Posted By crates on April 30, 2009

The first time that I remember listening to National Public Radio was in September, 1974 in Eugene, Oregon.  I was using my old 8 transistor FM radio that I had gotten for Christmas when I was in the eighth grade (I know, I didn’t think NPR was ever on AM, but it was!).  I remember being attracted to the station immediately.  I have never been a person who liked to listen to music that much on the radio, always preferring news and talk programs that explored the issues of the day, and I enjoyed this about NPR.

I continue to listen to NPR every day almost exclusively, and I really do enjoy the local programs dealing with local issues along with the in-depth reporting of the national and international news.  I have never considered myself to be a political sort of  person, rarely taking much interest in the squabbles and infighting that goes on between the political parties.   Likewise, I never thought of NPR in a political sort of way.  I just enjoyed it.  Part of the enjoyment involved the relative lack of commercials (although this has changed).

I remember talking to a friend about how much I enjoyed the programming on NPR and was surprised when he claimed that the programming was extremely slanted from a liberal point of view.  As I disagreed with him, claiming that the programming was unbiased as could be, there awoke a little niggling worm of doubt.  I began to re-examine my feelings about NPR, and I concluded that one of the reasons that I liked it so much was that it coincided with my own political viewpoint.

Thus after 35 years of listening to NPR, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that National Public Radio presents an extremely biased point of view.  This obvious bias is especially evident in the local programming and also during political campaigns.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I agree with most of the bias presented by the network, but I really do not want to always be presented with news reportage that I agree with!  I want to be challenged by contrasting viewpoints, not always being fed a diet of liberal pablum.

This bias is not always that obvious.  Much of the bias is shown by selective reporting, only reporting events from a certain viewpoint.  For example always reporting the events in Israel from the Palistinian point of view, very rarely presenting the contrasting side.  Or always presenting the controversy on evolution from the pro side and presenting any anti-evolutionist viewpoints as being held by ignorant conservatives.  Now this last point has taken me a while to realize since I am obviously an evolutionist, and have always enjoyed NPR’s reporting on the subject–until I realized that, once again, I am being fed a one-sided reportage.

    I thought that this bias was especially evident in the recent national elections.  There were times that I just had to switch it off, it was so blatant.  KUOW in my area is the worst as far as bias goes with it’s local shows, whereas KPLU alternates its NPR programs with wonderful selections of jazz.

Here are a few sites and quotes:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4717847

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3827/is_200311/ai_n9317144   appears to be a conservative commentator.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/

general_current_events/media/americans_see_liberal_media_bias_on_tv_news  article on publics perception of bias in the media…statistics.

“The bias against conservatives and Republicans is the most visible, though not necessarily the most fervently held one (the pro-Palestinian bias comes to mind here). Democratic politicians and former members of the Carter and Clinton administrations are frequent guests on the shows. Conservatives on NPR are as rare as a snow flake in the midst of summer. Since the bias against Republicans is so ubiquitous, it can be easily shown:
The issues that keep Washington politicians and pundits occupied are often initiated by interest groups and so-called “think tanks.” It seems that for every liberal group there is a conservative counterpart. The most influential Democratic think tank is the Brookings Institution, while the premiere think tank on the Republican side is the Heritage Foundation. When you search Google News for the two names, you find an about equal number of citations for both, with a slight advantage for the Heritage Foundation (53%). Searching for the think tanks on NPR’s web site, the Heritage Foundations seems to be almost non-existent (19%). Obviously, the folks at NPR don’t like to talk to fellows with conservative ideas. http://www.nprsucks.com/opinion5.htm

http://www.discovery.org/a/2068  Says npr is proevolutionist  heh

http://www.slate.com/id/2090044/ Terry Shaviao’s coma…biased presentation by NPR

Categories: Miscellaneous, People
Tags: Nationial Public Radio, NPR, NPR biased