CEO Katherine Maher’s testimony adds to the argument against public subsidies we've made for years.
National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher has regrets. She should be grateful to the House Republicans who compelled her to express them during a subcommittee hearing last week on the thoughtless left-wing biases that flourished under her leadership.
During that hearing, Maher confessed that her outlet was “mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner.” That makes it sound as if NPR merely failed to give the story its due. Rather, NPR refused to cover the story at all so as to not “waste our time on stories that are not really stories,” as former NPR managing editor Terence Samuel put it. In addition, Maher admitted that her news-gathering institution lacked the requisite curiosity to explore the prospect that Covid originated in a Chinese lab — that is, until enough Democrats in good standing were willing to admit as much.
It was a damning performance, and Maher’s Democratic allies failed to muster a coherent response to it. In lieu of cogency, Democrats retreated to old talking points about how Republicans are blinded by their irrational hate for America’s partially taxpayer-funded public news outlets, NPR and PBS, because they just cannot tolerate the existence of family-friendly educational products.
If that sounds like a familiar tactic to you, we hope that’s due in part to our efforts to highlight the Democrats’ cynicism in their defense of these federally subsidized enterprises. We need your help to keep at it, which is why I’m asking for your contributions to our spring fundraising drive.
Indeed, cynicism may be too soft a word for the performance that NPR’s congressional allies put on last week. “Are Bert and Ernie part of an extreme homosexual agenda?” California Congressman Robert Garcia asked one witness. “Is Elmo now, or has he ever been, a member of the Communist Party of the United States?” Tough stuff, Congressman.
Democrats haven’t even bothered to update their rote defenses of the biased fare on offer from the likes of NPR and PBS. These are the same deflections that National Review dismantled 13 years ago. Indeed, the Republican lawmakers who cited Maher’s testimony as more evidence for why taxpayers should not have to pay for the privilege of being misled are advancing the arguments that NR has been making for years.
By the time veteran NPR journalist Uri Berliner blew the whistle on his institution’s reflexive biases in early 2024 — an act of dissent for which he was booted from his professional home of 25 years — his indictment read like a summary of our coverage of his employer’s blind spots.
When NPR assembled a team of “disinformation” reporters in 2022, NR’s Ryan Mills decided to highlight all the disinformation that NPR itself has happily broadcast over the years. NPR, for example, lent credence to the unfounded allegation that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis massaged statistics to embarrass blue-state governors. Curiously, NPR’s errors all lean in the same direction.
National Review has spent the past decade making the most comprehensive case for why taxpayers should not be forced to contribute to the promotion of an ideology they may not themselves support.
Contributor and American Enterprise Institute fellow Howard Husock observed that NPR’s geographic isolation in Democrat-dominated parts of the country contributes to its reporters’ insularity. Our own Kathryn Jean Lopez and Caroline Downey have highlighted its morally vacuous coverage of the abortion regime in the United States. George Leef made note of the outlet’s conspicuous hostility toward the capitalist enterprise. Jason Richwine dismantled NPR’s hopelessly biased effort to cover for Joe Biden’s refusal to enforce American immigration law.
And that was all before Berliner pulled back the curtain. Berliner’s acknowledgment of his employer’s systematic biases generated a wealth of reporting on and analysis of NPR’s partisanship. From Charles C. W. Cooke’s savaging of Maher’s robotic incantation of the tenets that guided liberals through their George Floyd–era moral panic to Jim Geraghty’s definitive assessment of NPR’s susceptibility to manipulation by sources with the right sort of politics, we’ve had the outlet’s number for a while. And they know it, too. Perhaps that’s why NPR attempted to smear our own Rich Lowry by initially accusing him of almost (yes, almost) saying a racial slur — a slander that NPR’s public editor felt compelled to call out as inaccurate.
As a National Review reader, you’re probably familiar with the mountain of evidence that amply justifies defunding NPR. What’s more, we’ve presented those facts to you in their clearest possible way. That’s what we do here: make the best possible argument for the conservative position without distorting the claims made by conservatism’s opponents. Our objective is to cultivate a movement that’s capable of persuading as many Americans as possible to support sane, rational, and morally upstanding policy. That project cannot succeed without your readership and your support.
Any amount you can contribute helps us to guide America’s political culture in a more conservative direction. We greatly appreciate your help in that, our shared mission.
