The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Is NPR’s Popularity Waning, or Has Their Appeal Become More Selective?

Posted on | July 18, 2025 | 1 Comment

Excuse me for dropping a Spinal Tap gag in the headline, but I couldn’t help thinking of that line as Republicans in Congress voted to eliminate federal taxpayer funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which is the umbrella organization for National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). What put me in mind of Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith’s dishonest spin on the band’s declining concert attendance was the link-backs to NPR whistleblower Uri Berliner’s April 2024 exposé of the public radio network’s bias:

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. . . .
Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. . . . But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming. . . .
Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly reflected America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a smaller, progressive silo.
Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns. . . .

Read the whole thing. Not surprisingly, Uri Berliner got the ax at NPR after spilling the beans, because liberal media bias is like Fight Club — the first rule is, you can’t mention it, at least not if you want to be employed at an outfit like NPR. Media bias is structural and systemic in its nature, the result of hiring practices that exclude opposing voices, so that there is no one in the newsroom who doesn’t share the echo-chamber delusions that their one-sided coverage is fair and accurate.

Here again I’m reminded of Spinal Tap, where so much of the humor derived from the band members’ absurd lack of self-awareness. Nigel Tufnel is playing a quiet and moody piano part for Marty DiBergi, telling him that it was influenced by Mozart and Bach:

Marty: What do you call this?
Nigel: Well, this piece is called “Lick My Love Pump.”

 

Just as Nigel didn’t get what was wrong with that — and let’s not even talk about the cover art for their Smell the Glove album — so, too, do the folks in public broadcasting fail to understand what’s wrong with producing partisan propaganda on the taxpayer’s dime. Doubling down on Trump Derangement Syndrome, making Adam Schiff and his “Russian collusion” fantasies a regular feature of their news coverage — why would they do that? Or, more to the point, why would they not see what’s wrong with that? The answer, as Uri Berliner pointed out, was that everyone in the building shared the same bias. NPR’s boss at the time, CEO John Lansing, had declared diversity was the organization’s “North Star,” but that obviously did not extend to diversity of opinion:

Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.
So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.

The belief that the exclusion of Republicans from employment at NPR is random, rather than deliberate, is a “Lick My Love Pump” level of not getting it, and the current leadership is even worse:

On Thursday’s “CNN News Central,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher responded to accusations that NPR is biased by saying that the network has worked to address that criticism and they’ll “keep doing that work in order to both understand those criticisms, but also to ensure that we remain the nonpartisan organization that we are today.”

As might be expected, others in the liberal media have circled the wagons to defend taxpayer funding for such crap, with CNN’s Brian Stelter supplying this laughable headline: “Trump’s victory over PBS and NPR ‘bias’ will be ‘devastating’ for rural areas, station leaders say.” Oh, sure, it’s going to be “devastating” for rural folks in Kansas and Kentucky that they might lose access to a daily dose of what Katherine Maher thinks of as “nonpartisan” coverage. Now shut up and lick my love pump.



 

Shop Electronics at Amazon

Save on Groceries and Everyday Essentials

Shop Amazon Basics

Office & School Supplies

Category: Media Bias

Comments

One Response to “Is NPR’s Popularity Waning, or Has Their Appeal Become More Selective?”

  1. FMJRA 2.0: Playoff Season : The Other McCain
    July 27th, 2025 @ 1:50 am

    […] Is NPR’s Popularity Waning, or Has Their Appeal Become More Selective? EBL To Cap an Action-Packed Week of #Winning, Tulsi Nukes ‘RussiaGate’ EBL 357 Magnum […]