I value NPR, donor to my local station, and am rooting for it. Still, I am so disappointed with how badly they are handling this situation. They need to grasp that Berliner is a whistleblower. He tried to go through channels and got nowhere. It is unbelievably chilling for NPR to say that you need to “secure approval” in advance to be a …
I value NPR, donor to my local station, and am rooting for it. Still, I am so disappointed with how badly they are handling this situation. They need to grasp that Berliner is a whistleblower. He tried to go through channels and got nowhere. It is unbelievably chilling for NPR to say that you need to “secure approval” in advance to be a whistleblower. It is like the military saying you had to go through the chain of command to report sexual harassment which every journalist could see was wrong. If someone at NPR had complained that LBGTQ+ people were not being treated fairly – however flimsy the evidence they provided – everyone would have said how “brave” they were to speak out and how we “can and must do better” and so on. The urge to shoot the messenger and ignore the message which has been the overwhelming NPR response to Berliner is so disappointing. I have witnessed numerous examples of what Berliner is referring to just as a listener. For instance, when Roe vs. Wade was overturned NPR reporting referred standardly to the side that would call themselves pro-life as “anti-abortion rights activists.” I get how hard finding appropriate nomenclature for all this is. Yet in the immediate days before that decision NPR had been covering efforts at gun control legislation. Never once did they refer to its proponents as “anti-gun rights activists.” This is just one example of the kind of thing that is baked into their reporting.
"For instance, when Roe vs. Wade was overturned NPR reporting referred standardly to the side that would call themselves pro-life as “anti-abortion rights activists.” I get how hard finding appropriate nomenclature for all this is. Yet in the immediate days before that decision NPR had been covering efforts at gun control legislation. Never once did they refer to its proponents as “anti-gun rights activists.”
I don't think these are the best examples of NPR's ideological thumbs on the scales. It is definitely more accurate to call the political and cultural movement that is focused entirely around banning and limiting abortions and abortion access as "anti-abortion" rather than "pro life", which was a nice PR marketing term that movement invented for itself decades ago, but "pro life" in a general sense has a lot more meaning than simply being opposed to abortion access and promoting a carry-to-term pregnancy mandate (that in its most "pure" and extreme ends does not even allow for the health and life of the mother), but very noticeably less focused on "quality of life" enhancements and goals outside of carrying a child to term under any circumstance. I get not every movement can be all things at any one point, but the "pro life" movement is 100% focused around abortion access and very few other aspects of promoting "life" to any agreed upon standard of quality, hence "anti-abortion" is a much more accurate moniker for this movement.
"Gun rights", by the same token, is a more or less accurate moniker for the movement that seeks to maximize gun access and ownership. "Anti-gun rights" however, is not so much as the goals of most gun control advocates (ah.. "pro gun control", now there's a much better moniker) is not to eliminate gun rights completely (at least as a mainstream and politically/Constitutionally viable agenda that most credible groups have to organize around versus fantasy outcomes feverishly posted on comments boards) but to impose "controls" on the manufacturing, distribution and ownership of guns, gun types and ammunition, while not so much engaging in the right, or not, to own guns in the abstract sense, it's about modernizing the intent of the 2nd Amendment in a world where guns are not single action musket rifles, and the usage of guns for nefarious means versus "forming a well regulated militia" is much more prevalent and the modern landscape does not seem to much match the Founder's intentions as written - but I digress - the point of the gun control movement is to control the "what and how much" within the confines of the rights versus litigating the rights themselves, hence "pro gun control" is a better description of the movement then "anti-gun rights" since most of these groups are not trying to repeal the 2nd Amendment.
So I think NPR is more or less using better agenda focused language than the "PR" language used by various Groups to describe themselves. A better example of "woke ideology" (sigh, I am growing to hate the term "woke" but we all know what it means at this point, so using it here) in play in various NPR/public radio programming is Mike Pesca's example he used in his podcast to illustrate: a program devoted to "slow train tourism" (a classicly truly niche and nerdy public radio offering if there ever was one - and a complete raison d'etre for public radio in the first place!), basically a guided tour of taking long and slow train rides across various US landscapes and taking the time to enjoy the travel and sightseeing from the train's view that we normally do not get driving or flying - was "reviewed" by a public radio produced show in which the hosts decided the "right take" on this was to completely destroy the nice and nerdy take about the various scenescapes that could be appreciated BECAUSE GENOCIDE HAPPENED HERE OK, the US is built on stolen land so any US citizen merely appreciating the "scenery" is appropriating "stolen views" COLONIALISM, also RACIST because only white people (ostensibly) would be able to afford and want to take "slow trains" for this purpose so it was automatically coded as "white" and therefore "problematic" and needing of "unpacking", etc. It was a nutty and nihilistic take on something that's so on its face inoffensive and completely divorced from culture war topics that they had to work hard to make it one, and very much reflective of the current progressive-left ethos - nothing can be righteously enjoyed or appreciated without the constant either self lashing of the white progressive for the sins of colonization/racism in order to be an "anti-racist white", or the revving up of grievances of non-whites in all topics (few of which of those non-whites seem to be eagerly tuning into public radio to be told that they should find a racial/ethnic grievance in "slow train rides", for example, based on NPR's own demographic audience numbers, let alone - which seems to indicate that not only are the producers of shows like this missing their super liberal/middle/upper middle class white professional audience with this repetitive and intrusive insistence on washing every. friggin. topic. through a now familiar "here's why puppy dogs and ice cream are racist white supremacy colonizing and problematic" "lens", but they are also not really meeting their targeted minority audiences because simply, few to no "regular" persons of any background spend their lives and free time, mental and emotional spaces like this, viewing everything under the sun through an "intersectional"/"anti-racist" "lens" (ugh, more terminology that I've increasingly eye rolled through but here again, we know what it means!), nor desires to have to carry around omipresent guilt/grievance around to "unpack" when they would... rather enjoy the scenery on a slow train ride?
That would have been a much better sample of the way that progressive activist ideological "lenses" have infected various public radio programming than the above examples - and I would add Berliner's cheap shots at the "Russiagate" and "Hunter Biden Laptop Story" that many other posters have provided very well argued defenses of "liberal media's sins" regarding - honestly those asides made me wonder who his audience was, or rather, if The Free Press was imposing some sort of editorial stamp on including those topics as "evidence" of NPR's "wokeness" and unreliability based on TFP's own biases and editorial narratives regarding.
At any rate, Berliner failed to do "actual journalism" in depicting what exactly NPR (the press in general) got "wrong" about these stories given the known facts at the time of those stories, versus Monday morning quarterbacking on revealed facts months/years after the stories, let alone a pretty big handwaving over the circumstances of both stories to where the right wing narrative about both is very much inaccurate and disputable.. Berliner would have been able to make a much better case for a seeped in ideological twist to everything had he not included those very debatable items, which does kind of make me wonder about his own biases...So, he's not wrong, but some of the manner and outlet that he chose are probably seem less conducive to the outcome he claims to desire?
NPR long had a policy of referring to groups by their preferred names, which is a respectful policy, and resulted in the use of the terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice." Both terms are problematic, but so are terms like conservative, liberal, progressive, etc etc that are still used. NPR and many other outlets abandoned the use of the preferred names in response to pressure. The general leftward tilt of the media was a factor.
The current MSM/NPR style treats abortion rights as the issue instead of right to life of the fetus. That's a clearly biased approach, assumes something that's at issue.
I agree that some of Berliner's arguments are weak, but I think he is sensitive to what was known at the time in his remarks about media stories, and does explain what exactly NPR did wrong.
In regard to the laptop story, he claims to have heard top NPR personnel say they shouldn't cover it because it would help Trump. That would be problematic. In any case, NPR did a very poor job explaining their decision, which Berliner quoted from. NPR needed to explain more, because in some ways the story wasn't merely a distraction, as Berliner points out. (NPR didn't suggest the laptop wasn't real, so Berliner's remarks about that based on later knowledge don't undercut NPR's response.)
On the Russiagate story, Berliner mainly criticizes the lack of mea culpa from NPR over allowing people like Schiff to imply there was good evidence of something there wasn't.
Publishing his views with the cooperation of Weiss in the place he did was a mistake, I think.
I was sorely disappointed, no angry, to see Berliner sign up for this in his otherwise seemingly well intentioned effort to yank NPR's leadership and staff from its bubble while it's bleeding audience and donors. It's not necessary to have to concede "Russiagate" and "Hunter Biden's Laptop" to the Right to be able to acknowledge and state that a lot of NPR's programming and reporting slant is heavy left biased and sometimes absurdly "woke". There's got to be a lot more and less debatable examples if the problem is so prevalent without having to concede these topics on shaky grounds that discredits him with the very audience he needs to persuade, which.. is not the prototypical Right Wing Uncle on the Free Press comments board who was already convinced that NPR was filled with "communists" to begin with since the 1990s and who got a massive dopamine red meat hit with Berliner's piece confirming his priors ;P
The laptop story, look others have taken to this in this thread, and this is already getting too long, but my main beef with this take is that the NY Post reporting was about the Rudy Giuliani hard drive copy, which he refused to provide to any independent sources for verification at the time of the reporting. Leaving aside that supposed NPR reporter's comment about not wanting to help Trump's re-election (not great, but under what context was it said - a casual meeting comment or a decisive comment to kill the story? that matters I think! But I don't think that was what made or broke this story at the time), the circumstances of the story still lean towards most major news orgs (INCLUDING FOX NEWS AT THE TIME, let alone the actual NY Post that ran the story refused to let their own reporters headline the article, it was instead headlined by a Sean Hannity show staffer I believe as a "guest journalist" to protect them instead, now if the sourcing and veracity of the story was so solid why are we not criticizing the actual venue of the report to have taken such precautions that made it so easy to discredit??) making the right decision - to report skeptically, at best, about the findings because no one was able to verify or confirm the sourcing of the data, and it is irrelevant whether Hunter Biden at the time confirmed or denied the data was his (and not exactly "shady" of him not to do so either way, again if we're operating under the truthiness that he dropped his laptop off for repairs with a nearly blind Mac repairman who (perhaps unethically?) viewed and copied the drive's data to disseminate to highly partisan (and super convenient that he had such access to Giuliani!!), then Hunter Biden is actually a victim of a pretty big privacy invasion at the least?), the burden was on Giuliani to prove he had "real data" and that the data was not illegally or unethically sourced. He refused and news media outlets treated it accordingly, and you have to ask yourself why if Giuliani had the legitimate goods why he would have refused to open them up for scrutiny that would have certified his story rather than discredit it.
And as for the news media's credulity of the former intelligence officer's signed letter advising about this data, It's not like Giuliani wasn't out in public for the last couple years in Ukraine specifically meeting with actual Russian agents attempting to purchase such data (hell, he got Trump Impeached for the first time over his activities over there!), so the notion that when a set of former intelligence agents marked this as a probable disinformation attempt, was that really out of left field or "biased" to handle the reporting accordingly? It wasn't for almost a full year after the NY Post story ran that the FBI (under Biden's DOJ btw, it was Trump's DOJ that refused to confirm or deny Rudy's statements in October 2020, make of that as you will!) released public information that it did in fact possess the actual Hunter Biden laptop (and not a copy of a copy that had been second-third-etc hand modified after their possession of the actual laptop) - so a lot of the "mea culpa" and lashing of the media about its handling of the story *as the facts were known in October 2020* with the NY Post story sourced entirely from Rudy just sounds like a lot of Monday morning quater-backing based on facts that weren't known for a year or two after.
And after all that is said and done - not even the most dedicated Republicans to the Impeach Biden cause, now having access to the actual FBI investigation and verified sourced material, have been able to come up with any Impeachable crimes of Joe Biden in relation to. So the other notion that this was somehow some election deciding information *as was reported in October 2020 in the NY Post* also seems like the Right trying to justify the massive disappointment that all the build up about Hunter Biden and his Laptop produced little other than evidence of an already sort of known louche lifestyle of a politician's son, embarrassing for him, but who was not himself serving in his father's White House at any point in time... AHEM AHEM "Jarvanka"... and not this massive Biden Crime Family Conspiracy that somehow managed to operate covertly for the last, what, 40-50 years that Biden has served in public elected office, and has for all that time more or less maintained an image of a boring yet earnest dude. It's almost as if the right wanted Hunter Biden Laptop to be the "Trump-Russia Conspiracy" of the left, overshot the moon by a few clicks, and ended up with the actual "Russiagate" egg on their faces for real. A fuckton of projection, IMO. It's the Trump Administration with the most direct and egregious examples of nepotism and profiting from Office at the end of the day, of which I could write another 20000 words depicting lol, but I'll spare you that ;P
And yes - I do agree Berliner probably limited his audience and credibility by going to The Free Press rather than maybe NY Times or CJR or some other more "mainstream" outlet - but which begs the question whether he would have gotten the story and distribution (for all the slagging of the NY Times, I think they would have published his essay, and probably a much better one that didn't concede on some very debatable points in the offering). Again, I'm a subscriber to TFP, they do put out good stuff for the most part, but there is also an increasingly disturbing "audience capture" thing going on, their editorial slant is very biased towards their heavily right wing audience (and vocal commentariat) - which makes them a very odd place to be in to be calling out other organizations for editorial bias!
Berliner used the examples he did in part because of what he sees as their historical significance in the change he sees at NPR. The coverage of Russiagate and the laptop story aren't merely examples of bias, but part of a history and explanation of what happened to NPR in response to Trump. It moved NPR more to the left, in his view. I think he's right about that. In addition to natural bias of the personnel, there was enormous pressure from NPR's audience to move more left and be less neutral in response to Trump.
I don't know how much of what you say about the laptop story Berliner might agree with, but it's beyond his point, which was that NPR blew it in not covering the story, that their reasons are suspect, and that it was part of a shift in the wrong direction.
That NPR is losing audience is in part what moved him to come forward now. He's exposing what he sees as the reasons for that, and trying to wake up NPR and its supporters. I have no hope he'll succeed, but I admire the effort.
I disagree that Berliner explained exactly what NPR did wrong with its reporting via Russiagate or Hunter Biden's Laptop. For one, is he stating that the media shouldn't have been reporting about an active special counsel's investigation of a sitting US POTUS at the time? Let alone that particular POTUS kept the story almost daily in the news cycle because it was his Tweets and public statements attacking the investigation that provided almost all of the daily news cycle fodder on this story than anything coming from Mueller's team, which was decidedly tight lipped during. Second, it's not clear that Schiff's alluded to evidence doesn't exist, - after all there has yet to be a House led investigation into "Russiagate" - but the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation revealed even more than Mueller's Report did, and actually did connect more dots directly to Trump than Mueller did, so perhaps that's what Schiff was alluding to if he had access to the same intel, which is not unreasonable to assume he did given his position.
Regardless, the "real failure" (IMO) was the media's apparent unanimous lack of curiosity to actually parse the details of the Mueller Report beyond the summary conclusion and suggested indictment count on anything "Russia related" (we keep "forgetting" the Obstruction of Justice charge recommendations made though!) - notably with the inability to discern "lack of evidence of a criminal conspiracy (which Mueller clearly stated was at least partially due to witness lying, tampering and destruction of evidence") as "total exoneration" against the colloquial and non-legal term of "collusion", of which Mueller's Report detailed quite a bit of, but which the media had lazily conflated the two terms for the year long investigation leading up to, and continued that lazy conflation with the actual report findings - and maybe it's my "bias", but my biggest frustration of the post-Mueller media reporting bent was of the former being predominantly reported as the conclusion, and not the latter, as in "No criminal conspiracy = No collusion" - sorry, that just wasn't the actual findings which is more accurately summed up as "not enough evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy, which btw was not in a small way due to witnesses lying and destroying evidence, but plenty of evidence of plain ole' collusion, and maybe we should consider non-criminal routes to assess a sitting POTUS who engaged in such collusion and lied about it repeatedly to the public and hid it from national security authorities". I guess that doesn't fit on a headline or in the 5 minute nightly news round up of the story though.
IMO, the post-Mueller reporting was super favorable to Trump's propaganda that he was a victim of a "rigged prosecution" etc because a large segment of the media lost interest in the details of the report when there wasn't a big headliner about criminal charges and salacious dealings to report on instead of having to dig through hundreds of pages of reporting and summarize what still remains to be *at best* pretty questionable practices of the Trump Campaign - *at best*, the Trump Campaign was aware of Russian attempts to interfere in our election and they lied about it to the public. Recall Trump's "supposition" that the DNC was hacked by a "400 pound fat guy in a basement" or "Chy-nuh" - the Senate Intelligence Committee report as well as the Roger Stone trial revealed Trump was very much involved in Stone's activities with Wikileaks and the timing and coordination, "collusion", shall we say, of the hacked data with his campaigning - and declined to report what they did know to authorities at the time (that the DNC was hacked by Russian operatives and distributed to Wikileaks to "launder the sources" and the Trump Campaign was aware of it all at every step). It's hard to look at any of that and conclude that Trump was unfairly set up by "The Media", much less any other agency - and while I am a Free Press subscriber, this default to coddle a right wing preferred view of these matters as part of their "jihad" against the mainstream media is getting very, very annoying and stale - but more seriously than my annoyance is the fact that supposed "centrist" outlets, like, say, "The Free Press", which is operated by "heterodox liberals", who however are coded as "liberals" entirely to their right leaning audience, are also laundering Trump's dirty drawers with this capitulation on these stories and disinterest in parsing the details with more nuance and critique towards Trump as should be warranted. It's giving him a free pass on yet another total lie and deception to his supporters, and it gets his lies and deceptions even more validated because now it's coming from supposed "liberals" who are "telling the truth about liberal media" and not just from right wing pro-Trump outlets.
Berliner wasn't suggesting there shouldn't have been reporting of the Russia collusion investigation, of course. He was saying what he actually said: NPR repeatedly let Schiff claim without challenge that there was evidence of collusion that, it turned out, didn't exist. And when that emerged, NPR didn't proportionately publicize that and apologize as it should have, in his view.
It's clear Schiff's evidence doesn't exist in the sense that he didn't have any evidence himself for what he said. He changed his tune after the Mueller Report came out. No one including the Senate has found clear evidence of collusion.
The rest of what you say about the coverage of the Mueller Report doesn't affect Berliner's arguments. He might well agree that it wasn't as well covered as it should have been in other ways. His references to Trump aren't in any way to defend Trump or portray him as a victim of media but to explain how the response to him changed NPR.
I think there's a place to refer to various groups by their preferred names and terms, such as when reporting on a specific group or action, interviewing a specific group's members as representatives of that group, etc, versus reporting and discussing the broader paradigm/ideology/movement/debate/agenda of those groups. So yes, when interviewing the head of the "Right To Life" organization, refer to as such. But I just don't think it's "liberal bias" to not refer to the broader movement to ban/restrict abortion as "pro-life" when reporting on the debate itself simply because many of those groups and supporters describe and name themselves accordingly, versus what their actual agenda is, which is narrow-casted onto abortion rights and access, making them at their essence simply "anti-abortion". Again, a movement/agenda that is "pro life" has a lot of bigger connotations outside of this context about what that movement might support beyond a forced carry-to-term pregnancy mandate.
Conversely, "pro choice" is more accurate to describe the opposition- because most organizations and supporters of abortion rights are not advocating for every pregnancy to be aborted (of which a "pro-abortion" moniker might stick if that was the case), but for the availability of a *choice* to do so, and mostly on a sliding restriction based on term length to be mostly adjudicated by the medical establishment vs politicians- but TBH, the majority of "pro choice" groups are also narrow-casted on abortion access and not so much on alternatives "choices" to abortion, so even here "pro choice" seems like a bigger descriptor than what the majority of "pro choice" groups are actually advocating for and focused on, which is "pro abortion access".
So to be fair, if NPR wanted to be more balanced while being more accurate in how they describe the sides of this specific debate *which is absolutely about abortion access and rights and not about vague "life affirming" or "choice affirming" preferences* in a general sense, they could use "pro abortion access" to describe "pro choice" as the counter to "anti-abortion" and both terms would, IMO, better capture the issue that is being debated versus self selected PR terms. If NPR is only choosing to identify one side by its core agenda while letting the other side "self define", yes I would agree that's some bias and not good for straight non-opinion reporting, even though, as I said, I can allow for "pro choice" as more descriptive than "pro life" so that's why I don't view this as big of a "bias violation" on NPR's behalf.
You have the same bias NPR does about abortion. It's very hard for people on either side of the abortion issue to see beyond their own side.
There's no anti-abortion movement that isn't based on belief in the right to life of the fetus. For the pro-life side, that's the fundamental issue. And that's logical: if the fetus has a right to life, then obviously abortion is a problematic thing, intentionally killing an innocent person.
The label pro-life in this context refers to the right to life of the fetus in particular. It can have a broader meaning, but it always has at least that particular meaning in this context. It's well established, and well understood as to what it means in the context of abortion.
For pro-choice, the fundamental issue is the right of the person who's pregnant to choose abortion.
Pro-choice is in no way a more accurate or clear term than pro-life. Like pro-life, it can have a broader meaning, of course, as we have all kinds of rights to all kinds of choices. A particular complaint of pro-lifers is that the label ignores all right to choice on behalf of the fetus, which as a person in their view has the right to have life chosen on its behalf, same as with a born child, even if the parents want to kill it. That's a sensible view, if there's a right to life for the fetus.
But the label is well established and well understood, just like pro-life.
The current MSM/NPR style is to refer to the issue in terms that fit the pro-choice view that what's primary is the right to abortion, not the right to life of the fetus.
This is a blatant taking of sides, but the blindness on this issue is so profound people don't notice. And find it hard to see even if it's pointed out.
The current style also puts one side in a positive light, favoring a right, and the other side in a negative light, opposing a right. Anyone who has studied rhetoric can explain why that favors the pro-choice side as well.
But all of this falls on deaf ears to those unable to see beyond their own side. And so it is at NPR.
very fair point ... when the pro-life mvmt finds someonemore clever & honest than Ben Shapiro to represent their rhetoric about/ignoring legally sound definitions of "person", "baby", etc , i will immediately strain to curb my partisan anti-fetal-right-to-life, anti-blastocystal-right-to-life, etc. rhetoric. (not because i do journalism but because i almost always prefer as much objective framing as possible when discussing philosophy, politics, economics, et al.)
I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying they need to come up with a legally sound definition? Some would be happy to define all fertilized eggs and what follows as people, some have other ideas about heartbeats or whatever, but none of that changes my point about labels.
Shapiro is no more the leading spokesperson for the pro-life side than Keith Olbermann is for the pro-choice, by the way.
indeed — normalizing (or at least uncritically parroting) "pro-life" based on folk usage + idpol is perhaps as or more problematic than rabbit-holing "Christian" vs. "true Christian" vs. "self-professed Christian" vs. "anthropologically categorized as Christian" ...
Many thanks for this thoughtful reply. I was not saying that they should have used the term "pro-life". I was pointing out that it is a tell of what you are for by when you frame an issue as opposing a "right". The logic of your argument seems to lead to suggesting the term "pro-abortion control". Some years back NPR's morning news reported on the March for Life by referring to it throughout as "the so-called March for Life." I wrote to them and asked why they don't speak of "the so-called Pride Parade." To their great credit, they wrote back acknowledging my point and saying they had put out an internal directive not to use "so-called". That is the NPR I love and long for. I'm not that worried that its employees overwhelmingly have a liberal bias. I am worried that they have gone so far into a mutually reinforcing silo of the likeminded that they can no longer even see an instance of it when it is pointed out.
I agree with your points about injecting "so-called" into any sort of labeling like what you describe, that's pretty on-its-face journalistic bias and should stay out of straight news reporting. I'm glad you got the response you did from NPR though - which IMO, does still demonstrate that NPR is at its core still an organization that cares about its integrity and perception (imagine notifying Fox News that its broad based characterizations of say, Black Lives Matter as "thugs" was "biased" and expecting a sincere response lol).
And I am inclined to agree with your last sentence - it's a mutually reinforcing silo that creates this bias, not some central plot so much. But it's also reinforced by the siloing of its audience, if NPR's audience is less diverse (in multiple ways) they are that much less likely to get the sort of feedback you provided in that example to even be aware that inserting "so-called" before the actual title of the demonstration itself did not belong in non-opinion reporting.
In a sense, the self-selection of the audience away from NPR is pushing it to be more ideologically out of step with a broader audience as a result. And for all the words spent dissecting the bias of NPR's staff, perhaps some attention should be pointed at the fact that to a large degree, conservative leaning audiences are self-selecting themselves from *any* media sources that are not fully displaying an obvert bias towards conservative viewpoints, ideology and politicians. Any news organization that doesn't report unquestionably favorable views and coverage of Trump, for example (or, conversely, focuses its reporting/opinion almost exclusively about the sins of the "left" and pretty much ignores the Right and Trump and/or publishes the sort of Berliner/The Free Press apologia about "Russiagate" - Matt Taibibi and The Free Press have gained quite the right wing following with this offering - that does nothing to challenge any perception that Saint Innocent Trump has been maliciously maligned rather than that there was a hell of lot a truth to "Russiagate" in the details), is considered by a large segment of Republican audiences to be "liberal media" and hopelessly biased against them.
There isn't a realistic outcome here where NPR starts hiring more conservative journalists and staff, and produces less "woke excess" programming (like the absurd "slow train" review that I mentioned) that ends up with large swaths of conservatives migrating back to NPR for news coverage. More likely, those conservatives will be viewed as "establishment", "RINOs", etc that are not at all representative of actual "movement conservatives" (and they will probably be right, the notion that NPR will hire Steve Bannon types is less than 0, let alone that Steve Bannon types would "sully" their right wing bonafides by working for NPR to begin with, so the hiring pool of "conservatives" will likely be a lot more of "Bulwark" types of Republicans, who will largely be in agreement with staff liberals when it comes to Trump and Trumpism,) so it's hard to see how this really can be changed outside of *conservatives themselves* being willing to consume media sources that allow any sort of critical reporting about the Right.
TLDR: it will take a movement on both the producers and journalists of NPR to modify their programming to appeal to a broader audience, but it also requires a broader audience being willing to listen to reporting (at the least) that does not simply promote their priors.
I value NPR, donor to my local station, and am rooting for it. Still, I am so disappointed with how badly they are handling this situation. They need to grasp that Berliner is a whistleblower. He tried to go through channels and got nowhere. It is unbelievably chilling for NPR to say that you need to “secure approval” in advance to be a whistleblower. It is like the military saying you had to go through the chain of command to report sexual harassment which every journalist could see was wrong. If someone at NPR had complained that LBGTQ+ people were not being treated fairly – however flimsy the evidence they provided – everyone would have said how “brave” they were to speak out and how we “can and must do better” and so on. The urge to shoot the messenger and ignore the message which has been the overwhelming NPR response to Berliner is so disappointing. I have witnessed numerous examples of what Berliner is referring to just as a listener. For instance, when Roe vs. Wade was overturned NPR reporting referred standardly to the side that would call themselves pro-life as “anti-abortion rights activists.” I get how hard finding appropriate nomenclature for all this is. Yet in the immediate days before that decision NPR had been covering efforts at gun control legislation. Never once did they refer to its proponents as “anti-gun rights activists.” This is just one example of the kind of thing that is baked into their reporting.
"For instance, when Roe vs. Wade was overturned NPR reporting referred standardly to the side that would call themselves pro-life as “anti-abortion rights activists.” I get how hard finding appropriate nomenclature for all this is. Yet in the immediate days before that decision NPR had been covering efforts at gun control legislation. Never once did they refer to its proponents as “anti-gun rights activists.”
I don't think these are the best examples of NPR's ideological thumbs on the scales. It is definitely more accurate to call the political and cultural movement that is focused entirely around banning and limiting abortions and abortion access as "anti-abortion" rather than "pro life", which was a nice PR marketing term that movement invented for itself decades ago, but "pro life" in a general sense has a lot more meaning than simply being opposed to abortion access and promoting a carry-to-term pregnancy mandate (that in its most "pure" and extreme ends does not even allow for the health and life of the mother), but very noticeably less focused on "quality of life" enhancements and goals outside of carrying a child to term under any circumstance. I get not every movement can be all things at any one point, but the "pro life" movement is 100% focused around abortion access and very few other aspects of promoting "life" to any agreed upon standard of quality, hence "anti-abortion" is a much more accurate moniker for this movement.
"Gun rights", by the same token, is a more or less accurate moniker for the movement that seeks to maximize gun access and ownership. "Anti-gun rights" however, is not so much as the goals of most gun control advocates (ah.. "pro gun control", now there's a much better moniker) is not to eliminate gun rights completely (at least as a mainstream and politically/Constitutionally viable agenda that most credible groups have to organize around versus fantasy outcomes feverishly posted on comments boards) but to impose "controls" on the manufacturing, distribution and ownership of guns, gun types and ammunition, while not so much engaging in the right, or not, to own guns in the abstract sense, it's about modernizing the intent of the 2nd Amendment in a world where guns are not single action musket rifles, and the usage of guns for nefarious means versus "forming a well regulated militia" is much more prevalent and the modern landscape does not seem to much match the Founder's intentions as written - but I digress - the point of the gun control movement is to control the "what and how much" within the confines of the rights versus litigating the rights themselves, hence "pro gun control" is a better description of the movement then "anti-gun rights" since most of these groups are not trying to repeal the 2nd Amendment.
So I think NPR is more or less using better agenda focused language than the "PR" language used by various Groups to describe themselves. A better example of "woke ideology" (sigh, I am growing to hate the term "woke" but we all know what it means at this point, so using it here) in play in various NPR/public radio programming is Mike Pesca's example he used in his podcast to illustrate: a program devoted to "slow train tourism" (a classicly truly niche and nerdy public radio offering if there ever was one - and a complete raison d'etre for public radio in the first place!), basically a guided tour of taking long and slow train rides across various US landscapes and taking the time to enjoy the travel and sightseeing from the train's view that we normally do not get driving or flying - was "reviewed" by a public radio produced show in which the hosts decided the "right take" on this was to completely destroy the nice and nerdy take about the various scenescapes that could be appreciated BECAUSE GENOCIDE HAPPENED HERE OK, the US is built on stolen land so any US citizen merely appreciating the "scenery" is appropriating "stolen views" COLONIALISM, also RACIST because only white people (ostensibly) would be able to afford and want to take "slow trains" for this purpose so it was automatically coded as "white" and therefore "problematic" and needing of "unpacking", etc. It was a nutty and nihilistic take on something that's so on its face inoffensive and completely divorced from culture war topics that they had to work hard to make it one, and very much reflective of the current progressive-left ethos - nothing can be righteously enjoyed or appreciated without the constant either self lashing of the white progressive for the sins of colonization/racism in order to be an "anti-racist white", or the revving up of grievances of non-whites in all topics (few of which of those non-whites seem to be eagerly tuning into public radio to be told that they should find a racial/ethnic grievance in "slow train rides", for example, based on NPR's own demographic audience numbers, let alone - which seems to indicate that not only are the producers of shows like this missing their super liberal/middle/upper middle class white professional audience with this repetitive and intrusive insistence on washing every. friggin. topic. through a now familiar "here's why puppy dogs and ice cream are racist white supremacy colonizing and problematic" "lens", but they are also not really meeting their targeted minority audiences because simply, few to no "regular" persons of any background spend their lives and free time, mental and emotional spaces like this, viewing everything under the sun through an "intersectional"/"anti-racist" "lens" (ugh, more terminology that I've increasingly eye rolled through but here again, we know what it means!), nor desires to have to carry around omipresent guilt/grievance around to "unpack" when they would... rather enjoy the scenery on a slow train ride?
That would have been a much better sample of the way that progressive activist ideological "lenses" have infected various public radio programming than the above examples - and I would add Berliner's cheap shots at the "Russiagate" and "Hunter Biden Laptop Story" that many other posters have provided very well argued defenses of "liberal media's sins" regarding - honestly those asides made me wonder who his audience was, or rather, if The Free Press was imposing some sort of editorial stamp on including those topics as "evidence" of NPR's "wokeness" and unreliability based on TFP's own biases and editorial narratives regarding.
At any rate, Berliner failed to do "actual journalism" in depicting what exactly NPR (the press in general) got "wrong" about these stories given the known facts at the time of those stories, versus Monday morning quarterbacking on revealed facts months/years after the stories, let alone a pretty big handwaving over the circumstances of both stories to where the right wing narrative about both is very much inaccurate and disputable.. Berliner would have been able to make a much better case for a seeped in ideological twist to everything had he not included those very debatable items, which does kind of make me wonder about his own biases...So, he's not wrong, but some of the manner and outlet that he chose are probably seem less conducive to the outcome he claims to desire?
NPR long had a policy of referring to groups by their preferred names, which is a respectful policy, and resulted in the use of the terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice." Both terms are problematic, but so are terms like conservative, liberal, progressive, etc etc that are still used. NPR and many other outlets abandoned the use of the preferred names in response to pressure. The general leftward tilt of the media was a factor.
The current MSM/NPR style treats abortion rights as the issue instead of right to life of the fetus. That's a clearly biased approach, assumes something that's at issue.
I agree that some of Berliner's arguments are weak, but I think he is sensitive to what was known at the time in his remarks about media stories, and does explain what exactly NPR did wrong.
In regard to the laptop story, he claims to have heard top NPR personnel say they shouldn't cover it because it would help Trump. That would be problematic. In any case, NPR did a very poor job explaining their decision, which Berliner quoted from. NPR needed to explain more, because in some ways the story wasn't merely a distraction, as Berliner points out. (NPR didn't suggest the laptop wasn't real, so Berliner's remarks about that based on later knowledge don't undercut NPR's response.)
On the Russiagate story, Berliner mainly criticizes the lack of mea culpa from NPR over allowing people like Schiff to imply there was good evidence of something there wasn't.
Publishing his views with the cooperation of Weiss in the place he did was a mistake, I think.
I was sorely disappointed, no angry, to see Berliner sign up for this in his otherwise seemingly well intentioned effort to yank NPR's leadership and staff from its bubble while it's bleeding audience and donors. It's not necessary to have to concede "Russiagate" and "Hunter Biden's Laptop" to the Right to be able to acknowledge and state that a lot of NPR's programming and reporting slant is heavy left biased and sometimes absurdly "woke". There's got to be a lot more and less debatable examples if the problem is so prevalent without having to concede these topics on shaky grounds that discredits him with the very audience he needs to persuade, which.. is not the prototypical Right Wing Uncle on the Free Press comments board who was already convinced that NPR was filled with "communists" to begin with since the 1990s and who got a massive dopamine red meat hit with Berliner's piece confirming his priors ;P
The laptop story, look others have taken to this in this thread, and this is already getting too long, but my main beef with this take is that the NY Post reporting was about the Rudy Giuliani hard drive copy, which he refused to provide to any independent sources for verification at the time of the reporting. Leaving aside that supposed NPR reporter's comment about not wanting to help Trump's re-election (not great, but under what context was it said - a casual meeting comment or a decisive comment to kill the story? that matters I think! But I don't think that was what made or broke this story at the time), the circumstances of the story still lean towards most major news orgs (INCLUDING FOX NEWS AT THE TIME, let alone the actual NY Post that ran the story refused to let their own reporters headline the article, it was instead headlined by a Sean Hannity show staffer I believe as a "guest journalist" to protect them instead, now if the sourcing and veracity of the story was so solid why are we not criticizing the actual venue of the report to have taken such precautions that made it so easy to discredit??) making the right decision - to report skeptically, at best, about the findings because no one was able to verify or confirm the sourcing of the data, and it is irrelevant whether Hunter Biden at the time confirmed or denied the data was his (and not exactly "shady" of him not to do so either way, again if we're operating under the truthiness that he dropped his laptop off for repairs with a nearly blind Mac repairman who (perhaps unethically?) viewed and copied the drive's data to disseminate to highly partisan (and super convenient that he had such access to Giuliani!!), then Hunter Biden is actually a victim of a pretty big privacy invasion at the least?), the burden was on Giuliani to prove he had "real data" and that the data was not illegally or unethically sourced. He refused and news media outlets treated it accordingly, and you have to ask yourself why if Giuliani had the legitimate goods why he would have refused to open them up for scrutiny that would have certified his story rather than discredit it.
And as for the news media's credulity of the former intelligence officer's signed letter advising about this data, It's not like Giuliani wasn't out in public for the last couple years in Ukraine specifically meeting with actual Russian agents attempting to purchase such data (hell, he got Trump Impeached for the first time over his activities over there!), so the notion that when a set of former intelligence agents marked this as a probable disinformation attempt, was that really out of left field or "biased" to handle the reporting accordingly? It wasn't for almost a full year after the NY Post story ran that the FBI (under Biden's DOJ btw, it was Trump's DOJ that refused to confirm or deny Rudy's statements in October 2020, make of that as you will!) released public information that it did in fact possess the actual Hunter Biden laptop (and not a copy of a copy that had been second-third-etc hand modified after their possession of the actual laptop) - so a lot of the "mea culpa" and lashing of the media about its handling of the story *as the facts were known in October 2020* with the NY Post story sourced entirely from Rudy just sounds like a lot of Monday morning quater-backing based on facts that weren't known for a year or two after.
And after all that is said and done - not even the most dedicated Republicans to the Impeach Biden cause, now having access to the actual FBI investigation and verified sourced material, have been able to come up with any Impeachable crimes of Joe Biden in relation to. So the other notion that this was somehow some election deciding information *as was reported in October 2020 in the NY Post* also seems like the Right trying to justify the massive disappointment that all the build up about Hunter Biden and his Laptop produced little other than evidence of an already sort of known louche lifestyle of a politician's son, embarrassing for him, but who was not himself serving in his father's White House at any point in time... AHEM AHEM "Jarvanka"... and not this massive Biden Crime Family Conspiracy that somehow managed to operate covertly for the last, what, 40-50 years that Biden has served in public elected office, and has for all that time more or less maintained an image of a boring yet earnest dude. It's almost as if the right wanted Hunter Biden Laptop to be the "Trump-Russia Conspiracy" of the left, overshot the moon by a few clicks, and ended up with the actual "Russiagate" egg on their faces for real. A fuckton of projection, IMO. It's the Trump Administration with the most direct and egregious examples of nepotism and profiting from Office at the end of the day, of which I could write another 20000 words depicting lol, but I'll spare you that ;P
And yes - I do agree Berliner probably limited his audience and credibility by going to The Free Press rather than maybe NY Times or CJR or some other more "mainstream" outlet - but which begs the question whether he would have gotten the story and distribution (for all the slagging of the NY Times, I think they would have published his essay, and probably a much better one that didn't concede on some very debatable points in the offering). Again, I'm a subscriber to TFP, they do put out good stuff for the most part, but there is also an increasingly disturbing "audience capture" thing going on, their editorial slant is very biased towards their heavily right wing audience (and vocal commentariat) - which makes them a very odd place to be in to be calling out other organizations for editorial bias!
Berliner used the examples he did in part because of what he sees as their historical significance in the change he sees at NPR. The coverage of Russiagate and the laptop story aren't merely examples of bias, but part of a history and explanation of what happened to NPR in response to Trump. It moved NPR more to the left, in his view. I think he's right about that. In addition to natural bias of the personnel, there was enormous pressure from NPR's audience to move more left and be less neutral in response to Trump.
I don't know how much of what you say about the laptop story Berliner might agree with, but it's beyond his point, which was that NPR blew it in not covering the story, that their reasons are suspect, and that it was part of a shift in the wrong direction.
That NPR is losing audience is in part what moved him to come forward now. He's exposing what he sees as the reasons for that, and trying to wake up NPR and its supporters. I have no hope he'll succeed, but I admire the effort.
I disagree that Berliner explained exactly what NPR did wrong with its reporting via Russiagate or Hunter Biden's Laptop. For one, is he stating that the media shouldn't have been reporting about an active special counsel's investigation of a sitting US POTUS at the time? Let alone that particular POTUS kept the story almost daily in the news cycle because it was his Tweets and public statements attacking the investigation that provided almost all of the daily news cycle fodder on this story than anything coming from Mueller's team, which was decidedly tight lipped during. Second, it's not clear that Schiff's alluded to evidence doesn't exist, - after all there has yet to be a House led investigation into "Russiagate" - but the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation revealed even more than Mueller's Report did, and actually did connect more dots directly to Trump than Mueller did, so perhaps that's what Schiff was alluding to if he had access to the same intel, which is not unreasonable to assume he did given his position.
Regardless, the "real failure" (IMO) was the media's apparent unanimous lack of curiosity to actually parse the details of the Mueller Report beyond the summary conclusion and suggested indictment count on anything "Russia related" (we keep "forgetting" the Obstruction of Justice charge recommendations made though!) - notably with the inability to discern "lack of evidence of a criminal conspiracy (which Mueller clearly stated was at least partially due to witness lying, tampering and destruction of evidence") as "total exoneration" against the colloquial and non-legal term of "collusion", of which Mueller's Report detailed quite a bit of, but which the media had lazily conflated the two terms for the year long investigation leading up to, and continued that lazy conflation with the actual report findings - and maybe it's my "bias", but my biggest frustration of the post-Mueller media reporting bent was of the former being predominantly reported as the conclusion, and not the latter, as in "No criminal conspiracy = No collusion" - sorry, that just wasn't the actual findings which is more accurately summed up as "not enough evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy, which btw was not in a small way due to witnesses lying and destroying evidence, but plenty of evidence of plain ole' collusion, and maybe we should consider non-criminal routes to assess a sitting POTUS who engaged in such collusion and lied about it repeatedly to the public and hid it from national security authorities". I guess that doesn't fit on a headline or in the 5 minute nightly news round up of the story though.
IMO, the post-Mueller reporting was super favorable to Trump's propaganda that he was a victim of a "rigged prosecution" etc because a large segment of the media lost interest in the details of the report when there wasn't a big headliner about criminal charges and salacious dealings to report on instead of having to dig through hundreds of pages of reporting and summarize what still remains to be *at best* pretty questionable practices of the Trump Campaign - *at best*, the Trump Campaign was aware of Russian attempts to interfere in our election and they lied about it to the public. Recall Trump's "supposition" that the DNC was hacked by a "400 pound fat guy in a basement" or "Chy-nuh" - the Senate Intelligence Committee report as well as the Roger Stone trial revealed Trump was very much involved in Stone's activities with Wikileaks and the timing and coordination, "collusion", shall we say, of the hacked data with his campaigning - and declined to report what they did know to authorities at the time (that the DNC was hacked by Russian operatives and distributed to Wikileaks to "launder the sources" and the Trump Campaign was aware of it all at every step). It's hard to look at any of that and conclude that Trump was unfairly set up by "The Media", much less any other agency - and while I am a Free Press subscriber, this default to coddle a right wing preferred view of these matters as part of their "jihad" against the mainstream media is getting very, very annoying and stale - but more seriously than my annoyance is the fact that supposed "centrist" outlets, like, say, "The Free Press", which is operated by "heterodox liberals", who however are coded as "liberals" entirely to their right leaning audience, are also laundering Trump's dirty drawers with this capitulation on these stories and disinterest in parsing the details with more nuance and critique towards Trump as should be warranted. It's giving him a free pass on yet another total lie and deception to his supporters, and it gets his lies and deceptions even more validated because now it's coming from supposed "liberals" who are "telling the truth about liberal media" and not just from right wing pro-Trump outlets.
Berliner wasn't suggesting there shouldn't have been reporting of the Russia collusion investigation, of course. He was saying what he actually said: NPR repeatedly let Schiff claim without challenge that there was evidence of collusion that, it turned out, didn't exist. And when that emerged, NPR didn't proportionately publicize that and apologize as it should have, in his view.
It's clear Schiff's evidence doesn't exist in the sense that he didn't have any evidence himself for what he said. He changed his tune after the Mueller Report came out. No one including the Senate has found clear evidence of collusion.
The rest of what you say about the coverage of the Mueller Report doesn't affect Berliner's arguments. He might well agree that it wasn't as well covered as it should have been in other ways. His references to Trump aren't in any way to defend Trump or portray him as a victim of media but to explain how the response to him changed NPR.
I think there's a place to refer to various groups by their preferred names and terms, such as when reporting on a specific group or action, interviewing a specific group's members as representatives of that group, etc, versus reporting and discussing the broader paradigm/ideology/movement/debate/agenda of those groups. So yes, when interviewing the head of the "Right To Life" organization, refer to as such. But I just don't think it's "liberal bias" to not refer to the broader movement to ban/restrict abortion as "pro-life" when reporting on the debate itself simply because many of those groups and supporters describe and name themselves accordingly, versus what their actual agenda is, which is narrow-casted onto abortion rights and access, making them at their essence simply "anti-abortion". Again, a movement/agenda that is "pro life" has a lot of bigger connotations outside of this context about what that movement might support beyond a forced carry-to-term pregnancy mandate.
Conversely, "pro choice" is more accurate to describe the opposition- because most organizations and supporters of abortion rights are not advocating for every pregnancy to be aborted (of which a "pro-abortion" moniker might stick if that was the case), but for the availability of a *choice* to do so, and mostly on a sliding restriction based on term length to be mostly adjudicated by the medical establishment vs politicians- but TBH, the majority of "pro choice" groups are also narrow-casted on abortion access and not so much on alternatives "choices" to abortion, so even here "pro choice" seems like a bigger descriptor than what the majority of "pro choice" groups are actually advocating for and focused on, which is "pro abortion access".
So to be fair, if NPR wanted to be more balanced while being more accurate in how they describe the sides of this specific debate *which is absolutely about abortion access and rights and not about vague "life affirming" or "choice affirming" preferences* in a general sense, they could use "pro abortion access" to describe "pro choice" as the counter to "anti-abortion" and both terms would, IMO, better capture the issue that is being debated versus self selected PR terms. If NPR is only choosing to identify one side by its core agenda while letting the other side "self define", yes I would agree that's some bias and not good for straight non-opinion reporting, even though, as I said, I can allow for "pro choice" as more descriptive than "pro life" so that's why I don't view this as big of a "bias violation" on NPR's behalf.
You have the same bias NPR does about abortion. It's very hard for people on either side of the abortion issue to see beyond their own side.
There's no anti-abortion movement that isn't based on belief in the right to life of the fetus. For the pro-life side, that's the fundamental issue. And that's logical: if the fetus has a right to life, then obviously abortion is a problematic thing, intentionally killing an innocent person.
The label pro-life in this context refers to the right to life of the fetus in particular. It can have a broader meaning, but it always has at least that particular meaning in this context. It's well established, and well understood as to what it means in the context of abortion.
For pro-choice, the fundamental issue is the right of the person who's pregnant to choose abortion.
Pro-choice is in no way a more accurate or clear term than pro-life. Like pro-life, it can have a broader meaning, of course, as we have all kinds of rights to all kinds of choices. A particular complaint of pro-lifers is that the label ignores all right to choice on behalf of the fetus, which as a person in their view has the right to have life chosen on its behalf, same as with a born child, even if the parents want to kill it. That's a sensible view, if there's a right to life for the fetus.
But the label is well established and well understood, just like pro-life.
The current MSM/NPR style is to refer to the issue in terms that fit the pro-choice view that what's primary is the right to abortion, not the right to life of the fetus.
This is a blatant taking of sides, but the blindness on this issue is so profound people don't notice. And find it hard to see even if it's pointed out.
The current style also puts one side in a positive light, favoring a right, and the other side in a negative light, opposing a right. Anyone who has studied rhetoric can explain why that favors the pro-choice side as well.
But all of this falls on deaf ears to those unable to see beyond their own side. And so it is at NPR.
very fair point ... when the pro-life mvmt finds someonemore clever & honest than Ben Shapiro to represent their rhetoric about/ignoring legally sound definitions of "person", "baby", etc , i will immediately strain to curb my partisan anti-fetal-right-to-life, anti-blastocystal-right-to-life, etc. rhetoric. (not because i do journalism but because i almost always prefer as much objective framing as possible when discussing philosophy, politics, economics, et al.)
I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying they need to come up with a legally sound definition? Some would be happy to define all fertilized eggs and what follows as people, some have other ideas about heartbeats or whatever, but none of that changes my point about labels.
Shapiro is no more the leading spokesperson for the pro-life side than Keith Olbermann is for the pro-choice, by the way.
indeed — normalizing (or at least uncritically parroting) "pro-life" based on folk usage + idpol is perhaps as or more problematic than rabbit-holing "Christian" vs. "true Christian" vs. "self-professed Christian" vs. "anthropologically categorized as Christian" ...
Many thanks for this thoughtful reply. I was not saying that they should have used the term "pro-life". I was pointing out that it is a tell of what you are for by when you frame an issue as opposing a "right". The logic of your argument seems to lead to suggesting the term "pro-abortion control". Some years back NPR's morning news reported on the March for Life by referring to it throughout as "the so-called March for Life." I wrote to them and asked why they don't speak of "the so-called Pride Parade." To their great credit, they wrote back acknowledging my point and saying they had put out an internal directive not to use "so-called". That is the NPR I love and long for. I'm not that worried that its employees overwhelmingly have a liberal bias. I am worried that they have gone so far into a mutually reinforcing silo of the likeminded that they can no longer even see an instance of it when it is pointed out.
I agree with your points about injecting "so-called" into any sort of labeling like what you describe, that's pretty on-its-face journalistic bias and should stay out of straight news reporting. I'm glad you got the response you did from NPR though - which IMO, does still demonstrate that NPR is at its core still an organization that cares about its integrity and perception (imagine notifying Fox News that its broad based characterizations of say, Black Lives Matter as "thugs" was "biased" and expecting a sincere response lol).
And I am inclined to agree with your last sentence - it's a mutually reinforcing silo that creates this bias, not some central plot so much. But it's also reinforced by the siloing of its audience, if NPR's audience is less diverse (in multiple ways) they are that much less likely to get the sort of feedback you provided in that example to even be aware that inserting "so-called" before the actual title of the demonstration itself did not belong in non-opinion reporting.
In a sense, the self-selection of the audience away from NPR is pushing it to be more ideologically out of step with a broader audience as a result. And for all the words spent dissecting the bias of NPR's staff, perhaps some attention should be pointed at the fact that to a large degree, conservative leaning audiences are self-selecting themselves from *any* media sources that are not fully displaying an obvert bias towards conservative viewpoints, ideology and politicians. Any news organization that doesn't report unquestionably favorable views and coverage of Trump, for example (or, conversely, focuses its reporting/opinion almost exclusively about the sins of the "left" and pretty much ignores the Right and Trump and/or publishes the sort of Berliner/The Free Press apologia about "Russiagate" - Matt Taibibi and The Free Press have gained quite the right wing following with this offering - that does nothing to challenge any perception that Saint Innocent Trump has been maliciously maligned rather than that there was a hell of lot a truth to "Russiagate" in the details), is considered by a large segment of Republican audiences to be "liberal media" and hopelessly biased against them.
There isn't a realistic outcome here where NPR starts hiring more conservative journalists and staff, and produces less "woke excess" programming (like the absurd "slow train" review that I mentioned) that ends up with large swaths of conservatives migrating back to NPR for news coverage. More likely, those conservatives will be viewed as "establishment", "RINOs", etc that are not at all representative of actual "movement conservatives" (and they will probably be right, the notion that NPR will hire Steve Bannon types is less than 0, let alone that Steve Bannon types would "sully" their right wing bonafides by working for NPR to begin with, so the hiring pool of "conservatives" will likely be a lot more of "Bulwark" types of Republicans, who will largely be in agreement with staff liberals when it comes to Trump and Trumpism,) so it's hard to see how this really can be changed outside of *conservatives themselves* being willing to consume media sources that allow any sort of critical reporting about the Right.
TLDR: it will take a movement on both the producers and journalists of NPR to modify their programming to appeal to a broader audience, but it also requires a broader audience being willing to listen to reporting (at the least) that does not simply promote their priors.