NewsBuster Tom Johnson has condensed his time reviewing NPR broadcasts for MRC (poor man) into an article for The American Enterprise magazine. His general theory is that NPR has traveled from a fairly radical past to a present in which it's fairly indistinguishable in its biases from the rest of the "mainstream" media establishment. Here's an excerpt:
Most old-school or throwback leftist bias on NPR falls into one of three categories, listed below in ascending order of importance.
The first contains examples of a frequently amusing sociopolitical exoticism. In October 2004, for example, All Things Considered co-host Melissa Block referred to Ralph Nader as a "major" Presidential candidate. A few days after the election, reporter Pam Fessler gave "international monitors" plenty of time to gripe about how voting rules in the U.S. vary from state to state.
Far goofier was a commentary from Eve Ensler, the mistress-mind of The Vagina Monologues, who shared: "I’ve been plagued by self-hatred my whole life, as I think many of us have...I think capitalism breeds it. Actually, I don’t think capitalism would exist without it.... We buy products and we consume things to fix ourselves."
Another commentator, Julie Zickefoose, offered pro-woodpecker, anti-person bias: "Must we trap them and bundle them into cages? Given a choice between such intervention and certain extinction, and the intellect to consider it, what would an ivory-bill choose? I imagine it flying away in a long, straight line, putting miles of swamp between it and the further workings of humanity."
His other bias themes are a complacency toward communism and a general skepticism at America's post-9/11 course. Read it all, and mourn for your tax dollars.
