Give her credit: Chief executive Katherine Maher is not afraid to look ridiculous on her quest to save National Public Radio from the federal chopping block. On Thursday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal’s podcast, hosted by Ryan Knutson and Jessica Mendoza, Maher claimed "we are consistently found to be centrist in reporting....we are a nonpartisan news organization."
Maher was on to talk about NPR filing a lawsuit, alongside three Colorado-based stations, challenging the Trump administration’s executive order to cut funding for NPR out of the federal budget.
First, Maher falsely labeled Trump’s executive order a violation of the First Amendment.
Katherine Maher: ….And what I mean by that is the executive order very clearly engages in what is called viewpoint discrimination, which is to say that the president has stated that NPR and PBS should not receive federal funding because he disagrees with our programming and our editorial choices, in terms of the story selection that we cover or the way that we cover the news….
But no outlet has a First Amendment right to the public treasury, and Mendoza quoted a Trump spokesperson saying such.
Jessica Mendoza: A spokesperson for the White House said that public broadcasting is, "Creating media to support a particular political party on the taxpayer's dime. Therefore, the president is exercising his lawful authority to limit funding to NPR and PBS." The argument that the Trump administration has made is not new right? Many Republicans have been attacking NPR as having a liberal bias for a while now. Last year, a former NPR editor also argued that there was left-leaning bias in the organization. And then just to broaden it out more recently, the Pew Research Center in a survey found that only 12% of Republicans say they trust NPR. Why do you think that is? Where does that perception that NPR is left-leaning come from?
Maher employed some fuzzy math to fudge the numbers, which consistently show conservatives shunning NPR.
Maher: ....As we look at the data of our audience, we see that it roughly matches the spread across the nation in terms of political belief. And so our audience is roughly a third self-identified as conservative, a third self-identified as independent or centrist, and a third self-identified as liberal or left, which is more or less the American demographic in terms of political belief.
When Maher argued that perception wasn’t reality when it came to NPR bias, Mendoza replied:
Mendoza: But is it really possible to divorce those two things to separate them? Wouldn't the perception be a problem, especially for a news organization that receives government money?
Maher: Well, I think there a number of different things that are packaged up in that. Perception is an issue and we don't like being perceived as liberal. If you look at our reporting, we are consistently found to be centrist in reporting. Some of our shows, programs, that are produced that are non-news shows, may feel as though they have a sort of cultural lens on them. But I want to be very clear that we are a nonpartisan news organization and make every effort to ensure that we have representatives of both major political parties on our air as frequently as possible....
The “centrist” and “nonpartisan” claims are easily debunked, while the admission that some “non-news shows may feel as though they have a sort of cultural lens on them” is a less-forthright version of something former New York Times editor Bill Keller said when defending his own outlet from accusations of liberal bias back in 2011: "We are liberal in the sense that we are open-minded, tolerant, urban….”
