NPR Is Not Your Friend

An examination of how the "liberal" news outlet targets a very narrow demographic and pays fealty to powerful interests while limiting our vision of the politically possible.

Note: You can watch a video version of this article here. A shorter version of this article was originally published by Current Affairs here (check out their other stuff, too). This is a much expanded version that takes a closer look at the biases of NPR’s news coverage by drawing upon a wealth of revealing examples. An earlier version of this piece originally appeared on Weird Catastrophe here.

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NPR is a problem. 

Now, to the good and proper leftists reading this, I’m sure many of you are already thinking, “Um, duh! NPR (Neoliberal Propaganda Radio) is a bastion of neoliberal groupthink and orthodoxy that gives cover to the worst of imperialism and corporate capitalism and it ought to disentangle itself from its corporate donors!” Very good, you can stop reading this since you obviously already know everything you need to know about the world, your ideology provides all the answers before the questions are even asked. By contrast, to the “basket of deplorable” right-wing readers who’ve found their way to this filthy rag, you may already be thinking, “Um, duh! NPR is an elitist, liberal propaganda cult that serves as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, is openly hostile to any conservative voices, and ought to be defunded!” Congratulations, you’re both kind of right, and both kind of wrong. 

NPR, originating like PBS from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was originally envisioned as an ad-free public service to all Americans, standing as an alternative to the privately owned commercial media. Yet, like much other media, NPR has become a product, a partisan news service with a sterile, professional tone that belies an underlying allegiance to a very narrow range of political viewpoints that are largely inoffensive to those in power. Today, NPR is stuffed with advertisements and mostly paid for by corporations and listeners who come from a very specific demographic: white, well-educated liberals. NPR receives relatively little in government funding these days. As a result of this shift in its funding and ethos, the outlet has come to exhibit some of the worst pathologies of our commercial mass media.

NPR is not our friend. Let’s take a closer look at why this is.

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NPR’s reach has grown considerably since its founding. Its programming (written news, audio, and video) reaches approximately 57 million people every week, while its flagship drivetime newscasts, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, are in the top 5 highest rated radio programs in the U.S., pulling in close to 15 million listeners per week. Needless to say, NPR has an enormous influence over the national conversation, particularly amongst its mostly liberal listeners. This is why it is so important to assess the kind of worldview that gets presented on NPR, which is anything but objective.

In a world full of overtly partisan outlets such as CNN, Fox, MSNBC, The Atlantic, Infowars, The Daily Wire, and many others, one might be tempted to think that NPR is a relatively moderate voice of reason amongst the sound and fury: a benevolent public service funded by the taxpayer; as friendly, essential, and innocuous as the Post Office.

NPR has “objective and balanced coverage.” That’s the assessment of Jack Mitchell, the first producer of NPR’s All Things Considered, who spoke with me recently about the evolution of NPR over the years. (He left the organization over 25 years ago and is now professor emeritus at University of Wisconsin - Madison.) Regarding the quality of NPR’s coverage, Mitchell said “it’s not that different from the tone of the New York Times.” (Sadly true.)

According to NPR’s own Ethics Handbook “Fair, accurate, impartial reporting is the foundation of NPR news coverage.” However, it is critical to understand that there is no such thing as impartiality in the media. The decisions made every day regarding what stories to cover, how much time to devote to a particular point of view, whom to talk to, whom not to talk to, and what tone and style should be employed when telling a story all represent subjective positions and points of view. Anyone who claims that their outlet is “objective” is high on their own fumes. NPR’s own Nina Totenberg concedes this point (She said: “Objectivity should never be confused with fairness. Nobody is purely objective. It is not possible. … What all of us are capable of is fairness.”).

Like all press outlets, NPR has a particular point of view. Its bias is just as profound as the likes of MSNBC or Fox News. But NPR is perhaps even more pernicious because it presents itself as a model of “objective” journalistic integrity and balance, posturing as an institution that is above all of the common rage-selling, opinionating, and infotainment. NPR’s bias is not simply left-leaning or right-leaning. Its coverage embodies a bias that is thoroughly of and in the service of the mainstream establishment, or what we might call the American bipartisan consensus.

Any view that does not adhere to this consensus or to received journalistic pieties, whether it comes from the left or the right, will be given short shrift on NPR. Regardless of whether a mainstream news outlet such as NPR dresses itself up in the accoutrements of the left or the right, it will generally prostrate itself before power, money, and the status quo.

What are some of the principal characteristics of the American bipartisan consensus? Firstly, entrenched, establishment media outlets such as NPR take for granted the dominant neoliberal ideology of our political and social discourse that has been ascendant since at least the Reagan and Thatcher era. The ideology of neoliberalism, a symptom of unrestrained capitalism, which seeks to conform every aspect of the society to the amoral dictates of the “free” market by any means necessary, including through calculated use of violence, is a poison that infects our culture, has little to nothing to do with the classical liberalism propounded by those such as Adam Smith, has no grasp of the cyclical nature of human history which contradicts its utopian delusions, and, as we are most concerned with here, has a predictable framework and expression in our media.

The American bipartisan consensus assumes that certain things are not to be the subject of serious public, or, for that matter, private, debate. An outlet such as NPR, staffed with true believers in the religion of neoliberalism, will generally give credence to the overarching system of capitalism; it will accept the tired principles of globalization, free trade agreements, and “free” markets; it will give tacit approval to the idea of meritocracy, that our economic system is not fundamentally flawed nor built on enforced inequality and class warfare, but rather that it is just in need of some tweaks here and there for everyone to thrive; it will pay fealty to official “authorities,” “specialists,” and credentialed “experts” and lend legitimacy to their pronouncements. NPR calls upon the usual cast of establishment talking-heads, government officials, mainstream thinktanks, and corporate mouthpieces to help “analyze” the daily news (read: disseminate establishment talking points). As citizen advocate Ralph Nader points out:

These news outlets seem oblivious to the blatant economic conflicts of interest inherent in groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and professors who moonlight with corporations. These interviewees have economic and ideological axes to grind that are not disclosed to the general viewers, listeners and readers, when they are merely described as “experts.”

A mainstream outlet such as NPR will implicitly accept the notion of American exceptionalism, having only credulity for the goodwill of Western militaries and states; it will give more emphasis to the crimes of official enemies of the outlet’s home state, such as Russia in the case of the U.S., while simultaneously downplaying or ignoring the crimes of its own state; and it will generally accept the notion that increased representation of racial and gender minorities within institutions is itself a form of justice and not what it actually is: a way for those institutions to co-opt whole categories of people to become complicit in their odious systems while conveniently leaving out the question of the need for a diversity of class, education, and ideology within those systems, not to mention a dismantling of those systems altogether.

As Mitchell put it:

[NPR] has no ideological diversity. They are allegedly going for a diverse audience by talking about [diversity] issues. But their audience has become no more diverse. There are really no more black people listening to NPR than there ever were, which is not very many...But they are really satisfying the academic liberals who love diversity. So being “diverse” is actually appealing more to the core NPR audience. It’s just reinforcing that audience as opposed to diversifying that audience.

This mainstream bias in media, an old problem, has more recently been attended by an extreme partisanization of audiences. According to 2019 Pew research data shown in the table below, NPR is the fourth most partisan network (in terms of listener partisan affiliation) behind MSNBC, Fox News, and the New York Times. The NPR listener base is also highly skewed toward the white, liberal, relatively young, and highly educated.

Eighty-seven percent of NPR listeners support the Democratic Party or lean that way. Sixty-eight percent of listeners are “college graduates +”, making NPR the second most skewed by education after the Times (Not coincidentally, many of NPR’s most prominent reporters are culled from the halls of elite universities. We’ll look more closely at the issue of homogeneity of education in the media a bit later.) As Michael P. McCauley puts it, rather smarmily I must say, in his book NPR: The Trials and Triumphs of National Public Radio, “a college education—and the mature set of values that comes with it—is the primary variable that predicts whether a person will listen to public radio.” Additionally, seventy-five percent of NPR listeners identify as white, only second to Fox News’ eighty-seven percent white.

“[NPR is] liberal, no question.,” Mitchell says. “But most listeners who listen to it don’t perceive that because they’re liberal too. And it seems right.” Mitchell characterizes the politics of NPR staff and listeners:

They are sympathetic to gay rights - 30 years ago before it was fashionable; Women’s rights; Black Lives Matter. This is all stuff that resonates with the socially liberal, college educated people who make up much of the Democratic Party and who make up much of the public radio audience. There is not much interest in major economic reform among those audiences. I mean, they’re doing pretty well themselves…I don’t think very many public radio listeners or staff really want to break up General Motors. Or break up Amazon. There’s not an economic liberalism that goes along with the social liberalism. And I’d say that’s true of the mainstream Democratic party… It’s that the comfortable audience doesn’t want to become economically uncomfortable. It’s just not something that burns in their souls: “What are we gonna do about economic reform? Corporate reform?” Antitrust - who talks about that anymore? Public radio was never radical. The New York Times was never radical. Mainstream media are not radical.

What Mitchell refers to here as radical is what I would call sensical and far past due antitrust enforcement that used to be standard practice, as well as an ability to see through the official lies of the U.S. state, but I’ll defer that point for now. He is correct in saying that the public is not radical. Given this, shouldn’t public radio reflect the mostly middle-of-the-road views that the great mass of the public has?

The problem with that framing is it leaves aside that mainstream media are not just moderate in their analysis (“moderate” being a code word for the acceptance of establishment orthodoxies and the dogma of the powerful, not a reflection of the views of the common man), they also have major blind spots in their coverage of power. There are major stories that corporate media give scant coverage to, which is a result of the structures of the press as an imbedded institution. These blind spots don’t reflect a moderate bias, they reflect an inability of the mainstream press to properly critique overarching structures by virtue of their assimilation into and dependence upon those very same structures.

Mitchell makes a good point about how most mainstream media outlets operate these days. He notes that media outlets have shifted toward a model of appealing to very particular audiences along cultural and ideological lines. Matt Taibbi explicates this same trend in his book Hate Inc: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. Taibbi writes that as Fox News cornered the market on the demographic of “55 to dead,” in the words of the late former network boss Roger Ailes, and became the most watched cable news station in the country, other outlets began following the same model of picking a political side that appealed to a particular population and sticking to it. The implications of this business model for a broad, well-informed citizenry are disastrous. Once a network starts picking political sides, if a particular issue cannot be blamed on either the left or the right, then who wants to tell the story? “If both parties have an equal or near-equal hand in causing a social problem, we typically don’t cover it,” Taibbi writes.

The bloated military budget? Mass surveillance? American support for dictatorial   regimes like the cannibalistic Mbasogo family in Equatorial Guinea, the United Arab Emirates, or Saudi Arabia? Our culpability in proxy-nation atrocities in places like Yemen or Palestine? The drone assassination program? Rendition? Torture? The drug war? Absence of access to generic or reimported drugs?
Nah. We just don’t do these stories. At least, we don’t do them anywhere near in proportion to their social impact. They’re hard to sell. And the ability to market a story is everything.

NPR is not at the same level as MSNBC or Fox News in terms of its commercial pressures, its tone, or its use of infotainment. NPR does do some stories on systemic issues, albeit within the general mainstream framework. But looking at the makeup of its audience, NPR is just as siloed off as any other corporate outlet. Once an outlet is reliant upon a homogenous audience and staffed with journalists who match that demographic, unspoken pressures are exerted on a newsroom to stay within the ideological bounds that are most comfortable to those demographics. NPR knows its audience and is likely to cater to its liberal listeners' interests.

McCauley, a former radio journalist, says that for public radio, this fixation on catering to the values of a particular audience is seen as necessary to its financial survival. “Audience research helped public radio fuse its programs more snugly to the values, beliefs, and attitudes of the people who tuned in (and pledged their financial support) most often,” he writes. 

Those who have worked in public radio such as McCauley and Mitchell recognize that no single radio station can try to serve the entire public. “Our media is so splintered that I’m not sure there can be a place that everybody trusts or feels confident in,” Mitchell said, “Because they’ll have lots of places that they can go to where they hear nothing that’s going to be bothersome to them. Why make yourself uncomfortable when you can be in a comfortable place? Be it Rush Limbaugh or NPR? Who wants to be uncomfortable? Who wants to be questioned?” 

Jack Mitchell, first producer of All Things Considered | UW-Madison/J.Miller

Over the years, then, NPR has essentially become a product specifically designed by its liberal, college-educated staff, paid for by its liberal, college-educated listeners, and sponsored by corporations who pay for access to that audience. NPR’s website for corporate sponsorship explains that “NPR has no list of sources from which funding will be refused,” and NPR has repeatedly defended its practice of accepting corporate sponsorships from the fossil fuel industry, including ExxonMobil and America’s Natural Gas Alliance. It has justified this practice on the grounds that “to impose a litmus test to accept or reject funding from an organization would create the appearance that NPR as a news organization has taken a position on the issues related to that organization” and NPR would no longer “be seen as fair and unbiased if someone inside the organization had decided that sponsorship from one side or the other was objectionable.” (NPR entices corporate sponsors in part by touting the “halo effect” that it can give to their reputation, meaning “the positive association and shared values that NPR listeners attribute to the companies that sponsor us.” If the effect is real, and NPR insists it is, then by their own admission they are funded in part by burnishing the reputation of the fossil fuel industry.) 

NPR’s leadership has fully bought into this kind of funding model, with corporate advertisements, once considered verboten, now being an accepted facet of NPR’s news programs. This reliance on securing corporate dollars using the lure of NPR’s “well-off” audience very much influences the programming decisions of the organization. NPR’s former president Delano Lewis once spoke to McCauley about the need to attract corporate dollars: “If you’re going to solicit money from corporations or foundations...they are interested now in your reach. They’re interested in the audiences that you serve, and the returns that they may see from reaching those audiences.” Some programs just don’t make the cut. In 1995, NPR canceled nine of its cultural programs, some of which were meant to serve minority audiences, and 20 people lost their jobs as a result. McCauley notes that Lewis “regretted the loss of these programs but said their small audiences attracted little in the way of badly needed private funds.”

In this sense, it’s difficult to see how NPR is capable of fulfilling its original mission to be an ad-free, noncommercial service operating chiefly in the interest of the diverse public. But that’s exactly what NPR was supposed to be.

The History of NPR: From Populism to Professionalism

The history of NPR starts in 1967, with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Public Broadcasting Act, which established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), under which NPR would be founded in 1970. In a speech in November 1967, Johnson made clear that the intention of the Act was for broadcasting to serve the public interest, as well as to provide education:

The Corporation will assist stations and producers who aim for the best in broadcasting good music, in broadcasting exciting plays, and in broadcasting reports on the whole fascinating range of human activity. It will try to prove that what educates can also be exciting. It will get part of its support from our Government. But it will be carefully guarded from Government or from party control. It will be free, and it will be independent—and it will belong to all of our people.

At the outset, NPR emphasized drawing from the voices of “the real people, not the experts,” Mitchell said. It was to “be representative of the entire country. The assumption was that all kinds of people would listen to this because all kinds of people were represented.” NPR’s first mission statement, the NPR Purposes, written by Program Director Bill Siemering, called for NPR to “celebrate the human experience as infinitely varied rather than vacuous and banal,” help citizens develop “a sense of active constructive participation [in society] rather than apathetic helplessness,” and “speak with many voices and many dialects.” 

Siemering had not been a journalist. His background was in educational radio. Mitchell recalls him as “a philosopher, a dreamer, a wonderful human being” who believed in featuring common people. “Siemering had said, ‘why do we always have to start All Things Considered with what happened at the White House today? Maybe somebody got a job in Philadelphia. And maybe that’s a big deal for that person. Why don’t we lead with that?’” McCauley notes that before NPR, Siemering had  opened “a storefront [radio] studio in a minority neighborhood, [that] helped residents communicate their interests and concerns to a wider audience.” McCauley writes that Siemering had a “1960s mentality” of wanting to “uplift the downtrodden masses,” and quotes the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Al Hulsen: 

I think there was a whole group of people, [and] Bill Siemering stands out among that group, that said, “There are resources all over the United States that can be tapped for national enlightenment”; that ideas are not restricted to the East Coast or Europe. They’re all over the world in the smallest places, in the biggest places. There are brilliant minds everywhere that could solve human problems, and put society ahead, and stop war.

For a time at the start, NPR prominently featured average people in its programming. Mitchell described “the early days” when they would call up people around the country, “observers,” such as a man named Charlie in Kansas and a “housewife” in Wisconsin, to get their opinions.

NPR used to have what they called “Sound Portraits,” interviews with everyday people talking about their occupations, from mechanics to balloon salesmen. “Real voices,” Mitchell calls them.¹ Mitchell also recalls NPR’s method of covering a strike at a Chevrolet plant in Ohio, with potentially unpredictable on-air results. “So we got the phone number of the telephone booth in the lunchroom at Lordstown. We called it, and whoever answered the phone, we talked to them.”

But, as Mitchell admits, Siemering’s vision was “highly romantic” and “not terribly realistic… No radio service serves everybody.”  At the same time, “I thought we were an alternative to the mainstream media,” Mitchell said in an interview with Current. “By 1978-79, about the time that Morning Edition began, NPR made a real major change of pace to move from being an alternative to being competitive. That I did not anticipate.” 

Around 1976, taking the advice of private consultants, NPR decided to become more “respectable” and professional, giving voice to experts instead of average people and hiring more people with journalism backgrounds to staff its programs. The goal was to become the “best journalistic organization it could be,” says Mitchell. “The aspirations of the staff were to become respectable. So we had this conflict between the ideal that had been laid out by Siemering…and the desire of many of the staff to be mainstream.”

As this conflict came to a head, Mitchell left NPR along with the rest of the top management. A “liberal Democratic journalist,” as Mitchell describes Frank Mankiewicz, was brought in to reorient the stations as NPR’s new president. “He didn’t even care about any of that Siemering stuff. He just wanted to be the best.” As such, NPR “became overwhelmingly a very good mainstream operation,” Mitchell says.

Perhaps partly due to this mainstream shift, NPR has been able to cultivate a “very elite, good audience…a rather well-fixed, rather comfortable audience who would be willing to pay for it,” Mitchell says. Essentially, public radio sells that audience to corporations. Today, public radio listeners and private corporations make up most of the funding for NPR. Corporate sponsorships comprise the largest portion of NPR’s revenue, totaling around 37 percent of its total budget.

As Mitchell points out, there are two reasons NPR doesn’t need government money anymore: NPR gets a lot of private money, and “government never came through anyway.” McCauley wrote in 2005 that because “the amount of federal money earmarked for public radio has dwindled to about 14 percent of the industry’s annual budget (33 percent if you include money from state and local governments)” and “income from private sources such as pledge drives and corporate underwriting accounts for a little more than half of the funding mix … America’s public radio system must, as a matter of survival, focus its programming and fund-raising efforts on the highly educated…audience that covets its programs most.” 

NPR was originally funded entirely by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That funding was significantly cut under the Reagan administration. The bulk of the funding was then shifted onto the backs of the local public radio stations and their listeners’ wallets, as those stations now had to pay for access to NPR programming. CPB later received a 25 percent cut during the Gingrich-led Congress of the 1990s. (NPR has been a longtime target for defunding by the right-wing. President Trump threatened to cut funding for CPB in 2020. In the warped political spectrum of the U.S., any media outlet that is not Fox News is considered rabidly left-wing.) Facing decreasing funding from the federal government, instead of lobbying Congress for guaranteed taxpayer dollars, in 2003 NPR’s then-president Kevin Klose secured a bequest of $225 million from Joan Kroc, heiress of the McDonald’s fortune. (NPR journalist Susan Stamberg joked about changing her name to Susan McStamberg.) It was this infusion of cash into NPR’s endowment which helped it to expand its news staff across the country and around the world. This is how our “public services” stay on life support, not through universal public funding, but through the whims of private philanthropy.

McCauley is blunt in defending NPR’s shift to serving educated elites and declining to produce programming that speaks to, or is spoken by, the disenfranchised, citing the superior market performance of the existing model: 

Many of NPR’s leftist critics assume that public radio should promote the interests of society’s disenfranchised groups, thereby helping them to gain a wider voice … [The] logic fails on a number of counts. First, radio has become a narrowcast medium in which individual stations thrive by “superserving” discrete segments of the overall audience… If Pacifica [Radio] is committed to serving disenfranchised groups, there is no logical compulsion for National Public Radio to do the same. (NPR airs many stories and programs about these groups, phrased in a manner that speaks to the sensibilities of its core listeners.) If NPR stations offered something for everyone in their daily schedules, their overall appeal for current listeners would drop markedly… 

(Speaking just for myself, I don’t necessarily need NPR to “promote the interests of society’s disenfranchised groups.” But I do need it to stop promoting the interests of our collective oppressors by treating every powerful U.S. official with kid gloves as if they are an oracle and a representative of a legitimate government and therefore worthy of respect.)

Mitchell doesn’t see NPR going back to the way it used to be, when shows took calls of average listeners. He said: “People say their predictable things without real clash of opinions. … I’m an overly educated university person, just like most of [those who work at NPR]. … Universities should be about debating ideas. … Real debate doesn’t happen on public radio, and I wish it would.” NPR’s Talk of the Nation, which did receive audience calls and emails, as limited and screened as they were, was canceled in 2013. (NPR officials said the decision was part of a “move away from opinion and toward straightforward storytelling.” Who gets to tell the stories?) 

Mitchell adds that presenting opposing points of view is of interest to the general public according to the Fairness Doctrine, established in 1947, which, as explained on the Nader Radio Hour, “required licensed radio and television broadcasters to present fair and balanced coverage of controversial issues of interest to their communities.” In 1987, the Reagan administration rescinded the doctrine, which helped lead to the partisanship we see today on the airwaves and on social media.

Furthermore, as Nader laments, NPR’s airtime is increasingly intruded on by advertisements:

What started as a ‘‘just a little bit of commercial sponsorship,’’ when Congress got tight some years ago, has now gone wild. Do we really need to be reminded that ‘‘support for this station (or for NPR) comes from x, y, z contributors,’’ about thirty times an hour? Mind-numbing, hour after hour!

Ultimately, as the CPB notes on their website, NPR is a “private-public partnership in the best tradition of America’s free enterprise system.” And that is exactly the problem. NPR has become a product of the free enterprise system rather than a truly public service which could bring listeners ideas that do not receive airtime on privatized media (ideas that also might happen to challenge that same free market system).

How NPR Operates

Let us now take a closer look at a few key issues which help demonstrate NPR’s mainstream bias. Broadly, these issues are:

• NPR’s warped view of “impartiality” in journalism

• Its deference to Democratic Party ideology

• Its ideological proximity to powerful institutions, which limits the scope of its news stories and precludes a political vision that might challenge the dominant ideologies of neoliberalism and militarism

• Staffing choices that match the larger trend of upper-class elitism and professionalization in journalism

First, let’s examine how NPR’s appeals to impartiality result in their journalists becoming, what I call:

The Dispassionate Robots of NPR

NPR has an ethics handbook that, on its face, seems intended to ensure that no NPR employee engages in partisanship, unfairness, or what could be considered impropriety, but in reality has the effect of turning NPR reporters into dispassionate, status quo selling robots who legitimize some of our worst institutions.

We can look, for instance, at the particular words NPR chooses to use when telling a story. NPR’s ethics handbook says: “We avoid loaded words preferred by a particular side in a debate. We write and speak in ways that will illuminate issues, not inflame them.”

Well, this certainly didn’t help NPR “illuminate” one of the key facts of America’s war on terror. In 2009, NPR defended their position of not using the word “torture” to describe the torture that was carried out by the CIA and the military under 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.

So, out of a desire not to inflame or use words with “political” implications, 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.

NPR’s ombudsmen Alicia Shepard went even further in response to backlash that they received from listeners, stating that, “the bottom line is, whether waterboarding is torture is still a matter of political debate, even if some listeners don't agree.” Truly shocking. It is not just “some listeners” that don’t agree. It’s also Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The Committee Against Torture, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. 
What a morally unreliable robot Alicia Shepard is. Look a Guantanamo detainee or an Abu Ghraib survivor in the eyes and tell them that what happened to them can’t be definitively said to be torture because it’s still up for political debate. What a joke.

Avoiding “loaded words” means that NPR will not call torture, torture. It will not call the apartheid state of Israel - a key U.S. ally - the apartheid state of Israel despite the judgments of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories. NPR further defers to Israeli interests by never using the “State of Palestine” label for the State of Palestine. The NPR style guide’s entry on Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem says: 

Do not use words like disputed or controversial. While these are not wrong, they are inflammatory, and any word is going to be disagreeable to someone. Just say East Jerusalem, West Bank, settlement, without descriptives.

So NPR journalists cannot even say the Israeli settlements are controversial (they are), let alone that they are illegal.

NPR will not say that the U.S. war in Iraq was a criminal invasion. NPR will not dare to call figures such as Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Barack Obama what they clearly are: war criminals that must be brought to justice for the countless deaths they have on their hands. It will not call the CEOs and the Wall Street tycoons who orchestrated the financial crisis with its resulting millions of foreclosures, firings, and erasure of savings accounts as what they truly are: thieves that are walking around scot free with our money. Avoiding “loaded” language does not mean that you are being fair and balanced. It means that you are perpetuating injustice in service of powerful, venal human beings. 

NPR also prides itself on being impartial but it has an odd definition of “impartiality” in practice. Take for instance this excerpt on impartiality from the handbook:

We avoid speaking to groups where the appearance itself might put in question our impartiality. This includes situations where our appearance may seem to endorse the agenda of a group or organization…

Well, that rule didn’t stop NPR’s Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin or NPR’s Juan Williams from speaking at the CIA on separate occasions upon the intelligence agency’s invitation. During his talk, Williams even went so far as to call CIA employees “the best and brightest,” and said that Americans admired the CIA and trusted it “to guide the nation and the nation’s future.”

This is the same NPR that fired two employees at affiliate stations for daring to just show up at Occupy Wall Street protests. Apparently that is an overt political statement that tarnishes the credibility and “impartiality” of NPR. But being a guest speaker at the CIA is no problem.

Journalists are considered impartial and are allowed to give talks to intelligence agencies so long as they go along with nationalist cant and cheer for the proper team, in this case the foreign-affairs-interfering, coup d'état-doing, domestic-surveilling, press manipulating, warmongering, torturing, and genocidal CIA. But if you express your opposition to those same war-mongering institutions, now you’re being partial. Truth and justice are of minor concern for establishment journalists in comparison to “impartially” applauding our permanent, un-petitionable state within a state, the intelligence agencies.

It does not matter what the pretext of the invitation is. If you, as a journalist, are invited to give a talk at the CIA and you do anything short of get your hands on secret documents and throw a Molotov cocktail into the office of the CIA Director, then you are participating in mutual oral sex between yourself and CIA personnel. In other words, you’re not being a journalist, you’re being an obsequious bootlicker and servile courtier of power.

This is the same NPR that admonished its longtime commentator Cokie Roberts for having the gall to write a piece that was openly critical of Donald Trump before he received the Republican nomination for president in 2016. So it’s not okay to publicly criticize a presidential candidate, but it’s totally fine to lie by calling torture “enhanced interrogation” on air.

NPR’s ethics handbook says: “Fair, accurate, impartial reporting is the foundation of NPR news coverage.” This “impartiality” does not engender trust in journalism. It engenders righteous scorn for an institution that gives cover to our oppressors by refusing to accurately call things what they are. What NPR describes as their standard tone of cordiality, Nader more accurately describes as “commercialism and amiable stupefaction.”

When NPR claims that it is maintaining journalistic integrity by adhering to notions of “impartiality,” what it means is that it is choosing to speak in inoffensive tones that are perfectly acceptable to elites; it is choosing to defer to the neoliberal, status quo establishment powers and consensus by refraining from using adversarial language in its news coverage. Such an approach is particularly bad for foreign policy coverage.

Take a recent example: the protests in Iran after the death of a Kurdish woman who had been taken into police custody for allegedly failing to abide by the dress code for women. According to the Guardian, witnesses say she was beaten by the morality police. NPR’s choice of words about the protests? The Iranian protests are about “personal freedoms, the economy, the environment.” The word “sanction” appears nowhere in the NPR article even though Iran has been under some form of sanctions by the U.S. since 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution (with brief pauses during the Obama and Bush years for humanitarian crises and as part of the nuclear deal, which Trump then withdrew from). Might U.S. sanctions have something to do with the “economy”? World Socialist Web Site more accurately describes the situation: “The protests are being fuelled by a rapidly deteriorating economic crisis, produced above all by the devastating impact of a brutal sanctions regime enforced by the imperialist powers that is tantamount to war.”

Another thing that NPR claims to pride itself on is its attempts to hear from diverse voices. According to NPR’s ethics handbook:

Hearing from a variety of people makes our journalism stronger and more complete. In our reporting, we seek various perspectives on an issue, as well as the evidence supporting or countering each one. We try to understand minority viewpoints as well as those of recognized authorities; we don’t ignore perspectives merely because they are less popular.

Yet in the very next paragraph, NPR admits it will give more coverage to those in power:

Those individuals whose roles give them an outsized influence in how events play out will necessarily receive more attention in our news coverage. But it’s important for our audience to hear from a variety of stakeholders on any issue, including those who are often marginalized.

So much for treating our friendly neighborhood balloon seller as equally worthy of airtime.

The mainstream journalistic “respect” for different viewpoints usually only refers to liberal or conservative viewpoints, left or right. But just thinking in those terms of left vs. right is more obfuscating than it is clarifying. Firstly, these shallow and increasingly un-useful terms gloss over key areas where anti-establishment thinkers of the “left” and the “right” are in agreement, such as in the belief that the dominant institutions of power are far past due for an overthrow. NPR’s claims of recognition of both “minority” views and “authorities,” their “understanding” of liberal and conservative perspectives, actually excludes most other political viewpoints out there, particularly ones which are adversarial to the kind of mainstream model that NPR represents. It is difficult if not impossible to find National Public Radio giving fair hearings to any members of the public who articulate views that are considered to be from the political wilderness. Where are the public anti-imperialists, socialists, anarchists, communists, fascists, fundamentalist pastafarians, radical environmentalists, eco-terrorists, black nationalists, pan-africanists, or anti-state militants being asked what they think about current events? NPR’s “impartiality” does not have much room for non-mainstream voices. Many perspectives actually do get ignored on NPR.

The typical commentary we usually get on NPR is something like an interview with a dismal member of the U.S. State Department followed up by a counterpoint offered by an employee of a U.S.-funded think tank. How enlightening. Actually, why even go through the trouble of interviewing such people? A chimpanzee would be able to predict what the State Department’s stance will be on any given issue. Let’s get the chimp to write up a transcript responding to the latest Israeli war crime and have Mary Louise Kelly read it on air. (“We support an investigation and we’ll follow the facts.”) Job well done. Just make sure the chimp doesn’t try to insert any follow-up questions to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on how the U.S. is actually going to hold Israel accountable for the murder of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh now that Israel has finally admitted it is responsible for her death.

NPR is subject to the same inertia, consensus-seeking, tone moderation, and nationalist deference to state, capital, and military interests as any large corporate media outlet, all the while claiming that it is balanced, above it all, and not in any way influenced by its underwriters.

NPR’s Deference to the Liberal Class and the Democratic Party

NPR’s audience and staff is composed overwhelmingly of college-educated liberals, the same demographic that dominates the Democratic Party. As Thomas Frank explains in Listen, Liberal:

Today, the Democrats are the party of the professional class. The party has other constituencies, to be sure—minorities, women, and the young, for example, the other pieces of the ‘coalition of the ascendant’—but professionals are the ones whose technocratic outlook tends to prevail. It is their tastes that are celebrated by liberal newspapers and it is their particular way of regarding the world that is taken for granted by liberals as being objectively true.

NPR’s coverage will generally frame things in ways that do not go beyond the bounds of the Democratic Party line. For example, in a discussion between NPR’s Mary Louise Kelley and Mara Liasson, the two poo-pooed Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign with uninformed opinions presented as fact. Most glaringly, they stated confidently that Sanders’ progressive policy proposals such as Medicare for All are “unpopular” even though consistent polling shows that they actually are popular. This undermining of Medicare for All falls in line with the official Democratic Party platform which emphasizes expanding “access” to private health insurance, not universal socialized medicine.

Piece after piece on NPR mocked Sanders’ electability prospects despite his campaign’s record-breaking small-dollar donations, polling which showed he fared better than Trump, that significant numbers of people who voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary went on to vote for Trump and would do so again in 2020, and that Biden looks and sounds like he needs to be hooked up to life support.

NPR breathlessly reported that the Russian government was trying to help the 2020 Sanders campaign, without ever acknowledging in that story that those claims were strategically leaked by the U.S. intelligence community (an institution not exactly known for its benevolence or truth-telling, but is well-known for its long record of interference in democratic elections, both foreign and domestic, and in mass-murder campaigns carried out against its enemies) at a time when Sanders was ascendant in the polls. That NPR story also relied on an analysis of the Russian-funded outlets RT and Sputnik. The analysis found, shockingly, that Sanders was mentioned more positively than other candidates by those outlets. How awful. One wonders what biases would be found by a similar analysis of Voice of America or CNN.

The establishment bias against Sanders, embodied by NPR, is in accordance with the corporate-friendly Democratic Party’s corruption in rigging the 2016 primary against Sanders. The Democratic Party and the corporations that support it would rather have Trump in the White House than a democratic socialist, they would rather have loyal apparatchiks, accountable to moneyed interests, than leftists who are actually accountable to the citizenry. And these puppet masters are the voices that predominate on NPR.

NPR’s bias towards the mainstream of the Democratic Party also serves to obfuscate the true function of the party: a hypocritical organization, masquerading as a rival to the Republicans, that is, in fact, a full partner with the Republican Party in selling out the vulnerable to the whims of capitalism and imperialism and which clings to its rotten power, built atop the desiccated corpse of our republic, at a ghastly price that our countrymen are only faintly beginning to apprehend. The two dominant American political parties are two sides of the same capitalist’s coin. Treating them as true rivals is either disingenuous or deluded.

NPR also consistently gives cover to what some would call the “ineptitude” of the Democrats but what I would call actions by design. In a recent story about President Biden’s dismally low popularity, NPR’s Domenico Montanaro blames Biden’s poll numbers on Senator Joe Manchin’s “obstruction.” Manchin, assiduously serving as the “rotating villain,” is a perfect excuse for a conservative figure such as Biden to throw up his hands and say that he can’t accomplish any promised progressive proposals that he had no intention of making happen anyway, while reporters such as Montanaro give credence to the notion that Biden has his hands tied by lack of cooperation within his own party. The story also notes that there is talk of a Democrat besides Biden running for president in 2024. Who does Montanaro list as potential candidates? The even more unpopular Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. Who isn’t mentioned? Bernie Sanders. Our vision of the politically possible is thereby occluded by NPR.

As media critic Normon Solomon put it, to the extent that NPR is balanced, it is “ideologically balanced between the views of the Gingriches and the Clintons.” And, perhaps more to the point, as professor Robin Andersen put it in a piece criticizing Kelley’s and Liasson’s discussion of Sanders on NPR, the ignorance that undergirds the majority of analysis that is presented on NPR “is willful, and finds its roots in a profoundly ideological position, an ideology adopted by journalists who favor and are rewarded by corporate arguments promoted by corporate Democrats.” Spoken like a true Naderite.

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This concept of who gets rewarded in mainstream media and who gets pushed aside is essential to understanding why certain worldviews receive widespread airtime and others do not. Those who succeed in the business of establishment journalism, and NPR is in no way immune from the degrading effects of the corporatization of journalism, woefully dependent as NPR is on corporate dollars, syndication fees, and intrusive on-air ads touting their donors, are journalists who know what the acceptable boundaries of speech are and obediently stay inside them. Trouble makers don’t succeed. They are marginalized, asked to leave, or fired.

The contention here is not that NPR reporters who stray from corporate friendly, neoliberal doctrine have someone from on high overtly censoring their speech. Such authoritarianism is not required for effective thought control. Rather, those who follow popular consensus and are able to articulate positions held by the elite class are rewarded with successful careers, primetime host positions, and various accolades, whereas those who stray from the righteous path and antagonize popular consensus are assigned to cover Elks Lodge events.

In one demonstrable case, journalist Chris Hedges was ousted from The New York Times for the crime of making public statements against the horrific U.S. invasion of Iraq. Hedges bluntly describes the kind of grooming that occurs in establishment newsrooms:

Careerists pay lip service to the stated ideals of the institution, which are couched in lofty rhetoric about balance, impartiality and neutrality, but astutely grasp the actual guiding principle of the paper, which is: Do not significantly alienate the corporate and political power elite on whom the institution depends for access and money. Those who master this duplicitous game do well. Those who cling tenaciously to a desire to tell the truth, even at a cost to themselves and the institution, become a management problem.

This kind of filtering ensures that a certain kind of ideology, disguised as being “objective,” will remain ascendant in influential establishment newsrooms, while divergent views will be shunted aside. Eminent scholar and general pain in the ass to neoliberal ideology, Noam Chomsky, describes this same phenomenon to a BBC reporter here:

“I don’t say you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky explains, “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. What I’m saying is if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

It is incredibly important to have a skeptical eye towards any media outlet, particularly when an outlet claims that it does everything it can to be “impartial” and “balanced.” Take a close look at the quality of their coverage and find out what perspectives are not being aired.

Go ahead and search for “NPR Noam Chomsky,” or “NPR Ralph Nader.” You will find that these two stalwart, well-respected experts who often challenge corporate and military power and who have long histories of public service are rarely given any airtime let alone discussion of their ideas on the “liberal” NPR.

You will also find that Chomsky had a review of one of his books preemptively taken off the air by a higher up at NPR. And how ironic it is that NPR, which owes its very existence to the advocacy of Ralph Nader and others in getting Congress to pass the bill that founded NPR, will rarely bring Nader on the air to discuss the corporate control of government and many other consumer protection issues concerning the American public which Nader is well-versed.

NPR’s Apologetics for Neoliberalism and How It Gives No Sense of History

NPR gets consistent criticisms from listeners about the lack of context they bring to news stories. NPR’s constant refrain in defence is that “radio reporter pieces and live interviews are bound by strict time limits, which sometimes leaves audience members frustrated at the lack of context included. Time is tight. A two-minute story can cover the day's news, but does not allow for an explanation of the contributing factors of the last 50 years.”

That is just an okay argument if there was scant context furnished in a small minority of stories. But when a preponderance of radio stories only look narrowly at an issue and give no broader context, then what is presented on air is an unreality that fits quite well within the dominant neoliberal framework and serves powerful factions that would prefer for people to have blinders on. NPR’s argument also fails to contend with the idea that maybe NPR news coverage should shift away from their self-imposed “strict time limits” giving only shallow sound bites about every single issue in a news cycle and instead towards more fully exploring a topic and giving airtime to substantive debate. As Nader points out, “very important subjects, conditions and activities not part of [NPR’s] frenzied news feed are relegated to far less frequent attention.”

Let us look at a few topics where NPR leaves out a lot of essential information.

Student Debt

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. People even resorted to Reddit for all kinds of advice and support on how to navigate the system.

The NPR story, in its brief entirety, is a textbook case of how the outlet leaves far too much on the table. 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 remaining student debt erased like the program was supposed to do, totaling around $2 billion (a mere fraction of the trillions of dollars of total student debt, unmentioned by NPR). The story says that some borrowers are also getting refunds for payments they made past the point at which the loan should have been erased, with one borrower using the refund “to help her young twins avoid college loans someday.” The story elides the fact that that money should never have been paid to the government in the first place. It also makes no mention that college loans could be avoided by simply publicly funding higher education to the point where tuition is either affordable or nonexistent like it broadly used to be in the U.S. and how it currently is in many other nations. According to Pew, 63 percent of adults favor such a policy.

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

How inspiring.

Another student debt story was written by NPR’s same Cory Turner about a program that was intended to put low-income borrowers on track to getting their loans cancelled so long as they made qualifying payments based on their income levels. The program was found to be woefully mismanaged, a consistent theme, with various contracted loan servicers keeping very shoddy records and being unable to properly track loan payments. A report from the National Consumer Law Center found that “4.4 million borrowers had been repaying for at least 20 years but only 32 had had loans canceled under [the income-based repayment program].” Emphasis mine.

This NPR story does a good job of highlighting the broken income-driven repayment program. But it does not explicitly connect the problems of the program with the simple fact that the government contracted out loan servicing obligations to private entities, a staple tactic of neoliberal regimes that consistently fetishize the supposed “efficiencies” of privatization. The story had no mention of the broader historical context of consistent federal defunding of higher education and it gave short shrift to the concept of universal debt cancellation. The only mention of student debt cancellation came at the end of the story with Turner relying on a “he said, she said” formula, giving the last word to a U.S. representative who is opposed to student debt cancellation. Tellingly, the on-air version of this story, which was given only 3-minutes on NPR’s Morning Edition, completely cuts out any mention of the demands for universal student debt cancellation, instead ending with a boilerplate quote from the Department of Education about how they will do better next time.

NPR produced another story on the recent extension of the student debt payment pause where Ailsa Chang interviewed Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.

Cardona, who speaks less like a Secretary of Education and more like a robot that has been programmed to use the filler “you know” at least once every other sentence in order to make him sound like a vague, stilted, unsure robot, was given little pushback by Chang regarding the exigencies of the student debt crisis. To be fair, trying to pin down a script-reading, nebulous, prevaricating actor such as Secretary Cardona isn’t easy to do live on air. But the best way is to keep it simple. Just ask him, “Why hasn’t the Department of Education just cancelled $10,000 of student debt for every borrower nor cancelled total tuition for every borrower making less than $125,000 a year who attended a public college or private HBCU as President Biden promised he would do?”

Of course Cardona will try to worm his way out of that one using his best PR speak just as he did with all the other questions. But at least he will have had the words of his own administration thrown back in his face on air. Instead of giving pushback, Chang wonders why more student debtors aren’t making payments while interest is paused, “which you would think is exactly when borrowers would want to be paying off their loans.” Such a ridiculous presumption, that debtors don’t have better things to do with their money like save as much as they can during a pandemic and a corporate-devised inflation crisis, is representative of an out-of-touch bias by NPR in favor of elite interests. 

Chang then asks, “Do you worry that the mixed messages this administration is sending about possible debt cancellation further down the road is maybe causing people not to pay down their loans?” Let me give a whack at fixing that broken question. Why would debtors pay off loans if the president wasn’t lying when he said he would cancel student debt? Why would debtors pay off loans when debtor unions are doing the government’s job by cancelling loans themselves and advocating for universal higher education?

These student debt stories all conveniently leave out a lot of crucial context that is unflattering to the powers that be and which makes these debt cancellations and pauses hardly worth rejoicing over on the part of the general public. These stories fall into the genre of stories that focus on a “good” thing happening but then never question why the “good” thing had to happen in the first place. Let’s fix that.

Firstly, the stories leave out a lot of details that reflect poorly on the Biden administration, details which put the lie to any claims that the administration is “progressive.” They fail 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, ha-ha.) None of these promises have been made good on.

These stories fail to mention that Biden has the authority to order the Department of Education to abolish all student debt, while his former spokesperson, Jen Psaki, continuously claimed 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 debt relief legislation.

These stories fail 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 a continuing pandemic and an inflation crisis that has been orchestrated primarily by monopolized corporations increasing prices well above any increases in their costs - which disproportionately impacts the poor and working-class.

These stories fail to mention that the Biden administration has also refused to restore an Obama-era protection, 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.

These stories fail to mention that the $2 billion of debt that has been erased so far under the recent changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program pales in comparison to the recently approved 2023 military budget of $858 billion, a sum that if divided up to all 13,800 public school districts in the U.S. would equal $62 million per district. Not to mention the approximately $54 billion (it’s difficult to produce an accurate number) that has been approved by Congress to prolong the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine.

There is also no mention that 42.9 million Americans owe a total of $1.57 trillion in student debt, while U.S. military spending since 9/11 has totaled over $14 trillion, with one-third to one-half of that total going to private mercenaries. Such a monstrous sum of money wasted on death and destruction that inordinately benefited the private interests of the military industrial complex could have instead gone to fund higher education.

These NPR stories fail to mention that the US military preys upon student debtors as a way to keep their enlistment rates up by promising student aid and free tuition for those who serve.

These stories fail to explain the broader historical 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 so that students don’t have to go into debt.

Here’s a quick recap of the student debt crisis that NPR never has time for.

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 as well as healthy, independent academies by slashing government funding for colleges and student aid. Schools would then become more reliant on charging tuition, students would become disempowered debtors, and university departments would turn into fiefdoms fighting over scarce resources. As governor, 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 federal spending on higher education 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 at every level, causing colleges to drain their student’s pocketbooks and lock them into debt peonage for decades if not for life.

Defunding of education also radically emaciates the academy, depriving it of intellectual freedom and courage, shifting stable tenured professorships to precarious adjuncts as a cost-cutting measure, turning professors into competitive grant writers, and morphing researchers into commercialized R&D arms of corporations. As the historian and professor Ellen Schrecker puts it:

Such a constricted model of the academic community not only would stunt the careers and futures of students and teachers but also would undermine the very idea of the university as a place for intellectual growth and meaningful scholarship. Academic freedom is in danger here, as is the future of the well-informed citizenry that our democratic system requires. An academy transformed into a site for job training and corporate research will be increasingly hard-pressed to retain its function as the last remaining haven for reasoned dissent and the home of serious ideas that do not lend themselves to sound bites.²

The current student 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. Student debtors, believing in the neoliberal pronouncements from figures such as the Clintons and Obama about the need to maintain a competitive edge in a globalized world, got an education in an attempt to improve their lives and 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 a post-NAFTA economy with stagnant wages, disempowered workers, and bailouts for the rich. 

The debt crisis is a result of an elite class that refuses to recognize education as a public good in and of itself, and not as a mere market commodity to be valued by how much a student’s wages or salary will be. The current student debt crisis is a result of austere policies carried out over decades by both Democrats and Republicans. All the while as Wall Street, fat cat CEOs, and billionaires rob the public purse and engage in their own organized tax strike, we are told by the political and media class that student 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 in regards to student debt. NPR leaves the listener feeling like all our problems are being taken care of, that these issues are mere isolated blips on our path of progress. Nothing to see here, folks. But these student debt stories are just one demonstrative example of how NPR functions as a state media outlet that consistently serves as a stenographer for power and capital.

Foreign Policy

Let us turn to the issue of how NPR covers U.S. foreign policy. It is startling to see how often their stories give deference to the U.S. State Department and whitewash the crimes of U.S. aggression while at the same time emphasizing the crimes of our official enemies

Let’s first examine the case of Israel. In late November of 2020, Israel carried out an assassination against a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist named Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. While driving in a car with his wife, Israeli agents, using a remote-operated machine gun mounted on a parked car, opened fire on Fakhrizadeh’s vehicle, killing him. This was yet another in a long line of assassinations of Iranian scientists by Israel. NPR did some decent reporting at the time regarding how this Israeli assassination of Fakhrizadeh could affect the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal. The deal, negotiated under the Obama administration, was easing economic sanctions on Iran in return for outside inspections of their nuclear program. President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal and reinstituted sanctions against Iran. In turn, Iran slowly restarted its collection and refinement of uranium.

Notably, NPR’s story from December 3rd made no mention of Israel being responsible for the assassination. It didn’t even quote the statement from Iran which cast blame on the Israeli state.

The story gives some voice to the notion that Iran does have a certain logic in wanting to develop nuclear capability despite costly Western sanctions. Quoting Ariane Tabatabai, an “Iran expert” from a U.S.-funded thinktank (who seemed bent out of shape by the passing of the ghoulish Madeleine Albright and the mendacious Colin Powell), she said, “there are individuals within Iran who say, listen, the economic cost [of U.S. sanctions] is worth it because otherwise Iran will continue to be a target.” Indeed, perhaps some nuclear capability would put a stop to all these assassinations being carried out by Israel. It would seem that Israel has an assassination addiction that is serious enough to merit intervention and treatment to stop it from continuing to hurt itself and others. If only there were Assassins Anonymous meetings it could attend.

Years earlier in 2012, prior to the existence of the Iran nuclear agreement, Israel assassinated a high-level Iranian nuclear scientist, his death being the fifth of its kind in just the previous five years. NPR reported on this killing without ever going so far as to describe the assassination as an act of terror. That, of course, would be too “inflammatory.” But NPR’s Peter Kenyon did go so far as to describe the assassination as a “belligerent act.” I would hazard to guess that if Iran carried out a single assassination against an Israeli scientist, let alone five, NPR would give credence to those who go beyond labelling it a mere “belligerent act,” and instead call Iran a terrorist state. Such a label being applied to Israel is considered beyond the pale in polite circles. 

These NPR stories explain little of the broader context of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy. NPR fails to mention that the U.S. is hell-bent on ensuring that Israel maintains its sole moral right to exercise nuclear force in the region, and every other nation’s attempt at nuclear capability in the region are illegitimate, a priori. Let’s look at how this dynamic is examined in a different NPR story.

In a conversation from 2018 that focused specifically on the Iranian nuclear deal, NPR’s Steve Inskeep - who has a long history of bias in favor of the U.S. client and apartheid state of Israel - interviewed Israel's Ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer. The Ambassador gave cover to then Prime Minister Netanyahu’s claim that Iran hid the fact that it had a nuclear weapons program which ended over a decade before the negotiation of the nuclear deal. Ambassador Dermer argued that the nuclear deal with Iran was ineffectual and that the U.S. would therefore be right to pull out of the agreement. The U.S. eventually did pull out of the agreement after Trump was pressured by neoconservatives such as Dermer and John Bolton (who has long advocated for regime change in Iran). This reneging by the U.S. is a key reason why current attempts to renegotiate the nuclear deal are being met with mistrust by Iran.

The bounds of the conversation between NPR’s Inskeep and Ambassador Dermer are quite revealing. Insofar as Inskeep gives any pushback to the Ambassador, it is only in regards to narrow trifles about the efficacy of inspections that the nuclear deal required. Dermer says that if “the commitment of Iran not to violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty gave us any comfort, we wouldn't have needed a deal to begin with because they've been signatories of the NPT from the beginning.” Inskeep does not bring up the fact that Israel isn’t even a signatory to the NPT nor that Israel itself has stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The entire conversation is based on the preconception that Israel has a right to possess nuclear weapons while every other country in the region does not.

There is no questioning by Inskeep of why Israel is allowed to be the only nuclear-armed state in the region. There is no questioning of what the alternative to the nuclear deal would be. Neocons, such as Dermer and Netanyahu in Israel and Bolton in the U.S., have long supported “maximum pressure” and sanctions on Iran, not as an effective way to deter nuclear proliferation, but as a way of instigating violent regime change in Iran (a tactic which is now being used against Russia with the war in Ukraine). Israel was never in support of a negotiated nuclear deal with Iran. Israel has always wanted to maintain a hostile stance against the country. Indeed, Israeli assassinations of Iranian scientists stopped for only as long as the nuclear deal was in place. Once the nuclear deal was left in tatters, exactly as Israel was advocating for, they resumed their terror campaign against Iran.

There is no mention in any of these NPR stories that Israel is a regularly belligerent nation that bombed Egypt, bombed Tunisia, bombed Syria, invaded, occupied, and subjected Lebanon to state terror throughout the 1980s and ‘90s; it regularly assassinates Iranian civilians; it is carrying out the longstanding occupation and genocide of Palestine.

There is no mention that the U.S. and Israel are responsible for a preponderance of the aggression in the region: instigating multiple coups, arming jihadist groups, causing a million deaths with the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq - not to mention the resulting destabilization of the entire region and the rise of ISIS.

There is little to no thought given to the notion that perhaps Iran, a country which suffered a CIA-backed coup of its democratically elected secular leader Mohammad Mosaddegh, wants to be able to deter the threat of Israeli violence and Western meddling. There is no mention of the fact that Israel opposed any kind of nuclear deal with Iran from the get go and therefore any Israeli undermining of the deal is likely done in bad faith. But of course, for a reporter such as Inskeep to bring all this up during a conversation with an Israeli diplomat would be uncouth and quite unlike NPR’s established tone of “respectfulness.” Respect for what?

A media outlet that can actually give some clarity to this situation and allow for perspectives that are considered off-limits by NPR is Democracy Now!, which interviewed Noam Chomsky in regards to this issue. Chomsky had this to say:

According to U.S. intelligence, [Iran’s] strategic doctrine is to try to prevent an attack up to the point where diplomacy can set in. I don’t think anyone with a gray cell functioning thinks that they would ever conceivably use a nuclear weapon or even try to. The country would be obliterated in 15 seconds. But [nuclear weapons] might provide a deterrent of sorts. And the U.S. and Israel certainly don’t want to tolerate that. They are the forces that carry out regular violence and aggression in the region and [they] don’t want any impediment to that.

The radical idea of a completely nuclear-free Middle East, which necessarily means the dismantling of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, is not countenanced in places such as NPR. It is not countenanced because such a prospect goes against America’s divine right to rule over the Middle East with Israel as its obsequious, nuclear-armed cudgel in the region. The prospect of a nuclear-free region, which is supported by Iran, would mean that the U.S. would have to acknowledge the fact of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which it currently does not. It does not acknowledge it because to do so would mean to admit that the billions of dollars in aid that is given to Israel every year by the U.S. is illegal under U.S. law. A law passed by congress in 1976 bars any aid to be given to nuclear armed countries which have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel has not signed the NPT.

None of this is spoken about on NPR. Instead, we are given an interview with an Israeli ambassador who says that the nuclear deal with Iran should be demolished and that Iran needs to dismantle its nuclear program while NPR’s Steve Inskeep operates under the imperialist assumption that Israel, a totally peaceful U.S. ally and definitely not nuclear-armed power, has only benevolent reasons for everything it does.

Not every story on NPR needs to provide every scrap of context for a particular issue. But when most of their stories provide little to no essential context, it is not a defensible mistake, it is an ideology made manifest. As Todd Gitlin puts it in The Whole World is Watching, when news outlets treat stories as single, discrete issues, providing little connective tissue to other stories, those outlets thus promote “the dominant system’s claim to general legitimacy.” If every story stands alone and is divorced from history, listeners are left with the feeling that every event is a one-off, a peculiarity, something to be understood and then forgotten, not something in a long line of events caused by the overarching structures of our society.

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The woefully transparent Western media bias in favor of the U.S. government, particularly on foreign policy issues where reporters will emphasize the crimes of official U.S. enemies but will deemphasize or ignore the crimes committed by the U.S. and its client states, the reasons for which are deftly described by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their classic work Manufacturing Consent, has presented itself in NPR’s coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s involvement in the war in Syria. Here are just a few examples.

In a recent NPR article on the U.S. and Russian proxy war in Syria and how it relates to the current war in Ukraine, the author, Jason Breslow, spends much of the article focusing on various war crimes committed by Russia in its attempt to help stop the U.S.-backed overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Breslow cites a U.N. investigation that looked at an attack where “more than 43 civilians were killed when Russian aircraft launched a series of airstrikes on a market. Civilians and other rescuers soon rushed to the scene, but within minutes they were met by a "double-tap" airstrike on the same area, killing scores more.”

Breslow doesn’t have the time to mention that the U.S. murdered 80 people in Syria in a “double tap” airstrike. He doesn’t mention that Amnesty International found that 1,600 civilians were killed in Raqqa, Syria by U.S.-coalition air and artillery strikes, in what was described as a “death trap.” Breslow makes no mention of the fact that the U.S. has been conducting a dirty war in Syria against Russian and Iranian coalition forces by funding anti-government jihadists (Al-Qaeda) and funneling weapons to those extremist groups in order to overthrow the Assad regime. 

Breslow particularly highlights the use of cluster bombs by Russia in Syria. He writes, “Cluster munitions are considered so indiscriminate in the harm they cause for civilians that in 2008 more than 100 nations signed a global treaty banning their use. Neither Ukraine nor Russia signed on.” Breslow fails to mention that not only did the United States also not sign that treaty, but we have even used cluster bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan and we sell cluster bombs to Israel and Saudi Arabia. Civilians are being killed years later by unexploded ordinance from these cluster bombs that were dropped by the U.S. and its allies. This, apparently, warrants no mention by NPR (National Pentagon Radio) when producing a story in the lead up to the U.S. providing billions of dollars of untraceable weapons to Ukraine (which are now flooding the black market).

I see your Russian use of cluster bombs in Syria, Breslow, and I raise you one U.S. bombing of critical infrastructure in Syria, a dam that if ruptured could have caused tens of thousands of deaths. The U.S. was fully aware of this possibility beforehand, and yet we bombed the dam anyway.

This rank hypocrisy of the U.S., laundered by the likes of NPR, is par for the course. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, recently addressed the U.N., saying: “We’ve seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs which are banned under the Geneva Convention.” Later, the official transcript of her remarks was edited to add the words, "if they are directed against civilians.” This Orwellian editing of the past, “he who controls the past controls the present,” serves to cover up U.S. hypocrisy, thus perpetuating the innocence with which we view ourselves and the endless evil that results from such manufactured innocence.

As Democracy Now! pointed out:

The U.S. has repeatedly used cluster bombs throughout its history, dropping them over Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq and elsewhere. Under President Barack Obama in 2009, a U.S. cluster bomb attack in Yemen killed 55 people, the majority of them women and children. Russia and Ukraine also have not signed on to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Simplified, state-supporting propaganda, disseminated by mainstream media such as NPR, fans the flames of war. It makes us feel like the unerring defenders of virtue who must stop at nothing to defend our allies from our demonic enemies. But, as Chris Hedges writes, war itself is demonic. It destroys everything that sustains life. In order for people to unquestioningly support such barbarity, they must be propagandized into it. “We, echoing the empty promises from Moscow, claim we do not target civilians,” Hedges writes, “Rulers always paint their militaries as humane, there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable. This lie can only be sustained among those who are unfamiliar with the explosive ordinance and large kill zones of missiles, iron fragmentation bombs, mortar, artillery and tank shells, and belt-fed machine guns.”

This magical thinking - us vs. them, the good guys trying to beat the bad guys - is made all the more worrisome with this conflict now in Ukraine that involves two nuclear superpowers owning the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons which are more than enough to wipe out most living species on earth.

NPR gives no voice to a moral critique of war, only strategic critiques of war. In an interview between NPR’s Sacha Pfeiffer and former NATO commander and retired U.S. Air Force general Philip Breedlove, the two go back and forth on whether or not the implementation of a no-fly zone over Ukraine is a good idea (it’s not). No one stops to consider the criticism that U.S. actions may be needlessly prolonging the conflict. Breedlove defended the use of what he called a “humanitarian” no-fly zone. “How is a humanitarian no-fly zone different than a traditional no-fly zone,” he was asked by Pfeiffer. “Maybe the humanitarian no-fly zone would only be over the western part of Ukraine,” he explains, “such that we could get relief trains in and wounded and dying out to try to bring medical care to them.” Why Russia would accept such an arrangement at face value and not suspect that this western no-fly zone would be used to funnel lethal arms, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, into Ukraine is not discussed.

Then comes this exchange which could have been lifted directly from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove:

PFEIFFER: Would you still support the idea of a no-fly zone over Ukraine if you knew it would provoke Russia to use nuclear weapons?

BREEDLOVE: No. Nobody wants a nuclear war.

PFEIFFER: So then it's a gamble to put a no-fly zone into effect.

BREEDLOVE: Yeah, that's your word. That's not the word I would use.

PFEIFFER: What word would you use?

BREEDLOVE: It's a calculated military decision.

Listening to this dangerous Orwellian nonsense over the radio nearly made me wreck my car. One can only hope that we live long enough to see this dialogue turned into a comedic sketch. As of now, it is simply frightening.

And then came another more telling exchange. Breedlove, encouraging the “conversation” of a no-fly zone over Ukraine, asked, “How many Ukrainians have to die?” To which NPR’s Sacha Pfeiffer responded, “Right. It's a terrible question no one wants to answer.”

What a journalist who is committed to standing up against entrenched power ought to say to a former NATO commander after he made that rhetorical move is this: Yes, how many more Ukrainians have to die because the U.S. is funneling lethal arms to the populace in order to bleed Russia out as much as possible and foment dangerous regime change of a nuclear-armed power, as has been made explicit on multiple occasions by the worst actors of our political class? How many more Ukrainians need to die before the U.S. stops escalating the conflict and instead encourages diplomatic talks between Russia and Ukraine? How many more Ukrainians need to die before the U.S. recognizes that it made a horrible mistake in choosing to expand NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union and thereby needlessly alienate Russia from the West? I said “needlessly” alienate Russia, but, of course, this alienation has a purpose. It ensures a permanent enemy in the form of Russia, and therefore a permanent war economy, something to line the pockets of the multinational weapons manufacturers in the name of security and freedom.

In a similar interview on NPR in the lead up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, NPR’s Melissa Block asked neocon Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz this question: “Now that the U.N. negotiations have become so prolonged,” (meaning that the majority of the world was not willing to go along with the patently criminal U.S. invasion) “do you feel that it was a mistake to take that route, to go through the U.N., and has it complicated your military strategy?”

NPR only asks questions of strategy. NPR does not question the morality of war itself. This leads to further acceptance of militarization and escalation, not diplomacy and peace. There is no room for diplomacy let alone pacifism when it comes to the official enemies of the U.S. State Department. There are only military options, demands from the barrel of a gun, to assert our values of “freedom” and “democracy.” This is the kind of “news coverage” you get when you bring on “experts” to talk and you give them no pushback.

This is how NPR can produce a story on the difficulty of prosecuting Russian crimes of aggression in Ukraine without giving any mention to how the U.S. consistently undermines any accountability for its own criminal wars of aggression in Iraq and elsewhere by refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court. This is how NPR can have a story quoting Merrick Garland as saying, “There is no hiding place for war criminals,” without first deriding such a laughable comment and then mentioning the fact that thousands of American war criminals from our many wars are living completely free and will likely never face an international war crimes tribunal such as we are currently attempting against Russia.

This is Western hypocrisy, plain and simple, legitimized by the likes of NPR. When NPR consistently fails to provide substantive pushback on these issues, it reveals how impoverished our media class is of any backbone or moral center. War does not spread virtue. It spreads death and empowers the most violent actors in a society, all the while enriching weapons manufacturers and impoverishing the great mass of people. A news outlet such as NPR that wants to avoid sounding “anti-war” in order to be perceived as “balanced” and “unbiased” is not actually being impartial. It is being amoral and dangerous, all in service of anti-democratic monsters.

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This is the same NPR that practically ran an industry advertisement for surveillance drones disguised as a “story.” The story, with the cutesy title “Look, Up In The Sky! It's A Drone, Looking At You,” has this to say about the wonders of drone technology:

Drones — or unmanned vehicles — have been a success with the military, and companies such as AeroVironment hope to make them an increasingly common sight in this country. [Vice President of AeroVironment Steve Gitlin] says the Qube costs just a bit more than a police patrol car, making it a much less expensive alternative to a manned helicopter.

By “success with the military,” NPR means that most people killed by U.S. drones are innocent civilians and not the intended targets. But the U.S. military defaults to labeling its victims military-aged males and combatants until they’re posthumously proven innocent, which the military barely, if ever, bothers to do. Why would it? Thankfully,  organizations such as Airwars do actually conduct on the ground investigations of drone strikes in order to give a fuller accounting of U.S. barbarity. “Success with the military” means that we have robots of death, controlled by lowly operators who were recruited for their gaming acumen, striking at villages with hellfire missiles, turning children into amputees and orphans, in impoverished countries that we have not officially declared war against. All of this is done in secret, with no public control, let alone debate, over such military actions. This is what the United States does every day. NPR calls it a success.

After the NPR drone story spends most of its time talking to drone evangelists, it fulfills its mission of “balance” by letting a privacy advocate say a few words about how drones can be used to spy on citizens.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote this in response at the time:

So NPR listeners heard for 4 1/2 minutes about the wonderful, exciting uses of drones from an executive of a drone corporation, an official with the drone industry, and a sheriff's spokesman using drones, and then for about 10 seconds at the end from someone who is "a little wary." If the drone industry had purchased commercial time on NPR, how would this report have been any different?

The difference would have been that listeners would have heard the same underwriting text read aloud in dulcet tones every single day 20 times a day, ad nauseum.

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I should acknowledge that all of these critiques so far are primarily targeted at NPR itself, and not at the many local public radio affiliates that are able to produce their own programming through local funding. My own 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 dismissive or antagonistic of anything that goes against mainstream orthodoxy.

Most state-funded media, such as NPR, PBS, or the BBC, tempers 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 claim of objectivity is 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:

https://www.rt.com/shows/going-underground/509805-soleimani-daughter-trump-administration/

This interview with Zeinab Soleimani, the daughter of slain Iranian General Qassem Soleimani who was illegally assassinated under orders from President Trump, is a shotgun blast of perspectives that are never seen or heard on U.S. media, including NPR.

For starters, the mere fact of a victim of U.S. wars in the Middle East being given 20 minutes to speak live on air from a state that is considered an “adversary” of the U.S. is enough to make you realize that such an interview would be exceedingly rare if not nonexistent in Western media.

And Soleimani punches huge holes in American myths, starting with the fact that the U.S. has played a key role in empowering Al Qaeda and ISIS in both Syria and Iraq, and that the journalist Julian Assange, who helped expose this fact, has wasted away for years in prison because of his courage in exposing Western lies and war crimes. Soleimani says:

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, he exposed the email that [National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan was telling Hillary Clinton that Al Qaeda is on [the U.S. side] in Syria…[Assange] is still in the prison. Why? Because he exposed them. And he said for everyone that…terrorists that are killing innocent people in the Middle East, America made them. And they are like toys for them. The lives of innocent people are like toys for them.

This is the email she is referring to:

“AQ is on our side in Syria.” Meaning that the CIA flooded weapons into Iraq and Syria knowing full well that they were arming anti-government jihadists tied to Al Qaeda, who ended up carrying out mass slaughter of civilians, in order to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.

Soleimani goes on to elucidate the fact, which both ruling parties in the U.S. like to deny, that it does not matter who resides in the White House, U.S. foreign policy is always bad for people and countries who try to stand up against Western hegemony:

There is no difference between Biden and Trump. They are the same guy. And they are following the same policy. There is no difference between them. Trump ordered killing my father but Biden supported that…What will change? They are the same people with the same mind. There is no difference for us…Joe Biden cannot return my father…The problem we have with America is with their policy…This will not change…They are the same people, the same mind, the same way, and each one of them is worse than the other one.

This interview expresses a view that would never be countenanced or framed as legitimate on mainstream U.S. media such as NPR. It gives voice to America’s victims. It humanizes the Iranian people. And it calls into question the blissful and arrogant innocence with which Americans view themselves and their government, an innocence which ensures the continuous immiseration of other people by our hands.

And yet, it is only RT that gets branded as “state propaganda,” while the likes of NPR, PBS, and the BBC get to prance around as neutral arbiters of truth and journalistic integrity, even though they conveniently stay within the narrow bounds of acceptable Western thought.

As a side note, the original segment that I wanted to use to demonstrate the above point was a piece produced by RT America that had an interview with former Marine Corps Intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter and a former Pentagon official who I can’t find the name of because the segment was completely scrubbed from Youtube after the Google-owned platform deleted every single video by RT America from its website. And I cannot find the segment on RT’s own website. Scott Ritter’s Twitter account has since been suspended because he did not toe the official Western line on the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine.

Here’s the broken link to the original Youtube posting:

The disappeared segment analyzed Iran’s calls to hold U.S. officials to account for ordering the illegal assassination of General Soleimani by putting those officials on trial at the International Criminal Court. Again, this segment produced by RT America gave airtime to views that are either ignored or derided by the Western press, namely that Iran, by seeking justice against the U.S. for the murder of its well-regarded General, is advocating for the rule of law, something that the U.S. abandoned long ago, and is accurately calling the assassination an act of state terror.

So thank you Silicon Valley companies for censoring any dissenting views from official U.S. dogma and thank you Western media for playing along as if this is normal, proper, and good. The dystopia is here indeed. All hail Big Brother.

The Professionalization and Elitism of Mainstream Journalism

There is one final angle I want to assess in regards to NPR, and the media in general, and that is the fact that the trend towards professionalization and accreditation of journalists has homogenized the journalism industry and turned it into a walled-off, elite class that expresses the values of its particular class interests. Just as NPR has become politically partisan like other media outlets, it has also succumbed to the same staffing biases that are seen within the larger media ecosystem.

Call them what you will: the professional managerial class, the creative class, the liberal class; they all vote respectably, they use the good and proper terminology, and they gain advanced degrees in order to write stories that pose no threat to our current systems. Think of the upper-class journalist with a Master’s degree from the Columbia school of journalism.

In older days, the idea of a Master’s degree in journalism would’ve been regarded as a joke; something that the fast-talking, low-down reporter characters from His Girl Friday would have scorned as high-falutin’ and effete. Today, it is becoming ubiquitous. Where I come from, the world of technical theatre, a Master’s degree in theatre is joked about as something people get if they’ve got nothing better to do than throw away tens of thousands of dollars on an education that they could get just by working at theatre companies, but I digress.

This accreditation of journalism, turning it into something that it didn’t used to be -an official class that you belong to instead of something that you do, saps any radicalism from the profession and creates an insular, not to say incestual, culture. Institutional reporters are increasingly culled from the upper classes and the milieu of elite colleges. Thus, the same principles of neoliberalism stringently inculcated at the academy remain ascendant in newsrooms. The poor, working-class, and high school graduates are marginalized. The range of acceptable thought narrows. The polite, upper-crust tone of NPR, representing, in fact, a narrow worldview, conveniently tends to serve institutionalized power.

In Hate Inc., Taibbi explains this trend towards journalist positions becoming occupied by college graduates and is worth quoting at length. He writes:

In the late 2000s, the British Cabinet Office issued a report called “Unleashing Aspirations.” It found journalism to be one of the most socially exclusive professions in the country, noting: 

• 98 percent of journalists born since 1970 were college-educated

• Less than 10 percent came from working-class backgrounds

• A journalist on average grew up in a family in the upper 25th percentile by wealth

In America the change came in stages. When journalism became cool after All The President’s Men, upper-class kids suddenly wanted in. Previously a rich American kid wouldn’t have wiped his tuchus with a reporter.

Ironically, All The President’s Men, which made reporting glamorous, was about adversarial journalism. But the next generation of national political reporters viewed people in power as cultural soulmates because, at least socially, they were…

political reporters became professional apologists, constantly telling us how hard it is for politicians to win elections and run things…

The Internet accelerated the class divide. Big regional newspapers increasingly became national or even global in mind-set. In the digital age it made more sense to design coverage for a sliver of upper-class readers across the country (who could afford subscriptions and responded to ads)…

Because news organizations were targeting those audiences, it made sense to pick reporters who came from those ranks as well. By the mid-2000s, journalists at the top national papers almost all belonged to the same general cultural profile: liberal arts grads from top schools who lived in a few big cities on the east and west coasts.

Taibbi is mainly describing for-profit outlets such as The New York Times and the Washington Post, but NPR is subject to this same trend as well. Take a look at the following table showing prominent NPR reporters and their alma mater:

Not coincidentally, the makeup of NPR listeners is also solidly of college graduates. As Jack Mitchell said about NPR’s audience: “People who are highly educated, that’s the key. The more education you have, the more likely you are to listen. If you did not graduate from high school, you do not listen. Period. If you have a master’s or a PhD you almost certainly listen.”

McCauley ascribes the tone of NPR directly to the educational backgrounds of its reporters:

The rational, fair, and balanced inquiry that is heard on NPR News is a function of the educational attainment of the network’s journalists and listeners and the value systems these people have developed through higher education.

Some values, indeed.

The elite tone of NPR, coming as it does from a professionalized staff, “turns off a lot of people,” said Mitchell. 

They use language that people don’t easily understand or aren’t comfortable with. It’s not language they would use…And [the hosts] don’t even know they’re doing it. It’s just the way they talk. They think it’s conversational. And it is for them, but the social divide is quite different.

NPR is routinely criticized from both the left and the right for a perception that the organization is homogeneous. As NPR itself admitted in 2005:

At NPR, there are discussions about whether the people who are attracted to work in public radio are too much alike. There is an increasing recognition that NPR needs to be a more diverse organization at every level -- culturally as well as politically. And that's a discussion that is long overdue.

The elitism of the media corresponds with the worsening political divide throughout the nation. Mitchell went on: 

[NPR listeners] really don’t have much respect for anybody who voted for Donald Trump. Well, half the country did. That’s a pretty big blind spot if you’re trying to work in a democracy and you want a functioning society. You really do have to, not only understand, but respect. NPR will go out and interview some people, but it’s like sending some correspondent to a foreign country. ‘Oh, what an interesting people you are.’ That kind of attitude.

A kind of vicious cycle occurs where the tastes of professional, liberal reporters are reflected by the professional, liberal audience, and vice versa, creating an establishment echo chamber. Describing the tastes of the public radio audience, McCauley writes: “NPR listeners are more likely than average to partake in just about any kind of leisure activity including exercise, sports, dining out, and attending live musical and theatrical performances. Nearly 70 percent purchased books over the year that culminated in NPR’s 2003 audience survey.” Books! They buy books! 70 percent of NPR listeners purchased at least one copy of The Da Vinci Code and The Secret! That’s how you know they’re real smart.

A reporter’s class and educational background are not necessarily determinative of the kind of reporter they will be. But as a general trend, people look out for their material, class interests. And as journalism becomes more homogenized and professionalized, it perpetuates the dominant ideologies that are so imbedded in our academies and political institutions. As Todd Gitlin puts it in The Whole World Is Watching: 

...journalists are socialized from childhood, and then trained, recruited, assigned, edited, rewarded, and promoted on the job; they decisively shape the ways in which news is defined, events are considered newsworthy, and objectivity is secured. News is managed automatically, as reporters import definitions of newsworthiness from editors and institutional beats….Simply by doing their jobs, journalists tend to serve the political and economic elite definitions of reality.

What does this accreditation mean for journalism? For starters, it fosters a culture of impunity. In Listen, Liberal, Frank describes the history of our broader culture of professionalization and how it has infected our politics. Explaining the unaccountable insularity that arises from professionalism, Frank writes, “the group to which professionals ultimately answer is not the public but their peers…They listen mainly to one another…they are not required to heed voices from below their circle of expertise.”

We see this same dynamic today in journalism as outlets defend themselves from the critiques of outsiders, blowing off substantive disputes as the ramblings of partisans. Indeed, NPR continuously absolves itself of the issues that listeners bring up. Whether it’s on their coverage of the lead-up to the Iraq War where, in defending itself, NPR praised the interview that Melissa Block did with the neocon Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, calling it a “model of sharpness.” Or whether it’s NPR’s refusal to use the word “torture,”; their questionable coverage of their underwriters; their delegitimizing of progressive politics; their liberal and status quo bias; or their nationalistic worldview, NPR always finds a reason to avoid full accountability or to conduct a broader systemic analysis of their coverage. As Frank writes: “Professions certify the expertise of insiders while negating and dismissing the knowledge-claims of outsiders.”

This professional elitism has broad political implications. As Frank explains:

As a political ideology, professionalism carries enormous potential for mischief. For starters, it is obviously and inherently undemocratic, prioritizing the views of experts over those of the public…But what happens when an entire category of experts stops thinking of itself as “social trustees”? What happens when they abuse their monopoly power? What happens when they start looking mainly after their own interests, which is to say, start acting as a class?”

National Public Radio is anything but public, in the most democratic sense of that word. Since its inception, the trend towards professionalization of NPR - with it leaving behind “the real people,” as Mitchell put it, and shifting towards the “experts” - mirrors a similar trajectory of the Democratic Party. Over the years, the Democratic Party has transfigured itself from the party of the people to the party of the professional class, a class which includes journalists.

As Democrats, under Bill Clinton, sold out the working class in favor of the corporate donor class with disastrous neoliberal policies such as NAFTA, and as NPR dropped its early alternative tone in favor of a more “neutral,” professional tone, thereby garnering the support of lucrative sponsorships, both of these institutions have solidified their reliance on and their subservience to the corporate and professional class at the cost of everyone else. Is it any wonder that NPR employees overwhelmingly belong to the Democratic Party or lean that direction? They are expressing class solidarity for the political party that ensures that nothing will ever fundamentally change.

Besides the issue of a homogeneity of class within the media, “well-educated” reporters, by the very virtue of their education, are suspect. Here’s why.

Through government defunding of higher education, universities have become more reliant upon tuition, grants, and corporate dollars. Battles over shrinking resources have pit tenured professors against adjuncts; administrative staff against college presidents; undergrad students against graduate students. Professors become judged by how many grants they can secure. Research trends less towards the public good and more towards lucrative commercial projects that corporations are happy to “partner with” and fund with the promise of their eventual patenting and privatization of the research.

As universities, battered by the market demands of neoliberalism, have shifted their priorities towards job training for students, the traditional role of the academy has been perverted. As the historian Ellen Schrecker notes in her book, The Lost Soul of Higher Education, “the increasing vocationalization of the academy now determines what so many American students do and do not learn.”

And once universities began seeking more funding from corporations for their research, they made a devil’s bargain. Schrecker notes that researchers now are often mandated to keep their results and their data secret, flying in the face of “the scientific community’s traditional culture of openness and publication.” Professors can’t even share their work with their own students.

This corporatization of academic research has emaciated higher education, turning universities into patent mills. This has deeply troubling results. Shrecker points to one case where “the University of Pennsylvania simply dropped their study of breast cancer genes rather than risk a suit for patent infringement.” In another case at UPenn, where an 18-year old died from a gene therapy experiment, “it turned out that the doctors conducting the experiment had not only misinformed their subjects about the project’s risks but had also concealed their own financial interest in the company whose product was being tested.”

Market pressures on the academy also disappear any lines of inquiry or study that do not have potential for profit. “The once thriving specialty of labor studies, for example, has almost entirely disappeared, while that of occupational health is also threatened,” Schrecker writes. “Similarly, although plant biology attracts support from agribusiness, environmental studies does not, a shift in funding that doomed Berkeley’s Department of Plant Pathology.”

Quoting a biologist explaining their school’s requirement for researchers to disclose any findings that may be commercially relevant before they are allowed to publish it, “they have up to six months to decide the fate of what you are working on…The lines between industry and universities are sort of merging.”

If you want to argue that an elite education and an advanced degree is a valuable asset when working as a reporter, that it broadens your perspective and gives you more ideas with which to bolster your analysis, fine. But given the mainstream worldview that tends to get spouted by those who come from such institutions, the fact that those universities have become manager mills, that they are subservient to corporatized and militarized research and funding, and that our academies chiefly operate not as makers of well-rounded citizens but as specialized career mills, you cannot pretend that such advanced degrees accord people the platonic ability to present news and analysis that does not reflect the interests of the class that they belong to. In other words, own your bourgeois pig status, and don’t offend our intelligence by saying that your degree magically makes you unbiased.

Colleges, by succumbing to their own corporatization without a mumbling word, have positioned themselves as a useful excuse for our political system to avoid the egalitarian and democratic distribution of wealth. We are told, in our oh-so benevolently meritocratic world, that we must get a higher education and receive advanced degrees in order to be upwardly mobile. There is no other way. Pay for a degree or get fucked. College faculty and professors, by placating to their corporatization and accepting their new role as specialized career mills and debt prisons, have become full partners in the perpetuation of inequality in America. And the elite students, but also, let’s not forget, the often woefully indebted students that colleges pump out, are carrying on that same crime into their professional lives where they give cover to the neoliberal order.

Happily, it seems that Ronald Reagan’s plot to de-radicalize students by turning them into debtors has now borne a generation of students radicalized by their debt. But their ability to successfully turn that debt into collective power is as yet fitful and scattered.

Schrecker has written several books on the many ways in which professors and their institutions have been systematically disempowered and forced into becoming corporate subsidiaries. The issue of how this all happened is a separate topic for another article. Schrecker herself is a happy example of a professor decrying the corporatization of higher education. But the main point I am drawing is that the intellectual independence and moral integrity of higher education in the U.S. has become so degraded as to cast skepticism on any journalist who ought to be using their role as an antagonist of power but instead defers to power and then waves their advanced degree around in order to rationalize their bowing, scraping, and creeping before the royalty of the neoliberal order.

Intellectual inquiry that is worth anything must be truth seeking, and therefore subversive, dubious of authority, and independent of dogmatism. Elite universities that pump out these stenographer reporters are not, as institutions, antagonistic towards the powerful and their liberal apologists. It is rare indeed for professors to stand up against the myths of American exceptionalism; to destroy the chauvinistic stereotypes that feed American innocence and keep us from recognizing our complicity in imperial and domestic acts of violence and oppression. Academic figures such as Wendy Brown, Ellen Schrecker, Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, Richard Wolff, Norman Finkelstein, and the late Howard Zinn are notable exceptions to the rule.

Honest academic inquiry is self-critical and destroys hardened and atavistic political ideologies. Not many of our intellectuals embody this kind of courage. And few reporters who come from this same elite class express any of these noble characteristics that the academy has sacrificed on the alter of capitalism.

I have no use these days for someone who robotically graduates from the sold-out academy with a specialized degree, be it journalism or political science. Before McCarthyism - the purgings, the blacklists, the fear - before the military inserted its fingers into higher education, before the Bay-Dohle Act allowed for corporate privatization of public research, before the days that Reagan-style neoliberalism defunded our academies, created a student debt crisis, and walled off our campuses from the rabble, our academies produced real, thinking citizens. Now, I wouldn’t trust a college graduate as far as I could throw one. Without a holistic view of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going, in other words, without knowing what the fuck is going on in the world beyond your narrow tinkerings, graduates are worse than useless, they are counterrevolutionary. 

The fact of our immoral and dangerous inequality, coupled with the fact that mainstream media outlets speak in the language of the more well-off, with reporters buy-and-large coming from the milieu of elite colleges and the professional managerial class, means that many people, who I count myself among, will increasingly see the media as a representative of and an apologist for the inequality all around us.

We rightfully resent and even hate the current institutions of mainstream media because they defend moneyed interests, speak in the language of the upper-class elite, and are unwarrantedly deferential to the state, the military, and capital, all while being dismissive and contemptuous of the understandable populist rancor and incredulity that is thrown at their institutions.

Why do people distrust the media? Because the media, feigning objectivity and balance, shovels out a very narrow point of view that is subservient to political and economic power and does not speak to the realities of the great mass of people. We hate the media because the media, largely, does not shine a light on the hollowing out of our public, democratic institutions by corporate interests. In fact, establishment media must be deferential to capital in order to maintain funding and access to institutional sources, while increasingly, the great mass of people are becoming more and more impoverished and without capital. Seven out of ten Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Forty percent of people can’t afford a $400 emergency. Meanwhile, the Fed wants to raise interest rates in order to manufacture unemployment as a way of tamping down inflation, and NPR doesn’t bat an eye at this manufactured, permanent unemployment scheme, saying that it will bring a “healthy labor market with wages and consumer demand in balance.” No thought is given by NPR to question the merits of how the Fed chooses to dictate the fates of millions of people in our economy. They are the experts, so naturally we must listen to them. This is stenography in action.

Do you think that Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace would give a fair hearing to Marxist economist Richard Wolff about inflation? Would Mary Louise Kelley bring Marxist journalist Vijay Prashad on to talk about the ongoing plight of Indian farmers suffering under globalization? Would Ari Shapiro sit down for a balanced and wide ranging interview to discuss the new book by socialist writer Vivek Chibber? 

If NPR were to hire a bunch of working-class, unaccredited reporters, hosts, pundits, and producers for their daily shows, culled from divergent, leftist, unapologetically anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist outlets such as the World Socialist Website, the Black Agenda Report, Truthout, The Empire Files, Breakthrough News, Jacobin, Consortium News, The Grayzone, Monthly Review, Mint Press News, Multipolarista, The Real News Network, and others, and those new reporters maintained the same quality of work that they’ve been producing under their independent outlets, NPR would see its substantial corporate underwriting and institutional access completely cut off, not because those leftist reporters are any more biased than the current coterie of NPR staff, but because the current NPR staff has a bias in favor of the capitalist status quo, because NPR is not threatening to elite interests, because it only speaks in language that is narrowly defined and has its parameters set for it by consensus. It is not that NPR is overtly and explicitly censored from up on high in order to appease corporate interests - it accomplishes that well enough on its own - it is that divergent voices would simply never be allowed to have a substantial mouthpiece in an establishment media outlet such as NPR - at least, not without a goodly amount of “correcting.”

In other words, how can an institutionalized reporter, working in a newsroom full of institutionalized reporters, be an effective adversary of institutional power? As NPR shows time and again, it seems difficult to accomplish.

Our political class is radically corrupted. And more and more, the reporters in mainstream media are products of that same class inculcation. Their universities produce neoliberal consensus and manufacture subservience to the political and economic power which props up the shambling corpse of our corporate state.

Keep these matters of no little importance in mind the next time you tune your dial to National Public Radio.

What NPR Could Be

While it may seem pie in the sky to transform NPR into a true radio of the people, there are things which could be done to move the outlet in that direction. McCauley writes that “NPR clearly does not approach stories from the fierce, radical viewpoint of Pacifica’s Amy Goodman [of Democracy Now!]” But such a “radical” orientation should certainly be an aspiration for NPR. 

Some steps toward improvement are obvious, like not allowing lead reporters to be the best friends of the powerful people they’re supposed to be reporting critically on.

Ralph Nader has outlined multiple ways in which NPR has strayed from its original vision and can do much to improve the quality of its coverage. Some of the things Nader suggests for NPR are:

• Take a more aggressive stance in advocating for Congressional funding in order to reduce or eliminate reliance on corporate donors. Additionally, “NPR should reject ads from disreputable or criminal corporations.”

• Focus less on entertainment subjects and celebrities and more on local civic leaders and organizations.

• Focus less on responding to what is in the national conversation and more on underreported stories. Nader laments that “very important subjects, conditions and activities not part of this frenzied news feed are relegated to far less frequent attention.”

• Be more explicit about the root causes of inequality and impoverishment of the American citizenry. “Increasingly, corporate power is shaping an evermore dominant corporate state that allows mercantile values to seriously weaken the social fabric and moral norms of our society,” Nader writes. “Not many NPR reporters use words like ‘corporate crime,’ ‘corporate welfare,’ or cover the corporate capturing of agencies, the vast unaudited military budget, or many other realms of American life controlled by ‘corporatism.’ But then what can one expect when they ignore credible civic groups, who have timely evidence of such domination, and keep on interviewing one another inserting four-second sound bites to academics and consulting firms?”

In the same way that publicly funding our higher education system allowed for the growth of radical social movements in the 1960s, just having our public radio actually be fully funded with public dollars would potentially go a long way towards allowing less mainstream views on air. Getting rid of the need for corporate funding would open up space for programming that is more experimental, less regimented, and unapologetically anti-corporate (just look at how the Works Progress Administration gave opportunities for more radical creators to make a living, leading to a flourishing in public art).

And just as NPR underwent a fundamental change in its culture and ethos in the late 1970s, it can do so again, this time with an eye towards kicking out the security state stooges who get interviewed so often. The powers that be would hate such a transformation, a sure sign that you’re doing something right. 

NPR ought to prioritize hiring talented reporters, producers, and managers from outside of the middle-class, college educated milieu. If the network wants to expand its listenership, instead of cynically targeting rich audiences in pursuit of corporate sponsorships, while also avoiding the pitfalls of condescension, NPR ought to be staffed by working-class reporters, ideally those who have not been socialized by establishment newsroom culture. (I’d prefer working-class leftist reporters, but let’s remember that class solidarity extends beyond the bounds of mere shallow political labels.)

Mitchell was skeptical of being able to transform NPR. “It’s become so big and so bureaucratic and so ingrown that I just don’t think it could change much,” he told me. “You would need a new organization.”

We must ask ourselves, given that NPR, in its staff, its funders, and its audience, is overwhelmingly liberal, white, and college-educated, what ever happened to the “public” in National Public Radio? Our citizenry lacks a national outlet which we can truly call our own, a radio which serves our interests, not the interests of the powerful. 

My humble suggestion for a rebrand: TPR, The People’s Radio.

1. In the balloon salesman audio, the broadcaster introduces Sound Portraits as a new form of “personal commentary” in contrast to the previous commentary on the show that had been provided by intellectuals such as “Haim Ginott, Russell Kirk, and Judy Bachrach, among others.” The snippets are fascinating in what they reveal about individual lives as well as society at large. The balloon salesman sings a song about making people happy with balloons and how he likes to see people happy even though he’s been through a lot in his life. He recalls being in the Army and being “messed up” by it and that he didn’t receive proper medical care and how this was “wrong” but he couldn’t get justice for it. But “I wasn’t going to give up,” he said. Auto mechanic McGinnis relates a perspective of class bias against him as well as a criticism of classism in the U.S. He recounts that once he tells people in a conversation that he fixes cars, they only want to talk to him about what’s wrong with their car. He says he would love to draw or paint but his mechanic work pays well, so he has to do it. Then in the next breath he laments how “our craftsmen stink” and don’t “give a damn” about the bigger picture of their work. He argues that craftsmen in the U.S. take no pride in their work and are only after making their “best buck” and getting home to “booze, broads, and baseball,” unlike their European counterparts who “take pride in their work.” But he then blames the mechanic’s lack of pride on society’s classist lack of respect for the mechanic.

2. The Lost Soul of Higher Education