Media Bias: A Case Against NPR

Since the budget (and continuing resolutions) and a potential government shutdown is the political story of the day, I thought I would challenge the notion that NPR is a non-partisan, equal opportunity disseminator of news. The facts are as follows:

In 2010, Democrats controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House is constitutionally assigned the task of originating anything that has to do with spending (and taxing). Therefore, the House is solely responsible for drafting budget legislation. The 2011 budget should have been proposed, drafted, and passed in 2010. This never happened.

The paragraph above is the ONLY reason why we are having this discussion in April of 2011. An organization that claims to have the highest standards of journalistic integrity should start – as in, right up front – every single article, news item, and anything else with an acknowledgment of why any article about the budget is being written to begin with. It doesn’t have to be a long statement. A simple “The Democrat controlled House did not propose or pass a 2011 budget 2010. Because of this the current Congress is in the process of…” is enough. The reader should know right away how and why we’re where we are. A timeline is set. It doesn’t even have to be in the opening paragraph, just somewhere towards the top of the article – say, in the first two or three paragraphs.

I went to the NPR politics section to see how the allegedly unbiased organization was covering the situation. The first story about the budget battle is titled “GOP Prepares Budget Extension As Talks Continue” and here’s how it opens:

House Republicans planned to bring another stopgap spending bill to a vote on Thursday after late-night talks failed to produce any solution to the protracted budget impasse – which threatens to force a partial shutdown of the government.

The latest temporary measure would keep the federal government open for another week while GOP and Democratic lawmakers try again to forge a set of budget cuts they can both agree on before a Friday midnight deadline. Democrats also have objected to dozens of GOP policy “riders” that would, among other actions, roll back funding for recent health care legislation and end government funding to Planned Parenthood.

We don’t get the required background until the second to last paragraph:

A Democratic-led Congress failed to complete the must-pass spending bills last year. When Republicans, backed by a slew of tea party-affiliated freshmen, assumed power in the House in January, they voted to slash $61 billion. The Democratic-controlled Senate rejected those cuts.

One sentence followed by a subtle shift of blame to the current “tea party” backed Republican House. Before this paragraph, NPR had already set up the case of how horrible a shutdown could be so that the reader was disgusted enough not to care why we were here to begin with. This was by design. This is the narrative being pushed by the Leftist establishment which includes NPR.

So we go back to the Politics home page and look for more analysis, right? What’s the second story about the budget battle? An article titled “The Nation: Blame Both Parties For Shutdown Threat“:

InTrade says there’s a 52 percent chance there will be a government shutdown before July. The brinksmanship and theatrics aside, I’ve long believed a shutdown would be averted and a budget deal reached for 2011–12. Now I’m not so sure. Some in the GOP are eagerly cheering on the prospect of a shutdown (literally), with the conservative Republican Study Committee even unveiling a countdown clock on its website (as of this post, there’s two days, ten hours, three minutes and five seconds left).

A mixture of Republican stubbornness and Democratic timidity has brought us to this point. Democratic leaders could have passed a budget before the 2010 elections or during the lame-duck Congress, when they held large Congressional majorities, but by punting on the issue, they empowered the new House Republican majority, whose number-one issue in the 2010 election was cutting government spending. In February 2011, House Republicans passed $60 billion in spending cuts for 2011 by targeting the usual suspects — eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood, preventing the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, blocking the implementation of healthcare reform, cutting off support for NPR, PBS and AmeriCorps. Their bill looked much more like an effort to defang longtime opponents and score political points than a responsible attempt to actually balance the budget or create jobs. Goldman Sachs predicted that the plan would halt economic growth by 1.5 to 2 percentage points in the coming year, while Moody’s forecast it would cost 700,000 jobs.

Wait, what? The Nation? Progressive magazine and website? That “The Nation”? Yes. That very one. The whole article is distinctly from the Leftist point of view. Republicans are evil and Democrats are too weak to fight them. What a joke.

So you have an NPR written article that buries the background of the situation under essentially irrelevant coverage, then the very next item is a hyper-partisan article from a Left-leaning publication. Nowhere on the NPR website is a counter to this narrative. No article from National Review or The Weekly Standard. Nothing. You get bland crap from NPR and then you get “analysis” from The Nation.

That’s called “bias.” They are shaping a narrative and using their name to give it credibility. Someone who may not have been paying close attention to the situation, upon hearing that the government shutdown might happen Friday (tomorrow), might go to NPR to get the latest developments. This is what they would get. The Left-leaning, Democrat version of events.

Now, I don’t have a problem with this, per se. I already know NPR is biased. But many people don’t. They think because it’s called “public” and is partially funded by the federal government, there’s some kind of requirement for NPR to be unbiased. NPR plays to this perception and they are assisted by the professional smear merchants on the Left.

Let them be biased. The internet is the great equalizer. Alternative voices can and will be heard. Let NPR be another mouthpiece for the Statist Left. Just don’t ask me to pay for it. Let them compete just like everyone else without federal funds.