We’ve long felt that NPR and PBS have been biased, but in the last decade or so that bias has gotten out of hand. It’s not just that they’re liberal. They’ve taken on that specific kind of academic, identity-obsessed point of view that has been the main thing that has driven voters away from the Democrats.
I challenge anyone to listen to a single hour of NPR news programing — or much of the rest of their programs, for that matter — that does not include at least one (usually more) of the following:
- A story on transgender issues portraying them as victims and told from the point of view of rights activists.
- A story on immigration told from the point of view of immigrants as victims while being dismissive (if even mentioning) their legal status.
- A story on climate change told in a breathless — and sometimes ludicrously reaching — fashion. How is climate change impacting transgender immigrants?!
I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that at production meetings the first agenda item is: what’s our climate change story today, our transgender story and our migrant story? Sometimes, NPR and PBS will “balance” these stories by throwing in a quote from somebody right of center, but it’s an afterthought as in, “Yeah, we’ll touch that base so when we get accused of bias we can wave it around.”
I get more push back from my liberal friends about this than anything else. Either they just don’t hear the bias or they do and they defend it with something like, “but Fox News…”
There are two issues here. First, obviously, Fox News doesn’t get public funding. And second, one thing liberals used to stand for was unbiased reporting. They didn’t want to be told what they already believed. They wanted solid information that even ran the risk of changing their minds. They didn’t want to be told what to think. They wanted to do that for themselves. But recently, since the whole country has fallen into a fierce tribalism, too many liberals have abandoned their principles. If the other side does it, they want to do it too. They don’t want to be informed, they want to be armed to do (usually imagined) intellectual battle with the enemy.
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Taxpayers will no longer support a media executive who believes that the First Amendment is the “number one challenge” to advancing left-wing propaganda.
