Following a report from National Public Radio (NPR) Senior Editor Uri Berliner about the far-left bias in the NPR newsroom, former President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to call for government funding of the biased network. In his report, Berliner claimed that there are 87 registered Democrats in editorial positions at NPR but precisely zero Republicans, angering many conservatives.
Berliner sounded off on the state of NPR in an essay published by The Free Press in which he noted the vast disparity in numbers of left-leaning employees and non-left-leaning employees of the federally-funded outlet and documented the lack of concern amongst his colleagues. He also described how that left-leaning bias prevented the outlet from reporting accurately on some issues, such as Hunter Biden’s laptop.
He also explained that, in the past, NPR reported accurately on even controversial topics and that, in his opinion, it was only really with the candidacy and election of Donald Trump that the NPR newsroom lurched far to the left and decided to go all in on its biased worldview rather than journalistic neutrality, something he opposed strongly. He said, in part:
“So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.
…
With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong. News organizations don’t go in for that kind of reckoning. But there’s a good reason for NPR to be the first: we’re the ones with the word public in our name.
Former President Donald Trump responded to the revelations on Truth Social, writing, in a post on Wednesday, April 10, “NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM! EDITOR SAID THEY HAVE NO REPUBLICANS, AND IS ONLY USED TO “DAMAGE TRUMP.” THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!”
FNC host Jesse Watters posted about the matter as well, writing, “NPR, a taxpayer-funded news organization, used to be trusted but now, they’ve gone rogue. One senior editor, a classic liberal, says NPR corrupted itself in 2016. He admits NPR coped with Hillary’s loss by getting into bed with Adam Schiff. He says NPR pretended like the Trump-Russia collusion story never happened once it was debunked, he says they tried to kill the lab leak theory and ignored Hunter’s laptop bombshell. This was all fueled by former NPR CEO, John Lansing, who thought white people had to atone for their skin color.”
Similarly, former GOP primary hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy argued that NPR has been acting like “state media” in a post on X, writing, “NPR is quite literally state-funded media. At some point in the last decade, they started acting like it.” Ramaswamy included, in that tweet, a video about NPR. Watch him discuss the issue here:
"*" indicates required fields