prominent in recent years.”

China is a notorious censor of the country’s media, as the state supervises virtually all content published in any outlet and, according to CPJ’s annual prison census, is the world’s worst jailer of journalists. But the work of foreign correspondents, which escapes China’s massive firewall because it is published abroad, has been historically more difficult for authorities to silence, try as they might by expelling and refusing to credential reporters. Now, as China has become more sensitive to its image abroad amid accusations it mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic, it has taken to harassing foreign journalists online.

“Going after foreign journalists is part of a broad strategy to control all information, including online voices, which has indeed become more challenging for them on all fronts as the methods of communication increase and diversify,” said Beach. “But it is also part of their strategy to proactively rewrite the global narrative about China, especially with the COVID story.”

The Chinese foreign ministry did not respond to CPJ’s email request for comment on the state’s roles in the online attacks. The Foreign Correspondents Club of China said in an email that it would forward a request for comment to its members, but CPJ received no responses. 

As part of this new tactic, state-run news organizations and tabloids, as well as popular anonymous social media users on Weibo, often post the names and the pictures of foreign journalists who “smear and attack China,” calling their coverage “biased” or “dishonest” while conveniently leaving out, or intentionally mistranslating, the original news reports.

When NPR’s Beijing correspondent Emily Feng went to Liuzhou, a city in the Guanxi autonomous region in southern China, to write about the Chinese delicacy “luosifen,” or snail noodles, she was followed by officials who tried to impede her reporting on what was supposed to be a “fun” story, she wrote on Twitter. After the story was published early this year, the online harassment started: Feng was labeled an “anti-China foreign citizen of Chinese descent” by posters on Weibo and in stories on Chinese news sites.  

One site in particular, the state-funded College Daily, appears to have deliberately twisted Feng’s words. “Foreign media journalist once again digs up ‘dirt on China,’: Luosifen will cause another COVID pandemic,” read the headline, which was followed by an article with a telling  mistranslation. In her NPR report, Feng referred to the snail noodles as “another snack that might keep China entertained for another year under lockdown,” but College Daily changed it into a snack “that might keep China another year in lockdown.” 

The publication went on to attack Feng with screenshots of her reports. “Almost every article she published on NPR was aimed at China. You can tell just from the titles that she couldn’t say anything good,” the College Daily article said, using shoddy and misleading translations of Feng’s reporting while failing to present the complexity of her work. “China excels at the Paralympics, but its disabled citizens are fighting for access” became “China excels at the Paralympics, but its disabled citizens are still fighting to get into the Paralympics.” 

The College Daily’s singling out of Feng also represents a growing trend of Chinese propaganda targeting female reporters of East Asian descent, whose independent reporting is perceived by authorities as a betrayal of their roots and their homeland, said Beach. 

“Journalists of Chinese descent are called ‘race traitors’ if they engage in any reporting on China that is less than flattering. The worst attacks appear to be aimed at women of Chinese heritage, because nationalism always has a strong undercurrent of misogyny.” 

But the narrative that journalists with Chinese backgrounds serve as political tools for Western media and governments to bash China may have sinister uses beyond discrediting their work – it has raised fears they could face legal charges in the country.

In December 2021, the Chinese propaganda tabloid Global Times, an offshoot of state-run newspaper The People’s Daily, described China-born New York Times visual investigative reporter Muyi Xiao as an example of a journalist who uses Western media to “ambush their comrades and motherland from behind.”  

The article noted Xiao’s resume included work with the Magnum Foundation, ChinaFile, and other groups. The paper called some of these organizations “anti-China” NGOs, accusing Xiao of “lying to her heart” or acting with the “zeal of a convert” in her affiliation with them. 

By associating Xiao with foreign NGOs, the state-orchestrated information operation may be setting the stage for invoking the Law on Administration of Activities of Overseas Nongovernmental Organizations, which prohibits Chinese nationals from “carrying out temporary activities in the mainland of China,” and “acting in the capacity of an agent” for foreign NGOs. Those found guilty of stealing, secretly gathering, purchasing, or illegally providing state secrets to overseas organizations can face five to 10 years in prison.

Xiao also declined an interview request with CPJ. 

Reporters who are not Chinese nationals face fewer risks. But they too must watch their backs. In March 2021, the BBC’s Beijing correspondent John Sudworth left China, where he had been based for nine years, due to the surveillance, obstruction, intimidation, and threats of legal action against him and his team. Sudworth became a target of online propaganda campaigns after he reported on the origins of COVID-19, Xinjiang’s re-education camps, and forced labor in Xinjiang’s cotton industry. 

In a press conference last year after Sudworth left the country, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told foreign journalists: “There is a price to pay for those who make rumor and defamation.”  

Sudworth did not respond to CPJ’s questions before publication and it remains to be seen whether Chinese authorities are planning to further impede, or even criminalize, foreign correspondents’ reporting in the country. For now, the fact that all but two of the 50 journalists in prison at the time of CPJ’s 2021 prison census are Chinese nationals may be cold comfort for international reporters.  

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Iris Hsu.

The Iowa caucuses officially began the Democratic primary, and even in this ongoing, extended battle for the White House, Iowa remains an important marker for candidates and the media. A close look at a piece by two of NPR’s leading political reporters, which aired just before the caucuses, provides a view of how journalists speak with authority on issues they seem to know very little about. The conversation between Mary Louise Kelly and her partner Mara Liasson, headlined “Where Iowa Falls in the Big Picture of the 2020 Election” (All Things Considered, 2/3/20), began with Kelly introducing the importance of Iowa for Democrats, but, she observed, it’s been on the “backburner,” after days of constant impeachment coverage.

Liasson agreed, then spent most of her introductory remarks on Trump, presenting him as legitimate as any past president:

Tomorrow night President Trump appears in the well of the House before he speaks to both houses of Congress for the big curtain-raiser for him, the State of the Union address. It’s the biggest audience he’ll have all year. It’s—every president gets to kind of kick off his re-election campaign with the State of the Union address, and we can expect to hear a campaign message from him tomorrow.

No mention was made that Trump had flouted the Constitution by refusing to cooperate with an impeachment hearing, or that Republican senators would fail to uphold the Constitution by voting to dismiss impeachment charges after a sham trial with no witnesses. Liasson’s critical remarks were reserved for the Democratic Party, both voters and candidates.

“I see a very unsettled race,” Liasson told Kelly, and continued, “Democrats are paralyzed by indecision.” One wonders which race she is looking at, as both state and national polls show that Democratic voters are anything but “paralyzed,” and for months have been anticipating the primary with “an incredible degree of excitement” (Vox, 2/3/20). One national Quinnipiac University poll (1/28/20) found a whopping 85% of Democratic voters were either “extremely” or “very” motivated to vote in the primary contests, characterizing their enthusiasm as “sky high.”

Liasson claimed that the main issue for the Democratic Party is “electability”—a fraught term often used to signal ideological orthodoxy rather than empirical chances of winning elections (FAIR.org, 10/25/19). She asserted that Democrats are “confused,” and “for good reason,” because Trump remains an “existential threat,” and not only are none of the candidates “a sure thing,” none even “seem likely to defeat” Trump.

Such handwringing is, again, not founded in facts or data. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll published the day before this broadcast—one day ahead of the Iowa caucuses—found that Trump was trailing all the leading 2020 Democratic candidates, with the top four candidates ahead of Trump in theoretical head-to-head matchups. Looking more broadly at polling, the two candidates who were then leading the Democratic field, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, had beaten Trump in 69 of 73 and 63 of 68 matchups, respectively.

The supposed lack of “electability” was solidified as a media obsession in mid-April of last year, when Obama’s former campaign manager, Jim Messina, now a political strategist for corporate Democrats (Common Dreams, 2/13/20), announced on the Powerhouse Politics podcast (ABC, 4/17/19) that “Sanders couldn’t beat Trump.” Messina went on to predict that the Democratic field would be honed down to Sen. Kamala Harris and former US Rep. Beto O’Rourke, along with Joe Biden, who had not yet entered the race.

Both Harris and O’Rourke dropped out of the race before the first vote was cast, while Biden’s polling numbers were in free fall after poor showings in both Iowa and New Hampshire. But despite Messina’s foggy crystal ball, his unelectability trope was adopted by pundits as a platitude. Vox (4/24/19) was one of the few to point out a few days later that Sanders actually had a very good electability record, having “consistently run ahead of Democratic Party presidential campaigns in Vermont” when he ran for reelection as a US representative. But “unelectable” is now an overworked spin pushed by centrist Democrats and their corporate media allies.

Liasson went on to worry about the “huge vulnerabilities” all the Democratic candidates have “for the president to exploit.” No mention is made of Trump’s mammoth negatives that present Democrats with enough ammunition to send him running, if they were so inclined. Indeed, corporate media have been incapable of imagining powerfully pointed, rhetorically effective, authentically truthful critical campaigns against Trump.

Instead, one of the most feared “vulnerabilities” frequently associated with post-Iowa front-runner Bernie Sanders is that he is a socialist. So common is this assertion that Data for Progress decided to explore it, using the Lucid survey sampling platform to test three different versions of a Sanders vs Trump polling question (Vox, 1/31/20).  The first version mentioned no affiliation, the second identified the candidate by party, and the third had Trump labeling Sanders a socialist, in this survey question:

If the 2020 US presidential election was held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were Democrat Bernie Sanders, who wants to tax the billionaire class to help the working class and Republican Donald Trump, who says Sanders is a socialist who supports a government takeover of healthcare and open borders?

In all three scenarios, Sanders won. He actually did slightly better when identified as a socialist as opposed to just a Democrat.

This third question also dispatched another of Liasson’s exaggerated negatives, the issue of “open borders.” But the wording she chose to represent the issue revealed her slant. Liasson asserted, “Majorities of voters don’t want to get rid of ICE or decriminalize border crossings.” What the National Immigration Forum found in November of last year was:

A majority of Americans told pollsters that they thought immigrants strengthened America, said immigrants have positive attributes such as “hard-working” and having strong family values, and that immigrants were good for America. The percentage of Americans who said they want immigration levels to be reduced is at the lowest level, in two different polls, since that question was first asked going back to 1965 (in Gallup’s poll).

These open-minded American attitudes toward immigration hold tight even in the face of the overt anti-immigrant racism, widely articulated at the highest levels of government, in an ongoing campaign the likes of which the US public has not been subjected to in nearly a century. The result is Trump’s premier accomplishment, a border wall, justified by anti-immigrant rhetoric. Americans may not be willing to say they favor decriminalizing the border, but they most certainly recoiled from the brutality of criminalization so evident on the weaponized borderlands of the American Southwest.

The New Republic (2/5/19) discussed the post-caravan opinion data, citing a Washington Post/ABC poll (4/30/19) that  suggested that voters opposed Trump’s draconian approach: The wall “remains extremely unpopular, with two voters opposing it for every one who supports it.” Most importantly, the survey demonstrated a desire to move beyond “securing” and further militarizing the border. We can only imagine what a powerful, careful, progressive Democratic campaign debate on open borders might actually accomplish.

As the two journalists continued to chat, Liasson took closer aim at Sanders, stating with bold authority that “you don’t even need to do the research part of oppo-research because his policy positions are opposed by big majorities of Americans.” Clearly, these journalists did little to no research preparing for this important broadcast. So many polls have documented what the public thinks about Sanders’ policy positions, and the evidence is overwhelming: From a wealth tax to minimum wage, they are extremely popular.

Last March, a CNBC/All-American poll illustrates this: support for paid maternity leave, 85%; government funding for childcare, 75%; boosting the minimum wage, 60%; free college tuition, 57%. Medicare for all came in at 54%. In October 2019, The Hill reported on an American Barometer survey that found “70% of the public supported providing ‘Medicare for All,’ also known as single-payer healthcare.”

Notably, the only issue included in that poll that garnered only a 28% approval rating was Andrew Yang’s idea of a universal basic income, even with the slogan “freedom dividend,” something Sanders has not focused on.

Another key policy proposal with broad public support is a wealth tax that both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren support. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll (1/10/20), nearly two-thirds of respondents agree that the very rich should pay more. Among 4,441 respondents, 64% strongly or somewhat agreed that “the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs.” Support among Democrats was even stronger, at 77%, but a majority of Republicans, 53%, also agree with the idea.

Liasson continued with a carefully selected list of “unpopular” positions that Sanders has taken: “He wants to ban fracking and somehow win Pennsylvania.” But a poll released days earlier (Pittsburgh City Paper, 1/30/20) found that 48% of Pennsylvania voters support a ban on fracking, and just 39% opposed a ban; 49% felt the environmental risks outweighed the economic benefits, with 38% taking the reverse position.

“Even a majority of Democrats don’t want to end private health insurance,” she exclaimed. Actually, 77% of Democrats support “a national health plan, sometimes called Medicare for All, in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan”—as do 61% of independents (KFF, 1/30/20).

What can we take away from this sad story brought to listeners by two formidable journalists, one who recently received high praise for her hardball questioning (NPR, 1/24/20) of Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo? Their ignorance is willful, and finds its roots in a profoundly ideological position, an ideology adopted by journalists who favor and are rewarded by corporate arguments promoted by corporate Democrats.

The results from the New Hampshire primary are in—mercifully quickly—showing Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders victorious with 26% of the vote, ahead of former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg with 24%. However, it was third place Amy Klobuchar, with 20%, who seemed to draw the greatest media buzz. The Minnesota senator has received a lot of press attention of late—almost all of it positive.

Why losing is actually winning

CNN’s election panel (2/12/20) heaped praise upon her; former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe described her performance as “spectacular,” while Democratic strategist David Axelrod claimed she “has a great personal touch.” Vox’s Matthew Yglesias (2/11/20) called her “the thinking moderate Democrat’s electability candidate.” The Week (2/10/20) said she had “clearly touched a chord” with the electorate, and NPR (2/12/20) claimed her third place was a victory that “shocked the establishment.”

The Christian Science Monitor (2/11/20) suggested her rise was a win for Midwestern values and pragmatism, portraying her as the “kinder,” “forgiving” and “empathetic” candidate. This might surprise some readers, as Klobuchar presents herself as a tough-on-crime former prosecutor, and is known for previously assaulting her staffers (Vanity Fair, 3/15/19).

Other outlets went even further. Bloomberg’s headline (2/10/20) insisted that “In New Hampshire, a Third-Place Finish Could Still Be a Win,” with the organization tweeting (2/12/20) that “Bernie Sanders may have come first in New Hampshire, but Amy Klobuchar won.” CBS Minnesota (2/12/20) also declared that the “third place finish for Sen. Klobuchar was a ‘win.’” MSNBC commentator Adrienne Elrod  (2/11/20) explained the thinking:

That key third-place finish…. Amy Klobuchar, the momentum is on her side, this would be a huge huge victory for Amy. In fact, I would almost argue that a third-place finish for Amy would be stronger and more important than a first-place finish for Bernie.

There you have it: Third is officially better than first.

The reason Klobuchar was “the story of the night,” NPR (2/12/20) helpfully admitted, was because “the search is on for the Sanders alternative.” “If Bernie Sanders looks like he’s running away with it, for the Democratic establishment that’s almost as scary as losing to Donald Trump,” said MSNBC Morning Joe host Willie Geist (2/3/20). Co-host Joe Scarborough explained that the Democrats could look to Mike Bloomberg as their “political savior”: “It may not be to get the 50%” of delegates, he said. “It may just be to stop Bernie and open the door for somebody else.”

Why winning is actually losing

This “stop Bernie at all costs” mentality explains why some of the media simply ignored Sanders’ victory altogether, part of a longstanding Bernie blackout strategy (FAIR.org, 5/4/15). Reuters (2/12/20), for example, headlined its live primary coverage with the words “Pete Buttigieg Finishes Second in New Hampshire Primary, Amy Klobuchar Third.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Trip Gabriel (Twitter, 2/12/20) claimed that the two stories of the night were Klobuchar’s performance and Buttigieg gaining ground on Sanders, echoing the Onion take (2/12/20): “Bernie Sanders loses to Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg in key battle for second and third place.” Sometimes life imitates satire.

Another way to present a victory as a loss was to combine the vote totals of all the “moderate” candidates to show that “Sanders could lose the Democratic nomination to a unified centrist vote” (Business Insider, 2/12/20). This is based on the assumption that supporters of particular candidates see themselves as belonging to ideological camps that don’t cross over—a dubious premise.  For example, polling suggests that if Joe Biden were to drop out of the race, the biggest bloc of his supporters would switch to Sanders as their second choice.

Nevertheless, Vox (2/12/20) argued that the results “show Bernie Sanders still has an ‘electability’ problem,” claiming that exit polls showed that voters who prioritized beating Trump, rather than someone who they agree with on major issues, chose Buttigieg.  But this is a false dichotomy that ignores the fact that words like “electable” and “pragmatic” have been coded for decades to mean “right-wing” or “pro-corporate” (Extra!, 9/1/92, 7/1/06; FAIR.org, 1/1/95, 3/16/10, 8/21/19).

It also ignores the reality that Sanders does better in head-to-head polls against Trump than either Buttigieg or Klobuchar, who often lose to the president. If media analysts can’t seem to recognize this reality, voters increasingly do; in the latest Morning Consult poll (The Hill, 2/12/20), more voters (29%) named Sanders as the most likely to beat Trump than any other candidate.

The press has also continued the tradition (FAIR.org, 7/26/19) of forgetting how to do basic math when discussing Sanders. A slew of outlets, including Bloomberg (2/10/20), Forbes (2/12/20) and the New Yorker (2/12/20), presented Bernie’s New Hampshire win as a negative, noting he won 60% of the state in 2016 and far less this time around.

To grasp the absurdity of the comparison, let’s imagine you own an ice cream store. You sell only two flavors: vanilla and chocolate. Chocolate is the most popular, making up 60% of sales. You then start selling eight more flavors, making ten. Chocolate is still the most popular: 26% of customers choose it. Would anyone in their right mind think, “What the hell is the problem with chocolate? No one is buying it any more!” Would any functioning adult, let alone ice cream business specialists, be unable to grasp why you’re selling fewer bowls of chocolate than previously? Yet political journalists across the board have apparently failed to understand that 2016 was effectively a two-horse race between Sanders and Hillary Clinton, whereas at least ten major candidates stood this time. And the fact that some people picked strawberry or pistachio does not necessarily equal a rejection of chocolate.

Of course, the actual reason journalists perform mental gymnastics worthy of an Olympic gold medal is that they are parts of large international corporations owned by the extremely wealthy, and funded (through advertising) by other extremely large corporations. Someone like Sanders, who promises to take on the power and influence of the rich, is an unwelcome intrusion into politics as usual. That’s one reason why we are deluged with stories about how Medicare for All is a really bad idea (FAIR.org, 4/29/19) or that billionaires don’t like socialism (FAIR.org, 2/3/20).

Sanders is the frontrunner going into the next Democratic debate on Wednesday. But don’t expect the media to treat him particularly well. Chuck Todd, who this week referred his supporters as the “digital brownshirt brigade”—referring to the Nazi paramilitaries who rounded up and executed people like Sanders’ family—is moderating it.

CNN and CBS do it. NPR and PBS do it. They all do it.

It’s a “gentleman’s” agreement between elite media and their establishment guests—a courtesy major news outlets bestow upon former officials who get to pontificate and editorialize about today’s events with no worry they’ll be identified by their jobs today.

On Wednesday night, CNN’s Don Lemon hosted ubiquitous Bernie Sanders-basher Jim Messina—solo, without an opposing view—to slam Sanders and his Medicare-for-All proposal.

Messina was introduced and repeatedly identified only by his former positions: “Former Obama Campaign Manager” and “Former Deputy Chief of Staff, Obama Administration.”

As is typical, viewers weren’t told what Messina’s current job is—far more relevant information than his positions years ago.

Messina is now a corporate consultant. He is CEO of The Messina Group, whose website boasts corporate clients such as Amazon’s pharmaceutical subsidiary PillPack, Google, Uber, Delta, and that boasts the slogan: “Unlocking Industries So Businesses Can Win.”

If properly introduced, it would have been no surprise to CNN viewers that a corporate consultant would malign Sanders, the most popular anti-corporate politician in recent U.S. history.

Lemon also neglected to inform viewers that since leaving Team Obama, Messina has been paid handsomely to elect conservative politicians across the globe, from Tory Prime Ministers David Cameron and Theresa May in Britain to Prime Minster Mariano Rajoy in Spain. Messina’s company website features an image of Cameron next to a banner that reads: “Campaigning for candidates we believe in.”

In U.S. corporate media, such misidentification is a hoary tradition, and a dishonest one. More relevant to news consumers in judging the quality of information from a former government official would be the current employment and entanglements of that ex-official.

In the months after the Chinese government massacred students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, no voice in U.S. media was more prominent or ubiquitous in apologizing for China than Henry Kissinger, usually identified only as “former Secretary of State.” Consumers of news were almost never told that at the time, Kissinger was a consultant to corporations doing business in China, as well as the head of China Ventures, a company engaged in joint ventures with China’s state bank.

When health care reform was being hotly debated in 1993-94, NPR presented point-counterpoint face-offs between a former GOP congressman and a former Democratic congressman, both of whom were quick to deride the proposal in Congress for a single-payer system of government-provided health insurance. NPR didn’t tell its listeners that both of its “formers” were current lobbyists or consultants for private health care corporations.

A lot of the corruption in Washington—the kind Sanders and Elizabeth Warren criticize—stems from former officials, whether Democrat or Republican, leaving government to work as consultants or lobbyists for private interests. Mainstream news outlets work hard to look away from this corruption, and one way they do so is by dutifully identifying their “experts” only as formers.

Anita Dunn will always be the “former Obama White House Communications Director.” (In that job, she assisted first lady Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign.) But after leaving the White House, Dunn became a consultant for food companies seeking to block restrictions on sugary food ads targeted toward children. She also consulted for TransCanada in its push for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Today, Dunn is a senior adviser on Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

A warning to news consumers: When CNN or NPR or PBS introduces a guest only as a “former” official, you are being lied to more often than not.

In a moment observers described as a telling display of the bipartisan support for regime change that pervades Washington, D.C., congressional Democrats applauded along with their Republican colleagues after President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address Tuesday night to praise Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who headed a failed U.S-backed coup against his country’s elected president last year.

Trump hailed Guaidó—who was in attendance for the address—as the “true and legitimate president of Venezuela,” a line that was met with a raucous standing ovation from members of both political parties, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the top Democrat in Congress.

As NPR reported, “Guaidó received an extended bipartisan standing ovation. It was one of the few times that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats stood to applaud during Trump’s speech.”

Watch:

I don’t give a shit that Nancy Pelosi ripped up Trump’s speech, her theatrics mean nothing. She stood up and applauded Trump’s fake regime change president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido. Both party’s leaders are rotten to the core pic.twitter.com/ggNegSwhaX

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) February 5, 2020

Keane Bhatt, policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), tweeted in response to the show of unity that “there is no better distillation of Washington, D.C. than a State of the Union in which Nancy Pelosi—having just led the impeachment of Donald ‘All Roads Lead to Putin’ Trump—twice joins in a rousing standing ovation of Juan Guaidó, Trump’s appointed ‘president’ of Venezuela.”

CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin reacted with dismay to the bipartisan standing ovation for Guaidó, whose coup attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro quickly collapsed last year despite support from the U.S. and other nations.

“The Democrats, including Pelosi, just got up to applaud the self-proclaimed ‘president’ of Venezuela Juan Guaidó,” tweeted Benjamin. “Intervening in Venezuela’s internal politics is the one thing that is bipartisan! How sad.”

In a moment observers described as a telling display of the bipartisan support for regime change that pervades Washington, D.C., congressional Democrats applauded along with their Republican colleagues after President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address Tuesday night to praise Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who headed a failed U.S-backed coup against his country’s elected president last year.

Trump hailed Guaidó—who was in attendance for the address—as the “true and legitimate president of Venezuela,” a line that was met with a raucous standing ovation from members of both political parties, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the top Democrat in Congress.

As NPR reported, “Guaidó received an extended bipartisan standing ovation. It was one of the few times that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats stood to applaud during Trump’s speech.”

Watch:

I don’t give a shit that Nancy Pelosi ripped up Trump’s speech, her theatrics mean nothing. She stood up and applauded Trump’s fake regime change president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido. Both party’s leaders are rotten to the core pic.twitter.com/ggNegSwhaX

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) February 5, 2020

Keane Bhatt, policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), tweeted in response to the show of unity that “there is no better distillation of Washington, D.C. than a State of the Union in which Nancy Pelosi—having just led the impeachment of Donald ‘All Roads Lead to Putin’ Trump—twice joins in a rousing standing ovation of Juan Guaidó, Trump’s appointed ‘president’ of Venezuela.”

CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin reacted with dismay to the bipartisan standing ovation for Guaidó, whose coup attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro quickly collapsed last year despite support from the U.S. and other nations.

“The Democrats, including Pelosi, just got up to applaud the self-proclaimed ‘president’ of Venezuela Juan Guaidó,” tweeted Benjamin. “Intervening in Venezuela’s internal politics is the one thing that is bipartisan! How sad.”

In a moment observers described as a telling display of the bipartisan support for regime change that pervades Washington, D.C., congressional Democrats applauded along with their Republican colleagues after President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address Tuesday night to praise Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who headed a failed U.S-backed coup against his country’s elected president last year.

Trump hailed Guaidó—who was in attendance for the address—as the “true and legitimate president of Venezuela,” a line that was met with a raucous standing ovation from members of both political parties, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the top Democrat in Congress.

As NPR reported, “Guaidó received an extended bipartisan standing ovation. It was one of the few times that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats stood to applaud during Trump’s speech.”

Watch:

I don’t give a shit that Nancy Pelosi ripped up Trump’s speech, her theatrics mean nothing. She stood up and applauded Trump’s fake regime change president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido. Both party’s leaders are rotten to the core pic.twitter.com/ggNegSwhaX

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) February 5, 2020

Keane Bhatt, policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), tweeted in response to the show of unity that “there is no better distillation of Washington, D.C. than a State of the Union in which Nancy Pelosi—having just led the impeachment of Donald ‘All Roads Lead to Putin’ Trump—twice joins in a rousing standing ovation of Juan Guaidó, Trump’s appointed ‘president’ of Venezuela.”

CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin reacted with dismay to the bipartisan standing ovation for Guaidó, whose coup attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro quickly collapsed last year despite support from the U.S. and other nations.

“The Democrats, including Pelosi, just got up to applaud the self-proclaimed ‘president’ of Venezuela Juan Guaidó,” tweeted Benjamin. “Intervening in Venezuela’s internal politics is the one thing that is bipartisan! How sad.”

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lashed out in anger Saturday at an NPR reporter who accused him of shouting expletives at her after she asked him in an interview about Ukraine. In a direct and personal attack, America’s chief diplomat said the journalist had “lied” to him and he called her conduct “shameful.”

NPR said it stood by Mary Louise Kelly’s reporting.

Pompeo claimed in a statement that the incident was “another example of how unhinged the media has become in its quest to hurt” President Donald Trump and his administration. Pompeo, a former CIA director and Republican congressman from Kansas who is one of Trump’s closest allies in the Cabinet, asserted, “It is no wonder that the American people distrust many in the media when they so consistently demonstrate their agenda and their absence of integrity.”

It is extraordinary for a secretary of state to make such a personal attack on a journalist, but he is following the lead of Trump, who has repeatedly derided what he calls “fake news” and ridiculed individual reporters. In one of the more memorable instances, Trump mocked a New York Times reporter with a physical disability.

In Friday’s interview, Pompeo responded testily when Kelly asked him about Ukraine and specifically whether he defended or should have defended Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv whose ouster figured in Trump’s impeachment.

“I have defended every State Department official,” he said. “We’ve built a great team. The team that works here is doing amazing work around the world … I’ve defended every single person on this team. I’ve done what’s right for every single person on this team.”

This has been a sensitive point for Pompeo. As a Trump loyalist, he has been publicly silent as the president and his allies have disparaged the nonpartisan career diplomats, including Yovanovitch, who have testified in the impeachment hearings. Those diplomats told Congress that Trump risked undermining Ukraine, a critical U.S. ally, by pressuring for an investigation of Democrat Joe Biden, a Trump political rival.

Yovanovitch, who was seen by Trump allies as a roadblock to those efforts, was told in May to leave Ukraine and return to Washington immediately for her own safety. After documents released this month from an associate of Trump’s personal attorney suggested she was being watched and possibly under threat, Pompeo took three days to address the matter and did so only after coming under harsh criticism from lawmakers and current and former diplomats.

After the NPR interview, Kelly said she was taken to Pompeo’s private living room, where he shouted at her “for about the same amount of time as the interview itself,” using the “F-word” repeatedly. She said he was not happy to have been questioned about Ukraine.

Pompeo, in his statement, did not deny shouting at Kelly and did not apologize. Instead, he accused her of lying to him when setting up the interview, which he apparently expected would be limited to questions about Iran, and for supposedly agreeing not to discuss the post-interview meeting.

Kelly said Pompeo asked whether she thought Americans cared about Ukraine and if she could find the country on a map.

“I said yes, and he called out for aides to bring us a map of the world with no writing,” she said in discussing the encounter on “All Things Considered.” “I pointed to Ukraine. He put the map away. He said, ‘people will hear about this.’”

Pompeo ended Saturday’s statement by saying, “It is worth noting that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine.”

Nancy Barnes, NPR’s senior vice president of news, said in a statement that “Kelly has always conducted herself with the utmost integrity, and we stand behind this report.”