CPB Funds Ideological Overseers at NPR in Response to Right-Wing Criticism

NPR is adding a new team of editors to give all content a “final review”—thanks to the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

After the public broadcaster came under right-wing scrutiny in the spring for supposed left-wing bias, NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin (NPR.org, 5/15/24) announced the organization would be adding 11 new oversight positions, though she wouldn’t say who would be funding them. The hires include six editors for a new “Backstop” team that will give all content, including content from member stations, a “final review” before it can be aired.

The CPB announced its role in a press release (10/18/24) that declared it was giving NPR $1.9 million in “editorial enhancement” funding to help NPR

further strengthen its editorial operations and meet the challenges of producing 24/7 news content on multiple platforms that consistently adheres to the highest standards of editorial integrity—accuracy, fairness, balance, objectivity and transparency, and the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.

‘You push people away’

A disgruntled NPR employee’s ax-grinding (Free Press, 4/9/24) prompted CPB to give nearly $2 million to keep an eye on NPR‘s politics.

That language reads as a direct response to the recent right-wing criticism. In April, former NPR business editor Uri Berliner published a lengthy essay in Bari Weiss‘s Free Press (4/9/24; FAIR.org, 4/24/24) arguing that NPR‘s “progressive worldview” influenced its journalism. Berliner’s essay centered around what he claimed was the “most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.”

Berliner was referring to the viewpoints of NPR journalists—he claimed he looked up the voter registration of NPR‘s Washington, DC, staff, and found no Republicans—but suggested that led to skewed reporting, including “advocacy” against Donald Trump.

NPR alum Alicia Montgomery (Slate, 4/16/24) penned a lengthy response to Berliner, noting, among other things, that staffers were “encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” Indeed, during Trump’s presidency, NPR senior vice president for news Michael Oreskes (WUNC, 1/25/17; FAIR.org, 1/26/17) announced that NPR had decided not to use the word “lie”: “I think the minute you start branding things with a word like ‘lie,’ you push people away from you.”

Montgomery wrote that the real problem with NPR was

an abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice. NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity.

‘Intractable bias’

NPR‘s editor-in-chief Edith Chapin spun the installation of government-funded commissars  as “something positive for journalism” (Current, 5/20/24).

Despite the lack of merit to Berliner’s arguments, the GOP jumped at the opportunity to engage in their time-worn ritual of investigating public broadcasting’s “intractable bias,” demanding that NPR CEO Katherine Maher document and report the partisan affiliations of all news media staff of the past five years, as well as all board members (FAIR.org, 5/11/24).

Chapin, who in an internal email (X, 4/9/24) about Berliner’s attack stressed the need to serve “all audiences” and “[break] down the silos,” said Berliner’s piece and the scrutiny it prompted was “a factor” in her decision to add the editorial positions (Current, 5/20/24).

Under the new editorial organization, it appears that all reporting, whether produced by NPR or its member stations, will have to undergo final review by the “Backstop” team (which reports to Chapin herself) before it can be aired or published—which has some staff worried about bottlenecks as well as bias (New York Times, 5/16/24).

Survival through capitulation

Looking at NPR‘s sources (e.g., FAIR.org, 9/18/18) consistently finds a bias not to the left, but to the center and right.

The CPB was created to insulate public broadcasters from political intimidation, offering a degree of separation from government pressures. But since its inception, it has instead been used as a political tool to push PBS and NPR to bend over backwards to programming demands from the right, which has developed a winning formula: accuse public broadcasters of liberal bias, threaten to cut CPB funding, allow it to be “saved” by extracting programming concessions—rinse and repeat (FAIR.org, 2/18/11).

As FAIR wrote 20 years ago (Extra!, 9–10/05), in the midst of that year’s right-wing assault on PBS:

With each successive attack from the right, public broadcasting becomes weakened, as programmers become more skittish and public TV’s habit of survival through capitulation becomes more ingrained.

Public broadcasting’s founding purpose was to promote perspectives that weren’t already widely represented in the media, yet it has consistently failed to live up to that mission. Some PBS and NPR programming tries to be faithful to that standard—particularly local programming from member stations—but FAIR studies (e.g., Extra!, 11/10, 11/10; FAIR.org, 9/18/18) have repeatedly shown that PBS viewers and NPR listeners often get the same, government-dominated voices and ideas they hear on other major media outlets.

Conservative voices in particular, in part because of right-wing pressure, have long found a welcoming home in public broadcasting, hosting PBS shows such as Firing Line, McLaughlin Group, Journal Editorial Report, Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered and In Principle. NPR focuses much more on straight news and cultural programming; a FAIR study (7/15/15) of NPR commentators found them to be almost entirely apolitical.

No help seeing America whole

Sarah Jaffe (FAIR.org, 2/1/17): “The norms of ‘balance’ that for-profit media have relied on to avoid offending news consumers…seem utterly useless under an administration that considers lies simply ‘alternative facts.‘” 

Now we have the CPB providing funding to NPR to hire editors that will make sure its programming adheres to standards that include “objectivity,” “balance” and “the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.” NPR staffers have every right to be worried about that.

How will the new editors define these terms? FAIR has repeatedly pointed out that objectivity is a journalistic myth; subjective decisions are made every time one story is greenlighted over another, and one source is selected over another.

And if objectivity were possible, it certainly wouldn’t square with a journalistic notion of balance that orders offsetting coverage of Trump party lies with coverage of Democratic lies. It’s not hard for politicians to realize that if “balance” and “objectivity” mean passing along whatever powerful voices say without scrutiny, media will serve as a frictionless delivery system for whatever reality you choose to make up.

Public broadcasting was indeed created to promote diverse viewpoints. The 1967 Carnegie Commission that launched public broadcasting wrote that it should “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard,” and air programs that “help us see America whole, in all its diversity.” But as we’ve shown over and over, it’s not GOP viewpoints that are missing—it’s the perspectives representing the public interest, which are largely absent in corporate media, and which the new CPB funding is not designed to address.

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FEATURED IMAGE: NPR headquarters, Washington, DC (Creative Commons photo: Cornellrockey04)