Whenever PBS or NPR air a discussion on defunding PBS and NPR, it’s always a tremendously one-sided chat. On June 24, the NPR talk show 1A — produced out of WAMU-FM in Washington, DC — aired an hour on the topic “How the loss of public media funding could affect America’s underserved communities.” Host Jenn White proclaimed that if federal funding was stopped, Native American and African-American stations would be hardest hit.
All the guests were pro-“public media,” and almost every caller and emailer was as well. They allowed one single conservative viewpoint, for about 75 words: “Hi, this is Kendra from Florida. And, you know, I really do lament the loss of funding for public radio especially in, like you say, Native American communities. But the only people you have to blame for that are the people at places like NPR. The programming is terrible. It’s partisan. It’s hacky. It’s, you know, people have been warning you guys for a very long time that you need to be more balanced in your coverage, and you have steadfastly refused.”
Bingo.
This was immediately rebutted by another caller: “Hi, this is Erin Timbers. I’m calling from Fort Wayne, Indiana. I’m a secondary education English teacher at a local high school. And I frequently use NPR stories and podcasts in my classroom to provide students with one bangle of a story, one bangle of a position, and I often use NPR as an example of unbiased news.“
This is how liberal indoctrination works. The schools are playing PBS and NPR bias in their classrooms and telling kids it’s unbiased.
White turned to one of her liberal guests, NPR “Public Editor” Kelly McBride. Her title suggests she listens to the entire public, but she doesn’t. She’s there to defend NPR as the best thing ever, as she did on this single moment of dissent:
WHITE: President Trump says NPR and PBS are biased against conservative perspectives. That’s something he’s using to try to justify clawing back federal funding. On what basis is he making those accusations?
McBRIDE: Well, he and other critics are generally singling out individual stories that seem to be focused on very small communities, trans communities, minority communities, immigrants. When — my job at NPR is to look at the entire journalism product.
And what I find in general is that they may lack a small amount of geographic diversity, right? Because they are located on the East Coast and on the West Coast. The network is meant to compensate for that. And they working very hard to bring more and more content in from the network.
And so to the extent that there is a bias, I don’t think it is a political bias. I think it is a geographic bias, and I think that NPR has worked very hard to compensate for that. And I think it’s unfair to look at, to cherry-pick small stories or individual stories, especially when you go back 10, 12, 15 years.
When you look at the amount of content that NPR puts out in a given week, it’s something like 1800 individual stories, individual topics. So that really, if you’re going to look at bias, you really have to look at a representative sample. And when I do that, I do not find bias the way that the president and other critics find.
McBride dragged out the entire leftist argument against horrible commercial broadcasting. With “public” media, she claimed, “everybody can get to the good stuff even if you don’t have the money. And that’s the thing about public media is nobody accuses public media of doing crass, wanton, sensational base coverage that does not serve the public’s interest. And so, really, that’s the biggest difference is in this ecosystem, and it’s very, very noisy for the consumers, right? Consumers are bombarded with cheap, bad information that’s free, and the only thing that’s really quality that’s free out there is public media.”
When “public” media talk about the “noise,” we can only guess that part of the “noise” is a disruptive conservative counterpoint that they dismiss as “misinformation.”
