National Public Radio is a news service paid for by all taxpayers and, therefore, should belong to all people and reflect their views. Instead, it airs pure leftist partisan hackery and does not even try to hide it, taunting its detractors to do anything about it.
NPR can behave in this manner secure in the knowledge that, since it first hit the airwaves in 1971, weak conservatives in Congress have saved its bacon by resisting any move to defund it.
One could use any news report or feature, any time of any day, to illustrate NPR’s bias — even the weather (climate change!) or the traffic report (electric cars!). But let’s take NPR’s Sunday “fact check” of former President Donald Trump’s press conference a week earlier.
It was titled “162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-checks former President Trump,” which is about as demure a headline as NPR churns out these days.
So, pray tell, what were these lies and distortions that Trump supposedly told? Look into them, and you will find that Trump’s assertions may have been expressed in his signature style, which NPR may find grating, but who cares, but fall firmly within debatable opinion.
Judge for yourself. Here’s by no means a complete list:
“I think our country right now is in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in from an economic standpoint,” Trump said.
No, NPR countered. “The U.S. economy has rebounded from the pandemic downturn more rapidly than most other countries around the world,” said our public broadcaster, without mentioning that there was a 1,000-point single-day drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Aug. 5 sparked by fears, as the Washington Post put it that day , “of a slowing U.S. economy.”
NPR did come back to that to chide Trump for saying, “You saw the other day with the stock market crashing.” Tut-tut, NPR said: “The stock market did not ‘crash.’ The stock market fell sharply at the end of last week as investors fretted about a softening job market. This was amplified on Monday when Japan’s stock market tumbled 12%, sparking a selloff around the world.”
Or, take a look at when Trump turned to his new Democratic Party opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris:
“Kamala's record is horrible," he said. "She's a radical-left person at a level that nobody's seen.”
Not so, NPR harrumphed. “It’s debatable how liberal Harris is.” Yes, NPR conceded, “She’s clearly liked by progressives, and her voting scores as a senator are on the liberal end of the spectrum, but is she ‘radical-left’ and ‘at a level that nobody’s seen’?”
Oh, for Pete’s sake. Vote trackers consistently put Harris’s voting record in the Senate as extreme — GovTrack had her 96 out of 99 in 2018, to the left of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Back when the media could bring themselves to say the truth about her, even NBC News called her voting record “one of the most progressive in the U.S. Senate.”
And, finally, there was Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements:
“We’re very close to a world war," he said. "In my opinion, we’re very close to a world war.”
Nope. “No serious person thinks that the U.S., Russia, and China are about to start a world war … only Trump is talking about world war,” a flummoxed NPR said, managing to be, as in most of its answers, both churlish and obtuse.
Yet there are, in fact, two very troubling hot wars at the moment, one in Eurasia and one in the Middle East, in which two friends of the United States, Ukraine and Israel, have been attacked by two rogue regimes allied with one another: Russia and Iran, the latter primarily through its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah.
Add to that fears of a coming conflagration in the Far East, where a China emboldened by U.S. weakness is flexing its muscle against Taiwan, another U.S. friend. China is also in a loose alliance with Iran and Russia, not called the Axis this time, but BRICS.
Northeastern University , the American Enterprise Institute , and the Institute for Policy Studies are among those that have entertained the WWIII notion. The IPS is a very lefty outfit whose donor roll includes foundations that also shower money on NPR, including the Ford Foundation and the Foundation to Promote Open Society, associated with billionaire George Soros.
NPR gave the game away when it said it was “debatable” how liberal Harris was. If it was debatable, then it can’t be subjected to a factcheck.
NPR simply did this to further the Harris campaign theme that Trump is a liar. The lies were “more than two a minute.” It was a “stunning number … problematic for a person running to lead the free world.”
All speeches by politicians can be subjected to the same fatuous and pretentious sort of “fact-checking.” President Joe Biden, who has a long record of fibbing, just told CBS’s Robert Costa, for example, that his polling against Trump “showed that it was a neck-and-neck race, would have been down to the wire” — the first of many lies in that interview. Did NPR fact-check that? Nah.
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It would matter less, or not at all, if NPR were a private company. But it’s partially paid by you and me.
That has to stop. If whoever is in the White House in January 2025 fails to take action against NPR, it will fall to Congress to end this partisan farce at the taxpayer’s expense.
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Senior Fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation.
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