Orwell Watch: NPR and the Death of Fairness

A story about facts and decency is quickly reduced to another partisan bias tale.

Earlier this week on The Free Press, Uri Berliner dropped a bomb on the public media world with “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” As discussed on the new America This Week, the longtime senior editor described how NPR fumbled three stories: Covid, the Hunter Biden laptop affair, and the Trump-Russia scandal. Regarding the latter:

At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff… Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming… It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens… What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection.

Berliner’s piece was immediately swallowed, mangled, and regurgitated as new propaganda. CNN media writer Oliver Darcy wrote “NPR faces right-wing revolt and calls for defunding after editor claims left-wing bias,” establishing the format that this was not about factual impropriety, but about a “right-wing revolt” against claimed “left-wing bias.” The New York Times did much the same thing, saying “NPR is in Turmoil After It is Accused of Left-Wing Bias,” adding that Berliner’s piece generated “firestorm… especially among conservatives.” On cue, human error-vane Jonathan Chait chimed in to insist “The Media Did Not Make Up Trump’s Russia Scandal.”

But this wasn’t about “bias.” It was about ethics, or a lack of them. But this has been going on for so long, most people have forgotten what ethics look like. Audiences have been trained to think that a station or person that doesn’t make overtly political coverage decisions is just hiding its real biases, which must be either right-wing, corrupt, or both. So someone like Berliner, when he talks about feeling “obliged” to cover even Donald Trump fairly, is actually just concealing a form of unfairness, or inspiring another tribe of unfair actors. Fair equals unfair. It’s impressive propaganda, actually. His story brought back bad memories: