Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Is NPR Too Liberal?

NPR’s decision to suspend senior editor Uri Berliner for five days after his online essay criticizing the network’s alleged liberal bias is not the first such controversy in the public broadcasting system’s history.

In 2010, for example, NPR cancelled commentator Juan Williams’s contract after comments about Muslims that he made during an appearance on the conservative Fox network. 

When people ask me as a former public media executive whether those who work there are mostly liberal, I always answer, “Of course!” The workforce at NPR and at member stations throughout the system tends to be well-educated — and well-educated people skew toward the liberal end of the political spectrum.

Beyond that, public broadcasting employees tend to be thoughtful people, interested in public policy, and supportive of social changes that hold the promise of making our democratic system more inclusive, diverse, and progressive.

Such tendencies can be easily mischaracterized as the kind of knee-jerk “wokeness” so decried by conservatives as a dangerous force in American culture. I’m not sure that such a danger actually exists, but if it does it comes nowhere close to rivaling the threat demonstrated by the Capitol rioters on Jan. 6th, 2021. 

Nevertheless, the critics’ point-of-view is worth taking seriously. 

Liberals, when they do achieve some measure of power, should always practice what they preach, and that definitely incudes tolerance for diverse points of view.

Which brings me back to the news hook for this column. I wasn't privy to the discussions leading up to Berliner’s suspension, but it certainly doesn’t make NPR look good. I read Berliner’s essay and found it to be a relatively mild critique of the network’s liberal bias through flawed coverage of three important stories. 

Whereas Berliner ascribes a liberal bias to the network’s failure to fully execute on those stories, and he may well be right, another view might be that these were routine journalistic failures, not political ones.

Either way, the leaders at NPR probably need to grow thicker skin when it comes to criticism from within their organization. Ideally they should welcome it, though I know that in real life that can be extremely hard to do.

Controversies over coverage happen not infrequently inside newsrooms, and I view them as healthy exercises. If I were running NPR, I’d probably hold out an olive branch to Berliner, with a gentle suggestion that the next time would he please try to keep the dialogue a little more inside the family circle.

Meanwhile, this very public controversy is already being seized upon by right-wingers to call for ending government support for public broadcasting, so let me be clear. NPR, whatever its flaws, is a national treasure. You can trust the journalism — it’s fair, balanced and relatively unbiased.

And at a time when our democracy is under serious assault, we need a healthy public media system now more than ever.

(I worked at NPR affiliate KQED in 1994-’5 and again from 2013-’19. Thanks to my friend and veteran journalist Bruce Koon for talking this issue through with me. He is of course not responsible for what I’ve written. That’s on me)

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