Liberals are horrified that on paper, NPR now only has one reporter on the "climate change" beat. Katherine Bagley at InsideClimate News reports there used to be three full-time reporters and an editor on the Earth-on-fire watch. But NPR insists that it knows this is a deeply important issue, and never one in need of balance.
Edward Schumacher-Matos
By Tim Graham | July 13, 2014 | 7:19 PM EDT
NPR’s absentee ethics watchdog/ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos is ending his three-year term (with three items in the the first six months of 2014, one of them insisting on a ban of the word “Redskins.”) NPR is looking for someone who has a “diplomatic style that will earn the respect and trust of the public and the NPR staff and other NPR managers.”
In reality, they’re not looking for someone who makes sure all taxpayers get a fair shake from the media outlet they’re subsidizing. They’re looking for someone to please NPR staff and the hard-core lefties known as the NPR “public.”
By Tim Graham | September 23, 2013 | 6:56 AM EDT
NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos addressed the issue of bias, but only on whether NPR should accept “enhanced underwriting” – commercials – from Al-Jazeera America. The advocate for the listeners told them they don't have "free speech values."
He basically said critics of the network are destroyers of free speech, and should stop complaining: “Whether NPR should even accept the sponsorship from Al Jazeera is a separate matter of management policy that is outside my purview. But I do have a vital interest in anything that restricts free speech, and this essentially is what the complaining listeners want to do.” The question of an anti-American bias is irrelevant:
By Matthew Sheffield | June 5, 2013 | 1:57 PM EDT
Judging from the silence from the NPR ombudsman, it would appear that the taxpayer-funded radio network has solved the pervasive problems of bias and ideological monoculture that have plagued it for decades.
NPR's internal media critic, Edward Schumacher-Matos, has not written a blog post since May 6 and has not been seen on Twitter since May 3, despite being called out several times by various individuals on the microblogging service for being unresponsive.
NPR Ombudsman Slams WashPost for Dumping Their Ombudsman, Then Trashes Media Watchdog Groups as Silly Partisan Nitpickers
By Tim Graham | March 5, 2013 | 6:59 AM EST The Washington Post decided to dump its ombudsman or reader’s advocate position after Patrick Pexton’s two-year contract ended. The position is “independent,” but all too often, the hiring media outlet gets every benefit of the doubt. Pexton has defended some incredibly shameless hit pieces, including the Rick Perry “Niggerhead”-on-a-rock story and the Mitt Romney “haircut bully” episode of 1965.
Nevertheless, on March 1, NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos decried the Post decision as leading to a greater decline in media credibility. In the midst of this however, he attacked media watchdogs as a class as silly, uninformed nitpickers:
By Tim Graham | December 13, 2012 | 2:03 PM EST
NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos has demonstrated he's not interested in the argument that NPR has a liberal bias. But he has repeatedly addressed listeners who are angry NPR favors Republicans too much, or fails to pounce immediately on leftist PR stunts like Occupy Wall Street.
On Wednesday, his post began: "Arthur Price of New York City asked this provocative question: 'Is it my imagination or is NPR featuring an excessive number of Republican voices when it comes to the so-called 'fiscal cliff'?' I didn't know, but I loved the issue he raised." Their internal count of stories from November 7 to December 6 said yes, Republicans were more quoted:
By Tim Graham | March 25, 2012 | 8:13 AM EDT
Possibly in response to NewsBusters readers who passed on our item on the string of Pope Benedict-mocking jokes on NPR's game show "Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me!" NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos tells NewsBusters and other critics: lighten up, or be compared to radical Muslims. Isn't the ombudsman supposed to advocate for the listeners, not denounce them?
"If we keep jokes about the pope off-limits, we create a silencing effect that is far more damaging than the jokes themselves. We threaten to become like the intolerant extremists now most notoriously bedeviling the Muslim world, though other religions suffer from strains of fanaticism as well." Say what?
By Tim Graham | March 5, 2012 | 6:27 AM EST
NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos is just making a cartoon out of himself in trying to be responsive after the Juan Williams firing and the Meet-a-Radical-Muslim-for-Lunch scandal. He went to discuss the idea of liberal bias on NPR with....Ralph Nader. "Nader, a five-time presidential candidate, has been calling me in recent months to hold my feet to the fire, and so I went to meet with him."
Naturally, Nader claims NPR is the home of capitalist pigs: "While the political right has been beating the drum for years that NPR is too liberal, Nader says that is not the true picture at all. He says that it is progressives on the political left, like him, who are being excluded from NPR's airwaves." Obama and Nancy Pelosi? They're in the middle.
By Tim Graham | October 20, 2011 | 5:09 PM EDT
Incoming NPR president Gary Knell smugly dismissed NPR critics in an interview with James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times. "If you listen over a period of time you hear voices from all ends of the political spectrum on NPR," Knell argued. "I think a lot of the critics, by what they say, don't even listen to the service." (Dear Mr. Smug: read the NPR section of NewsBusters, with links to your transcripts.)
That's not the only smug echo among the NPR rookies. Another line is that conservatives (or people who agree there's a liberal tilt) aren't the "real listeners," the "core audience" of NPR -- even if they're "core" funders through taxes. That's what new NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos said in an interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation on October 11:
By Tim Graham | October 19, 2011 | 4:46 PM EDT
Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller has a hot scoop about a National Public Radio employee aiding "Occupy" protests in the District of Columbia. "National Public Radio host Lisa Simeone appears to be breaking the taxpayer-subsidized network’s ethics rules by acting as a spokeswoman for Occupy D.C. group 'October 2011,' which is currently 'occupying” Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.'
Simeone hosts NPR’s nationally distributed “World of Opera” program and “SoundPrint,” a program that airs on DC NPR affiliate WAMU-FM. In a YouTube video uploaded in July, Simeone proclaimed "The time has come to stop these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and all the other places we're now bombing with our drones and other equipment, and to demand that money that's being spent and wasted on slaughter come home here to spent in the U.S. on human needs."
By Tim Graham | October 18, 2011 | 7:48 AM EDT
The ombudsman at a media outlet is supposed to be an advocate for the audience, a watchdog to keep the media outlet honest. But several new ombudsmen are following a more comfortable rut: kissing the hand that feeds them, and defending the media outlet from "baseless" public criticism. Patrick Pexton is doing that at The Washington Post, and Edward Schumacher-Matos is doing the same at NPR.
Late Monday, the NPR ombudsman slammed NewsBusters and National Review Online. The pull quote summarized: "I want to learn from the advocacy groups. But not much of their criticism holds up." He even suggested there was "certainly no liberal bias" as NPR flooded the zone of the London phone-hacking story that leftists thought could be Rupert Murdoch’s undoing:
By Tim Graham | August 27, 2011 | 4:04 PM EDT
On Tuesday, NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos reached back to a July 26 story on the horrific shootings in Norway. Correspondent Sylvia Poggioli suggested the shooter, Anders Breivik “once belonged to the ultra-right Progress Party.” Schumacher-Matos lamented the “ultra-right” label, and asked Poggioli to explain herself. He called it "ultra-wrong."
It quickly became clear that Poggioli saw "ultra" extremism in the party's opposition to Islam and immigration. The ombudsman posting including just a few paragraphs of what Poggioli wrote in her own defense. But at the bottom of the page, he posted the whole reply, and her affinity for left-wing rags like the Nation and "far right" labels became really obvious: