By Tim Graham | March 21, 2015 | 7:31 AM EDT

Ultraliberal former Congressman Barney Frank promoted his book Frank on National Public Radio on Monday on the badly named Fresh Air show with Terry Gross. Only one point of view is normally allowed on that stale show.

Early in the 38-minute softball session, Gross really loaded a question about Christian-right “homophobia” in the Reagan years, proclaiming you would have to be avoid saying “overtly racist things,” but you could be overtly bigoted on the gay agenda. She laughed as Frank suggested spcial conservatives should be institutionalized.

By Brent Bozell | and By Tim Graham | November 22, 2014 | 7:58 AM EST

The liberal myth surrounding the hypercompetent Barack Obama faded long ago, but the liberal myth of “cultural icon” Jon Stewart is only getting stronger. Stewart’s tour of interviews for the new movie he directed, “Rosewater,” has created a parade of flatterers, sycophants, and every other synonym in the thesaurus for “obsequious.”

Roy Sekoff at The Huffington Post stands out by insisting the movie only polishes this walking statue: “In finding this format, in this form, you have become obviously a cultural icon, maybe one of the dominant figures in the political discourse.”

By Tim Graham | July 23, 2014 | 12:16 PM EDT

On July 17, the day before NPR's Diane Rehm Show had a unanimous panel of four leftists on transgender issues (including a Time reporter), NPR’s nationally distributed Fresh Air talk show devoted 43 minutes to “the growing number of people who identify as transgender.” Host Terry Gross brought on three transgender “rights” advocates to promote the book Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Trans Community.

As usual, the guests were treated to perfectly one-sided and sensitive questioning, the “rudest” of which came on how they never want to discuss genitals they were “assigned at birth” or surgeries to alter them:

By Kyle Drennen | June 13, 2014 | 11:55 AM EDT

On Friday, CBS This Morning was the only one of the Big Three network morning shows to cover Hillary Clinton's testy Thursday exchange with NPR host Terry Gross over Clinton's shifting position on gay marriage. Neither NBC's Today nor ABC's Good Morning America bothered to mention the unflattering incident for the potential 2016 presidential candidate. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

This Morning co-host Charlie Rose informed viewers: "Politico says Hillary Clinton rejects the idea that politics affected her views on same-sex marriage....In an interview Thursday, NPR host Terry Gross repeatedly asked Clinton about the issue." A clip followed of the contentious back and forth in which Clinton ranted to the liberal host: "I think you are being very persistent, but you are playing with my words and playing with what is such an important issue."

By Tim Graham | April 13, 2014 | 9:12 AM EDT

It started sounding like Unholy Week on NPR. On the national show “Fresh Air,” one day after Bart Ehrman insisted Jesus didn’t see himself as God, host Terry Gross brought on another atheist author, Barbara Ehrenreich. The segment was titled "A Nonbeliever Tries to Make Sense of the Visions She Had as a Teen."

Or as Hanna Rosin summarized it for Slate: “Could Barbara Ehrenreich, fourth-generation atheist, proud socialist, and mocker of brightness and smiles, have found religion? Dream on, Billy Graham.” But apparently titling your book "Living With a Wild God" makes your atheist comrades unhappy.

By Matthew Balan | April 10, 2014 | 4:59 PM EDT

NPR's Terry Gross anticipated the Christian holy day of Easter on Monday's Fresh Air by boosting "popular" author Bart Ehrman's latest book, where the agnostic scholar asserted that "Jesus himself didn't call himself God and didn't consider himself God, and that none of his disciples had any inkling at all that he was God." During the segment, Gross wondered if "Christians made the claim that Jesus is God in order...to grow from being a small cult."

Ehrman also claimed, "I don't think Jesus was given a decent burial – that he was probably thrown into a common grave of some kind," and that the early disciples of Jesus probably hallucinated his resurrection:

By Tim Graham | October 6, 2013 | 8:45 PM EDT

NPR’s Terry Gross is best remembered by conservatives for her 2003 assault interview with Bill O’Reilly. But it was all fuzzballs and flowers for Chris Matthews when he came to Gross’s show “Fresh Air” on Tuesday. They were discussing the new Matthews book on his old boss Tip O’Neill and Reagan.

The first laugh line from Gross? She asked Matthews, “Can you remember that far back, to when you were partisan?” Another gag line came when Gross asked if Matthews grew emotional when his liberalism (“love for the political process”) was challenged by people who want to dismantle and defund things:

By Tim Graham | August 1, 2013 | 10:44 PM EDT

Inside the liberal echo chamber that is National Public Radio, the stale show known as “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” addressed Congress on Wednesday with New York Times congressional reporter Jonathan Weisman. Host Terry Gross announced “this Congress has been one of the least productive in history. They have accomplished so little that the president is looking into how he can bypass Congress and use executive actions to make changes in areas like job creation, immigration and the economy.”

Gross put all the blame for Congress on the “radical” Obama-resisting conservatives: “What do you think have been the most dramatic examples of partisanship or obstructionism or radicalism during this 113th Congress so far?” Weisman said tax hikes made Congress "productive" at first, but conservatives ruined it:

By Tim Graham | July 23, 2013 | 8:25 PM EDT

The next time a public-radio station goes into pledge-drive mode and begs listeners to chip in $100 for those snazzy premiums like the Nina Totin'-Bag, it would be wonderful if, in the spirit of balance and fairness, they would read off some salary numbers for NPR stars. Do people on modest incomes really want to chip in $25 to make sure an anchor can take home $375,000?

Instead, pledge-drive announcers often plead that stations need donations to pay for program fees, not anchor salaries. Blogger and news-app developer Andy Boyle pored over a few IRS 990 forms and revealed some of the highest-paid public radio poobahs:

By Tim Graham | May 30, 2013 | 3:41 PM EDT

On Tuesday's Fresh Air on NPR stations from coast to coast, host Terry Gross interviewed author Stephen King on his new book  "Joyland," which features a young man in a wheelchair with muscular dystrophy and his grandfather, a radio evangelist named Buddy Ross, who insists the disease is divine punishment.

King might have surprised the secular-left devotees of public radio -- not with the usual talk of how organized religion seems like a "theological insurance scam," but by proclaiming he believes in God: "Everything is sort of built in a way that to me suggests intelligent design." He had to talk more about his inconsistency and doubts to get back in NPR's secular sweet spot.

By Tim Graham | March 28, 2013 | 2:58 PM EDT

In a cozy radical-to-radical interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross on Wednesday, incoming MSNBC primetime host Chris Hayes announced he’s watched Bill O’Reilly “very, very, very little...I’m positive I have never watched an hour of the O’Reilly show.”

Hayes is going to pretend that Fox News and MSNBC aren’t really competitors at all: “I genuinely don’t think of myself as in competition with Bill O’Reilly.” They don’t have the same “pool of viewers.” Hayes sounded like he meant “gene pool.” He can’t “hate-watch” conservative programs like some liberals do:

By Tim Graham | March 23, 2013 | 2:12 PM EDT

Pardon the age of this item, but it's on an issue of campaign history. On March 13, NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross interviewed new CNN host Jake Tapper about politics and journalism, and whether there was blowback from presidents and candidates over tough questions. But Gross felt compelled to bring up the "lies" told about John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign -- without expressing anything specific.

Tapper said he was assigned as a Swift Boat Veteran fact checker by ABC. Gross said, "So you were fact-checking some of the Swift Boat attacks against presidential candidate John Kerry. There were so many lies in those attacks. What was the fact-checking like, and how effective do you think it was in trying to counteract the lies?"