NPR Isn't Your Friend (Old Version)

How the "liberal" news outlet perpetuates the status quo and limits our vision of the politically possible.

not right propaganda

Note to readers: This article is an older, shorter version of a much more expanded critique of NPR that I wrote here. Please check out that newer piece for a more up to date and fleshed out argument. Thank you.

On November 16th, 2021, NPR produced a story about student debt cancellation that would have you believe that all is rosy with the world and that the people in charge are benevolent and have our best interests at heart.

The story, produced by Cory Turner - who has done some otherwise good reporting on improper student debt - focuses on the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. This program, administered by the Department of Education, was intended to erase the remaining student debt of borrowers who worked in public service for 10 years, as long as they made consistent “eligible” payments during that time. But the program was broken, with strict criteria for what constituted eligible payments, poor management on the part of the Department of Education and its loan servicing private contractors, and very low approval rates for debt cancellation, leaving many people behind who thought their service in the public realm would pay off in the form of debt cancellation.

It is very enlightening to listen to or read the NPR story in its brief entirety. The story is mainly composed of interviews with borrowers who recently had their student debts cancelled. The interviews are intended to be heartwarming, quoting one borrower as saying that he spread his joy “through the rafters at work” after he had $20,000 in student debt erased.

The story notes that, thanks to the easing of restrictions in the program, approximately 30,000 borrowers will soon have their student debt erased, totaling around $2 billion.

In a cutesy flourish, the story ends with one of the borrowers saying that she wishes the Education Department would now fix her favorite annually losing football team, the Cleveland Browns.

How inspiring.

But this story leaves out a lot of crucial context that makes these debt cancellations hardly worth rejoicing over on the part of the general public.

Firstly, the story fails to mention that these debt cancellations are being made over a year after Joe Biden promised “immediate” cancellation of $10,000 of student debt for every borrower as well as total tuition debt cancellation for every student making less than $125,000 a year who attended a public college or private HBCU. (He also promised that Covid-19 tests would be free and that any medical bills related to Covid-19 hospitalization would be covered.) None of these promises have been made good on.

The story fails to mention that Biden has the authority to order the Department of Education to abolish all student debt, while his spokesperson, Jen Psaki, claims that the avenue for such an action lies with congress, even though the administration knows full well that the current congress would never pass such legislation.

The story fails to mention that not only has Biden not cancelled any student debt as he promised he would, his administration also keeps telling borrowers to prepare themselves for when the loan payment pause expires, even in the face of an unabated pandemic and an inflation crisis that has been orchestrated primarily by monopolized corporations increasing their prices well above any increases in their costs - which of course disproportionately impacts the poor and working-class.

The story fails to mention that the Biden administration has refused to restore an Obama-era protection, that was rescinded under the Trump administration, that mandated for-profit universities to ensure that their students achieve a certain debt-to-earnings ratio, and if the university failed to meet that threshold then it would lose federal funding and its students would not be eligible to take out federal student loans.

The story fails to mention that the $2 billion of debt that has been erased so far under the recent changes to the loan forgiveness program pales in comparison to the recently approved 2022 military budget of $768.2 billion.

The story fails to mention that 42.9 million Americans owe a total of $1.57 trillion in student debt, while military spending since 9/11 has totaled over $14 trillion, with one-third to one-half of that total going to private mercenaries.

The story fails to mention that the US military preys upon student debtors as a way to keep their enlistment rates up by promising student aid.

The story fails to explain the broader context of the student debt crisis, which is essential for understanding how we got here in the first place and why our government chooses to trot out a mismanaged Public Service Loan Forgiveness program instead of just adequately funding universal education in the first place.

Here’s a quick recap. In 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California. He became popular by running against the radicalism of the student movements happening on University of California campuses, particularly UC Berkeley. Reagan understood that you could undercut a vibrant and politically engaged student movement by slashing government funding for colleges and student aid. Schools would then become more reliant on charging tuition, and students would become disempowered debtors. Reagan said that the state should not “subsidize intellectual curiosity.” He then went on to cut school budgets and the California legislature exempted professors from state employee pay raises.

Once Reagan became president in 1980, the effects of this callous ideology of austerity spread across the entire nation. Professor Devin Fergus notes that higher education spending was cut by about 25 percent between 1980 and 1985.

In raw dollar figures, cuts totaled $594 million in student assistance and $338 million in Pell grants…Effectively, these changes shifted the federal government’s focus from providing students higher education grants to providing loans.

These trends have continued unabated. Government funding for education has been steadily chipped away, causing colleges to rely more on draining their student’s pocketbooks and locking them into debt peonage for decades.

The current debt crisis is a result of policy. It is a result of our political institutions being utterly beholden to immoral corporate interests at the expense of the American people - as debtors who got an education in an attempt to improve their lives now find themselves unable to start a family, purchase a home, save for retirement, or do anything but work paycheck to paycheck just to stay afloat in an economy that is designed to destroy us. The crisis is the result of an elite class that refuses to recognize education as a public good in and of itself, and not a mere market commodity to be valued by how much a student’s wages or salary will be. All the while, we are told by the political and media class that debt abolition is not only politically infeasible, but morally wrong. As such, their claims to legitimacy are becoming thinner and thinner, and would be laughable if the effects weren’t so deadly serious.

This is the essential context and analysis that NPR fails to provide. But this particular student debt story is just one demonstrative example of how NPR functions as a state media outlet that consistently serves as a stenographer for power and capital.

This is the same NPR that defended their position of not using the word “torture” to describe the torture that was carried out by the Bush administration because:

the word torture is loaded with political and social implications for several reasons, including the fact that torture is illegal under U.S. law and international treaties the United States has signed.

Um, so, we should avoid calling something torture even though it’s torture because those who carried it out and ordered it to happen committed an international crime and we don’t want to sound like we’re accusing any powerful people of having committed a grievous crime. What a stunning and brave stance that is, NPR.

This is the same NPR that fired two journalists for daring to show up at Occupy Wall Street protests. Apparently that is an overt political statement that tarnishes the credibility of NPR. But what if one of NPR’s journalists trumpeted the war in Iraq? Would they have been fired for favorable bias towards imperial violence?

This is the same NPR that was openly hostile to the progressive Bernie Sanders movement and breathlessly reported that Russia was trying to help the 2020 Sanders campaign, without ever acknowledging in the story that those claims were leaked by the US intelligence community (an institution not exactly known for its benevolence or truth-telling, but is well-known for its long record of interference in the democratic elections of sovereign nations and in mass-murder campaigns carried out against its enemies) at a time when Sanders was ascendant in the polls.

This is the same NPR that reported on the Israeli assassination of a high-level Iranian nuclear scientist (Israel receives billions of dollars of funding every year from the US, by the way) without ever describing the assassination as an act of terror, but NPR’s Peter Kenyon did go so far as to describe it as a “belligerent act.” I would guess that if Iran carried out an assassination against an Israeli scientist, NPR would go beyond labelling it a mere “belligerent act.” This same story failed to mention that the US is hell-bent on ensuring that Israel maintains its sole moral right to exercise nuclear force in the region, and every other nations’ attempts at nuclear capability are illegitimate, a priori.

I should acknowledge that these critiques are primarily targeted at NPR itself, and not at the many local affiliates that are able to produce their own programming through local funding. (But it should also be acknowledged that NPR gets most of its funding from dues paid by local affiliates and from corporations.) My local station, KCBX, recently produced a good series of stories examining local farmworker labor. And KCBX also broadcasts more anti-establishment media voices such as FAIR’s CounterSpin, Democracy Now!, and Le Show.

But liberals who get most of their news primarily from NPR are getting a very particular view of the world that is antagonistic of anything that goes against mainstream orthodoxy. NPR relies upon the usual cast of establishment talking-heads, government officials, and corporate mouthpieces to help disseminate their talking points.

Most state-funded media, such as NPR or the BBC, neuters its coverage in order to appease those who fund them and in order to not overly offend state interests. They make appeals to “objectivity,” when all that means is adherence to mainstream, safe opinion and echoing of official statements. The claims of objectivity are merely thinly-veiled obedience to powerful state and corporate interests (which at this point in the US are one and the same.)

This is why you can have government-funded media outlets such as NPR cry foul over “state-run propaganda” outlets such as Russian Television, even though RT can produce a segment like this:

The above segment, with interviews of a former Pentagon official and a former Marine Corp Intelligence officer, can be critiqued for relying solely on the voices of former US military officials, but it nevertheless expresses a view that would never be countenanced or framed as legitimate on mainstream US media such as NPR. Namely that Iran, by seeking justice against the US for the murder of Qasim Soleimani, is advocating for the rule of law, something that the US abandoned long ago, and is accurately calling the assassination an act of state terror.

It is also worth pointing out that the entire media landscape has devolved into tribal echo chambers. Pew research found that 87% of NPR listeners are Democratic party members or lean that direction, and it’s even worse for the New York Times:

Liberals ought to keep in mind that NPR is but one viewpoint, a media outlet that is likely to cater to its liberal listeners interests, not an arbiter of objective reality. It is reliant upon particular funding revenues to maintain its business, much of which are corporate. And any entity that fires its employees because they refused to pay fealty to tribal orthodoxies is worthy of both skepticism and derision.

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As a side note, I argue for student debt abolition not because I have student debt (I don’t). I was lucky enough to attain a bachelor’s degree without having to take out any loans. I argue for student debt abolition because I recognize that it is the proper thing to do given the systematic gutting of our public institutions and the resulting burden being shifted to private individuals, all the while our military budgets never cease to increase and our government keeps Wall Street on life support while Americans are languishing in the streets. You can read more about my arguments here. You can also go support, and be supported by, the Debt Collective.