Critics Trot Out NPR’s History of Left-Wing Bias after Outlet Launches ‘Disinformation Reporting Team’

The announcement that National Public Radio is launching a reporting team to combat disinformation is being met with skepticism among conservatives and Republicans who have long accused the outlet of having a leftwing bias, including blatantly ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election.

On Friday, NPR’s executive editor, Terence Samuel, and editorial director, Nancy Barnes, sent a note to newsroom staff announcing that the outlet was launching a disinformation reporting team, and announcing the four staffers who will make up the team.

Conservatives and elected Republicans blasted the announcement online, stating that the NPR disinformation team should start by looking at NPR’s own reporting. Others snarkily compared NPR launching a disinformation team to the mafia launching a crime-fighting initiative.

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Tim Graham, executive editor of the media watchdog Newsbusters, is skeptical that NPR will focus much of its efforts on combatting left-wing disinformation. “Conservatives have the assumption that they won’t based on their record,” he said. Graham believes NPR will likely focus on disinformation of interest to its primary audience, upper-income liberals.

“They know who their audience is, and it’s not me,” Graham said.

Conservatives have long complained about what they see as blatant left-wing bias at NPR. The news outlet received intense scrutiny in 2011 after right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe, in an undercover sting, recorded NPR Foundation executives saying that the Republican Party had been hijacked by fundamentalist Christians and “seriously, racist, racist people.”

Much of the right-wing pushback on NPR’s disinformation team announcement centered on the outlet’s efforts to actively suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal ahead of the 2020 election.

After the October 2020 New York Post scoop, which reported on files and emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop – left at a Delaware repair shop – that detailed his financial dealings in Ukraine and China, Samuel publicly explained why NPR wouldn’t be publishing any stories on the scandal, a potential liability for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” Samuel said of the story, which turned out to be very real. “And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was . . . a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”

NPR has faced several other accusations of biased and inaccurate reporting in recent years. The outlet has been accused of downplaying voices who believe Covid-19 may have escaped from a Chinese lab, falsely declaring a scientific consensus about the effectiveness of masks at preventing the spread of Covid among school children, and highlighting false claims by Florida so-called whistleblower Rebekah Jones, who alleged that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and state health leaders had conspired to fudge the state’s Covid data.

In January, NPR’s legal affairs correspondent, Nina Totenberg, reported that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch refused a request from Chief Justice John Roberts to wear a mask on bench, allegedly to protect Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is diabetic. All three justices disputed the story, calling it “false.” NPR stood by it.

After the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe this month, NPR was accused of attempting to score political points by describing Abe as a “divisive arch-conservative,” which it later changed to “ultranationalist.”

NPR, like other mainstream media outlets, also has been criticized for pushing progressive cultural narratives and Left identitarian language. It has recently described women as “people who menstruate,” and uses the politically-correct “Latinx,” a term that most Hispanics don’t use to describe themselves, and that many find offensive. NPR recently ran a story about the skin color of emojis, tweeting that when white people use yellow-skinned emojis, thinking they are race neutral, it instead “signals a lack of awareness about white privilege, akin to society associating whiteness with being raceless.”

Last summer, after pressure from its young reporters, NPR loosened restrictions on its journalists and is now allowing them to participate in demonstrations and marches over controversial and polarizing issues. “Is it OK to march in a demonstration and say, ‘Black lives matter’? What about a Pride parade? In theory, the answer today is, “Yes,” according to an NPR story on its own updated ethics policy.

Former NPR CEO Ken Stern, writing in the New York Post in 2017, noted his belief that media bias is real, including at NPR.

“Most reporters and editors are liberal — a now-dated Pew Research Center poll found that liberals outnumber conservatives in the media by some 5 to 1, and that comports with my own anecdotal experience at National Public Radio,” Stern wrote. “When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate and what the narrative of the day will be.”