All Things Considered

NPR Anchor Audie Cornish Peddles Liberal Talking Points During Interview with Rand Paul
By Jeffrey Meyer | January 30, 2014 | 12:09 PM EST

Sen. Rand Paul sat down with NPR anchor Audie Cornish on the January 29th All Things Considered, and from the moment the interview began, NPR’s listeners knew the likely outcome: a one-sided attack job.

Anchor Robert Siegel explained that while Cathy McMorris Rodgers gave the official GOP response, Sen. Mike Lee had a Tea Party response, and Paul had an online video response. Cornish began the interview by asking, “How do you convince the independent voter out there who sees this kind of mishmash of responses from various Republicans and no definitive agenda?”

NPR Media Reporter Presses NBC News to Be More Biased on Russian Gays, NBC Claims 'We're Not Activists'
By Tim Graham | January 17, 2014 | 6:37 PM EST

On Monday’s All Things Considered, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik drew this unintentionally hilarious sentence out of NBC executive Alexandra Wallace: “Our job is to report on what's going on in the world. We're not activists. We're observers and analysts.”

Folkenflik’s story pressed on NBC News from the left, that they must campaign against Russian repression before, during, and after the Olympics. NBC protested they'd been interviewing gay athletes like Billie Jean King and Brian Boitano and letting them express their joy at being picked by Obama to represent the U.S. delegation. Russian gay lobbyist Konstantin Yablotskiy represented the Russian leftists:

NPR Totally Skips the Names 'Obama' and 'Clinton' As They Discuss Senate Benghazi Report
By Jeffrey Meyer | January 16, 2014 | 5:15 PM EST

Benghazi could have been prevented. Those were the findings in a newly released bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that blamed the State Department for failing to protect the U.S. consulate in eastern Libya.

During its nightly All Things Considered program on Wednesday, NPR anchor Audie Cornish and reporter Tom Gjelten spent nearly four minutes discussing the report without uttering the names Obama and Clinton once. Gjelten even made a bit of a gaffe about the Democrats. On Thursday, NPR’s Morning Edition didn’t bother to cover Benghazi, but instead found time to discuss whether or not Florida would decide that medical marijuana should be given to children with seizures.

NPR Honors the 'Complicated' and 'Achingly Beautiful' Work of Radical Black Poet Who Wrote 9-11 Was an Israeli Plot
By Tim Graham | January 12, 2014 | 8:00 AM EST

Billionaires who back conservative Republicans are trashed on NPR when they die as “scathing TV ad” backers. But what about a black radical who wrote a poem blaming 9-11 on Israel and implying America was evil and terrorist? On Thursday night's "All Things Considered," NPR began by calling him “one of America's most important — and controversial — literary figures,” under the headline “Amiri Baraka's Legacy Both Controversial And Achingly Beautiful.”

The man’s invented Muslim name was Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones). He was the poet laureate of New Jersey in 2002, but they abolished that honorary office after his poem. NPR cultural correspondent Neda Ulaby found his most controversial work wasn’t too negative, it was “complicated.”

NPR's Gay Ari Shapiro Reports On 'How 2013 Became The Gayest Year Ever'
By Tim Graham | December 29, 2013 | 3:49 PM EST

On the day after Christmas, NPR’s All Things Considered offered a little gift to openly gay reporter Ari Shapiro: seven minutes of air time for a story with the online title “How 2013 Became The ‘Gayest Year Ever’.”

As anchor Robert Siegel said NPR was looking at the “winners and losers of 2013...for gay rights groups, the last 12 months saw a huge string of victories, from state legislatures to Congress to the Supreme Court. The surprise ruling in Utah legalizing same-sex marriage is just the latest win. NPR's Ari Shapiro reports on why some LGBT advocates are calling 2013 the gayest year ever.”

Bozell Column: Punk Rockers Knock Christmas
By Brent Bozell | December 21, 2013 | 8:11 AM EST

What’s been called the “war on Christmas” is often a case of secular liberals wanting to engage in Christmas denial. In the name of not wanting to offend people of minority faiths (or no faith), they remove the C-word from department-store catalogs and remove Christmas songs from public-school concerts, leaving us with lame messages about snow.

But there’s another kind of Christmas denial: the kind that simply stomps on Christianity as ridiculous and kicks over the nativity set. Take the atheist punk band Bad Religion and their new record of Christmas songs they found “hilarious” to record.

NPR Bemoans 'Stronghold of Traditional Values and Religious Beliefs' in Russia
By Matthew Balan | November 11, 2013 | 7:51 PM EST

Friday's All Things Considered made it clear that NPR is not just one-sided when it comes to the domestic agenda of left-wing homosexual activists, but it also slants toward them with foreign issues. Correspondent Michele Kelemen boosted a collaboration between visiting members of the "Rakurs" LGBT group from Russia and their American counterparts in Washington, DC and Maine.

Kelemen zeroed in on the testimony of one Rakurs member who lamented how the Russian city of Arkhangelsk has supposedly turned from a place "open to different views and trends" to a "stronghold of traditional values and religious beliefs in the Russian north".

NBC Pushes Line That Death of 'Sacred' Yasser Arafat Was Poisoning, Ignores New Report That Says No
By Tim Graham | November 9, 2013 | 9:33 PM EST

On Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News and Thursday’s Today, NBC hyped the notion that Palestinian guerrilla leader Yasser Arafat “may have” been assassinated by poisoning. They let Palestinians accuse Israel, and bizarrely suggested only Israel “considered” Arafat a terrorist (forgetting decades where the U.S. officially agreed).

There was no NBC update Friday when NPR’s All Things Considered reported the Palestinian Authority released a separate Russian study that did not confirm the notion of poisoning with Polonium-210. NBC didn’t offer any journalist or government official who disagreed with the pro-Arafat line:

Actual NPR Headline: 'Healthcare.Gov Could've Been Worse'
By Tim Graham | October 23, 2013 | 11:38 AM EDT

NPR is looking quite desperate in its promotion of Obamacare. This was an actual headline at the NPR website: "Despite Glitches, HealthCare.gov Could've Been Worse." Jonah Goldberg told me "I thought you made up that headline!" He cracked on Twitter: "For instance, logging on could have permanently blinded you!"

On Tuesday night's All Things Considered, anchor Melissa Block borrowed this oddly optimistic concept inside the liberal bubble from Rusty Foster of The New Yorker magazine. He said "I'm sort of amazed at how well it does work, actually, which is, you know, where it kind of -- it could've been worse."  They needed more time, he protested:

Softball Shocker: Obama Grants Interview to NPR Anchor Who Compared Him to Abe Lincoln
By Tim Graham | October 2, 2013 | 8:40 AM EDT

President Obama granted a 24-minute interview to NPR Morning Edition anchor Steve Inskeep, the man who compared him to Abraham Lincoln in a softball 2012 interview with David Axelrod.  On Tuesday's morning show, they spread the interview into three segments distributed throughout the show. The questions were mostly brief, neutral process questions about budget negotiations, but Inskeep did ask a tough question, from the Left, about rising income inequality on Obama's watch. (The full transcript is here.)

What really stood out was the part where Inskeep helpfully suggested to Obama that conservatives are scared that Obamacare will be implemented because it will become popular – which it certainly isn’t now – and then agreed it’s a deficit-shrinker:

NPR Brings On Author to Expose the NFL As A -- Nonprofit?
By Tim Graham | September 29, 2013 | 8:53 AM EDT

NPR took up the NFL as a topic, with author Gregg Easterbrook, a sports junkie and long-time writer for liberal magazines and sites like Slate.  On Wednesdays’s All Things Considered, anchor Robert Siegel seemed to sneer at the sport: “Football: part sport, part national addiction, part cult.”

Siegel told Easterbrook “Yours is one of the most conflicted books I've ever read. You love the game. And you document the umpteen ways in which it has forfeited any claim to your love. Why not say ‘Enough, goodbye, football’?” Easterbrook said “I love football and I want it reformed.” Both liberals and conservatives might be shocked that the massively profitable NFL is chartered as a nonprofit:

Sen. Patty Murray Argues With NPR Anchor that Americans Are Ignorant of Obamacare's Great Benefits
By Tim Graham | September 27, 2013 | 8:40 PM EDT

Kudos to NPR All Things Considered anchor Robert Siegel, who on Thursday night pressed liberal Sen. Patty Murray to consider that perhaps Democrats might want to bend a little on Obamacare. He cited a Pew poll showing the partisan blame for a shutdown would be 39 percent Republican, 36 percent Democrat.

But it really got amusing when Murray wouldn’t budge – in fact kvetched that Obamacare was based on a “Republican idea” – when Siegel suggested that if Obamacare remained unpopular a year from now, would she then concede something might be wrong? Murray, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, actually suggested the American people are simply unaware they have already benefited: