It's freestyle Friday here at NPR. We're going to kick it up a notch, put the iPod on 'random' and maybe catch a Barry Manilow song...In the House of Commons, the Republicans proposed to defund NPR (National Public Radio).
Really!?!?
I mean...Really!?!?!?
NPR just may be one of there own. William Blum in, 'Rogue State' writes :
FAIR (Fairness and Accurateness in Reporting) did a study on NPR. Here are some quotes:
Republicans outnumbered Democrats by more than 3 to 2 (61 percent to 38 percent). A majority of Republican sources when the GOP controls the White House and Congress may not be surprising, but Republicans held a similar though slightly smaller edge (57 percent to 42 percent) in 1993, when Clinton was president and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. And a lively race for the Democratic presidential nomination was beginning to heat up at the time of the 2003 study.
Elite sources dominated NPR’s guest-list. These sources—including government officials, professional experts and corporate representatives—accounted for 64 percent of all sources.
Women were dramatically underrepresented on NPR in 1993 (19 percent of all sources), and they remain so today (21 percent). And they were even less likely to appear on NPR in stories as experts—just 15 percent of all professionals were women—or in stories discussing political issues, where only 18 percent of sources were women.
Six regular commentators were African-American (13 percent), two were Asian (4 percent) and one was Latino (2 percent). The remaining 80 percent (37 of 46) of commentators were non-Latino whites. All but one of 27 regular commentators in the 1993 study were white (96 percent); the one exception, cartoonist Lynda Barry, is of European and Filipino descent.Of course, most people think NPR is has a liberal bias:
News of the April launch of Air America, a new liberal talk radio network, revived the old complaint, with several conservative pundits declaring that such a thing already existed. “I have three letters for you, NPR . . . . I mean, there is liberal radio,” remarked conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan on NBC’s Chris Matthews Show (4/4/04). A few days earlier (4/1/04), conservative columnist Cal Thomas told Nightline, “The liberals have many outlets,” naming NPR prominently among them.
Nor is this belief confined to the right: CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer (3/31/04) seemed to repeat it as a given while questioning a liberal guest: “What about this notion that the conservatives make a fair point that there already is a liberal radio network out there, namely National Public Radio?”
So here we have a liberal publicly funded radio network, infiltrated by conservatives. What great propaganda! Of course, it is well known that the CIA likes to infiltrate unions and other left-wing organizations. No wonder when exiting NPR-exec Ron Schiller made some disparaging comments in a secret video tape regarding conservatives, not only did he resign immediately but the NPR board asked for the resignation of the CEO/President Vivian Schiller (no relation). To be fair, NPR did fire Juan Williams for making disparaging Muslim remarks on Fox News last year.
You decide: Liberal, Conservative, Liberal with secret Conservative slant or Conservative with secret Liberal slant.
