On Wednesday’s broadcast of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” NPR News Media Correspondent David Folkenflik discussed the congressional hearing on NPR and PBS and stated that the questions about bias in public media are being revived because Republicans want to cut things and “It is reflective of kind of this anti-press posture, particularly of the Trump administration.”
Folkenflik said, “So, this question about bias in public media was reignited by an Uri Berliner essay a year ago, he’s a longtime Senior Business Editor at the network. He left the network after posting an essay in The Free Press. In fact, that number, 87 registered Democrats, comes from a quick survey he did of people he could find who worked at NPR who lived in Washington, D.C. whose voter registrations he could find. Obviously, NPR has many hundreds of journalists, and so, this is sort of a way he drilled down on that, that NPR doesn’t necessarily affirm, is reflective.”
He continued, “But the reason it’s being revived now is that you have the Republicans in power, both houses of Congress and in the White House and they are looking to cut all sorts of things throughout government, all kinds of public programs. It is reflective of kind of this anti-press posture, particularly of the Trump administration. And public media is often an easy target because taxpayer dollars are involved, of course. And that can be whether there’s an episode of a children’s show on public television that featured a performer reading to children in drag or NPR’s own chief executive, her social media posts, well before she joined NPR, showing her often liberal and pro-Democratic beliefs.”
Folkenflik further stated that NPR CEO Katherine Maher said she “kind of regretted” many of her past posts, NPR’s newsroom is insulated from her influence, and conceded that the network mishandled some stories.
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