National Public Radio (NPR) has long been a mainstay of elitist liberalism. As I have written before, although some of its news coverage, especially on international issues, remains useful, its biases are now so overt as to disinvite any confidence in its claims to fairness.
Consider just some of the stories featured on June 26-28, 2023:
** “Thousands of LGBTQ veterans have yet to receive the military benefits they’re owed”
** “Protests against LGBTQ inclusivity in schools have turned violent in LA County”
** “How school systems, educators and parents can support transgender children”
** “How the Bud Light boycott shows brands at a crossroads: Use their voice, or shut up?”
** “In historic bid, transgender Delaware state senator launches congressional campaign”
Three days, five LGBTQ stories. This, despite the fact that only 3.5% of the American population identifies as male homosexual, lesbian, “transgender,” or “other” (another 4% identify as bisexual). This steady infusion of stories sympathetic to the LGBTQ activist movement are part of a larger narrative, one aggressively friendly to social extremism and fraught with anti-Christian bias.
That bias is pronounced with respect to evangelical Protestants. I’ve found several stories since January of this year dealing with evangelicals, two of them with the passings of Tim Keller (whose social conservatism and theological orthodoxy are not mentioned) and Pat Robertson (whose detractors are quoted at length). The others are, predictably, antagonistic (“An evangelical superstar left her church but kept her faith;” “He walked away from his evangelical roots to escape feeling suffocated;” and “Black praise in white pews: when your church doesn’t love you back”). Other themes include “Christian nationalism” and the National Prayer Breakfast, the tone of both of which is sinister and frightening. Clearly, there is an adversarial bent to NPR’s reporting.
Neglected entirely, of course, is any coverage of all that evangelicals do that profoundly benefits our society. I suspect NPR’s reporters are not only ignorant of such but disinterested in learning about it.
Then there’s NPR’s abundant coverage of abortion. The outlet has a section on its website titled, “Reproductive Rights.” This very title assumes that killing an unborn person is a matter of “rights.” From the medical record, we know that abortion is the destruction of an unrepeatable life that is terminated by her dismemberment in the womb.
NPR covers abortion exhaustively — and almost exclusively favorably (I did find one 2023 interview with a young woman who heads UC-Berkeley’s Californians for Life). Thus far in June, NPR has featured 10 stories on abortion — all of them sympathetic with “the right to choose.” The value of the little person in the womb is never discussed. To my knowledge, not once.
Also, according to NPR, “Google makes millions from anti-abortion centers misleading ad buys.” Anyone familiar with America’s 2,300 pregnancy care centers knows they mislead no one. They simply encourage women not to destroy the lives growing within them and provide myriad kinds of assistance to these women and their families.
Noteworthy is the fact that this charge of being “misleading” comes from a group calling itself the “Center for Countering Digital Hate” (CCDH), an offshoot of Britain’s far-left Labour Party that has received funding from liberal extremist organizations, including George Soros’s “Hope Not Hate” group. Yet NPR takes the CCDH narrative whole, gulping down its findings like a shark in a float of tuna. And, as you might have guessed, NPR studiously avoids any mention of the predatory and profit-driven activities of Planned Parenthood.
Most notoriously, last November NPR covered a live abortion. National Review reported, “In the audio, a vacuum can be heard suctioning out the unborn child, as well as the woman’s cries and moans.” At my advancing age, I’ve developed a rather thick skin. But this makes it crawl, and creates in me a palpable sense of nausea.
Kelly McBride is NPR’s “public editor,” or ombudsman. She can be reached by Twitter at @kellymcb and @nprPublicEditor, the NPR webpage, and NPR’s Facebook page. I encourage readers of The Washington Stand to let her know your thoughts about what I’ve written above and request, respectfully but unequivocally, that NPR live up to its name — that it come to represent the whole of the American public, not only slivers of it that are oblivious to the existence of intelligent, principled, and serious social conservatives.
Until then, NPR should change “public” to “progressive.” No doubt NPR’s favorite socialist, Bernie Sanders, would be delighted by this spasm of intellectual honesty.
Rob Schwarzwalder, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Regent University's Honors College.
