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.
Back in 2011, although NPR's audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren't just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America.
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.
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. 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. It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. What's worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don't practice those standards yourself.
Russiagate was not NPR's only miscue.
In October 2020, the
New York Post published the
explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. But it wasn't a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.
Politics also intruded into NPR's Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic.
Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren't about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. 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.
Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that "the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus."
https://www.thefp.com/p/npr...icas-trust
