How to Fix NPR

Imagine what would have happened if a Muslim editor at NPR had accused the network of a pro-Israel bias. Imagine what would have happened if a transgender editor had accused it of being insensitive to transgender issues. Imagine how the network would have reacted if a female editor had charged that it was biased toward her male counterparts.

I can imagine. There would have been sensitive, carefully worded statements from management saying that these editors were “heard” and that there would be a commitment to do better. Committees would have been formed. Sensitivity training would have been mandated. Diversity consultants would have gotten contracts.

But when Uri Berliner wrote a thoughtful, balanced and insightful article laying out a very convincing claim that NPR had lost the public trust because it had been captured by, “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population,” he got the reaction I fully expected. Management immediately hit DEFCON One. They rejected Berliner’s claim out of hand and then they punished him. He was suspended for five days without pay.

You can read Berliner’s full piece here or my cribbed version here, but either way I think you would have to agree with me that Berliner makes a case that is detailed, convincing and, overall, quite fair to his employer and his colleagues. There is, in fact, a very obvious lack of what Berliner calls “viewpoint diversity” at NPR. He checked on the registrations of over 80 of his colleagues. There wasn’t a single Republican in the bunch. You really don’t see the problem there?

And it’s not just NPR management that is circling the wagons. Other liberal news outlets quickly framed the whole thing as a “conservative” attack. You can discount it because Donald Trump and conservative commentators have praised it. NPR host Michel Martin quickly adhered to the company line when she accused Berliner of, “blowing the place up, by trashing your colleagues, in full view of people who don’t really care about it anyway.”

She means conservative pundits and politicians. But I care about NPR. I’ve been a listener for over 40 years. And I’m no conservative. Berliner spoke for a whole lot of people who used to love NPR, still listen to as much of it as they can stand, and want to see it return to its glory days of solid, unbiased reporting. As a group, NPR listeners are curious people who want reliable information so that we can form our own views. We do not want to be part of a study circle.

If all this were happening at other liberal media outlets, like MSNBC or CNN, it would be bad enough. But NPR was established by Congress and tax money accounts for about a third of its budget. And here NPR is being less than honest because it claims that less than 1% of its funding comes from the government. The 1% is the direct funding it gets from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But it gets about $90 million through fees it charges to local public radio stations for programs such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

Those fees are federal tax dollars given to the local stations that are then required to turn them around and pay NPR. The local stations can’t use their federal grant money for any other purpose, like local news programming.

So, while I’m sympathetic to calls to defund NPR, simply cutting the direct federal payment won’t have any impact. A better solution would be to repeal the law creating NPR in the first place, revoke its tax exempt status and allow it to become just another biased, privately held media outlet, like MSNBC or FOX News.

If that seems too extreme, another good idea would be to simply allow the local stations to use their federal grants in any way they want. That would be a good thing because what’s really lacking is local news coverage. Frankly, we don’t need NPR to cover national and international events. There are plenty of other outlets that do that and many (AP, Reuters, etc.) that do it with much less bias.

Any kind of reform at NPR will face tough sledding. Democrats will resist any change. But Berliner’s piece has, at the very least, forced scrutiny on NPR, what it is, how it gets its money and whether it deserves the word “public” in its title.