172 Comments

After being a local NPR contributor for almost 40 years, I canceled my monthly support last year. Our local NPR station has 2 local stations, I initially cut my support in half to listen to classical music. Then even those local hosts started injecting politics into their broadcasts, so I luckily found Your Classical Radio, Minnesota public radio. Better than NPR radio with numerous genres.

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Why doesn't congress subpoena her for a hearing instead of requesting? She's a quasi-govt employee.

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“Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) called Berliner a “disgruntled former employee,””

Well, he was not a former employee when he exposed NPR in the Free Press.

Pallone also “questioned if his Republican committee members “were truly concerned about journalism,” given their lack of scrutiny toward right-wing media…”

Are tax payers funding “right wing media”? Is Pallone advocating congressional meddling in private news organizations? Would he be okay calling MSNBC,s executives to testify about content or would that be restricted to FOX, National Review, Breitbart, and Daily Wire?

Rep. Kathy Castor thinks the committee is doing the work for Putin, Xi, & the Ayatollah.

Gosh.

Here I am thinking the committee called Maher because our tax dollars go to a so call news org recently outed by one of its senior editors for consistently promoting a rather obvious bias.

Yep, Vlad Putin, Xi, and the Ayatollah have these republicans in their hip pockets.

Dang.

Maybe Maher will expose this treasonous behavior in a tweet?

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Why the hell does the GOV fund NPR ? They do no public service and have become a political organization , what did we expect ? It seems in our current political environment there just can't be a news organization that is considered middle of the road so why have a pretend organization like NPR that thinks it's middle of the road ? NPR has never been middle of the road , they always been left , it's just that now the left is so far crazy left that we are seeing it ! This needs to be unfunded by the GOV no if's and buts just pull the plug time !

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Funny that its "news" NPR is biased when everyone else has known this for, like, forever.

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May 13·edited May 13

Berliner wrote exactly what I've been feeling about NPR and also PBS for a long time. I was a listener and even a small donor, but no more. The bias is too extreme and always, always left-sided. Let them report what they want without tax payer money.

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“...long history of peddling misinformation, disinformation, promoting partisan agendas, and sowing fear and division.” Uttered by a Democrat, no less.

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The Uri Berliner essay pub;isjed by TFP was as important a piece as any published anywhere. It was not as if I hadn't alway known what was going on at NPR and so many other "news" outlets....but the absolute admission of the bias struck clean and deep.

The fact that NPR's new honcho won't show up to testify as to the bias claims in front of Congress (representatives of the very people that fund a significant part of NPR is alarming). The arrogance!

As the mainstream media continues to fade, slipping into irrelevance, one would think they would heed a wake up call. NPR isn't all that is broken in America. The media isn't all that is broken. Our problems are far greater. That said. fixing the media (starting with defunding tax payer largess for NPR) would be a good start.

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My guess is she has lived her life in "safe bubbles" and never had to deal with the controversy now surrounding NPR. Also, the likely grilling from Congress. By refusing to show, she is making it easier for NPR to become a campaign piece for DJT and a Congress that could defund NPR. I'm pretty sure a market survey would show the remaining ~40m audience already subscribes to multiple streaming services and news subscriptions. They could easily afford one more. NPR would truly be "listener supported."

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Love that people like Katherine Maher are out there "saving democracy" when they refuse to participate in democratic processes

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Rep. Pallone calling Berliner a “disgruntled former employee.” Except he wasn’t so Pallone is attacking without reading a word.

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Defund NPR. End of story.

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I wonder what that previously scheduled board meeting was about.

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founding

The solution seems pretty simple to me. NPR can do whatever it wants, however it should not be receiving federal funding, directly or indirectly.

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May 10·edited May 10

It's difficult for me to wrap my head around a CEO of a publicly funded company, giving the middle finger to the people who actually control the organization. Part of being a CEO, which is an awful job, but it's dealing with the political and bureaucratic mess that comes with running large companies, this is literally the job, she basically abdicated the purpose she was hired for. I have strong feelings for the direction of NPR, but don't even care what the reason is, this alone suggests she's completely unfit for the position because she does not understand it.

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I used to listen to NPR a lot, and I am a Democratic Party voter. What frankly turned me off of NPR was when I started hearing words like unhoused people, instead of homeless people, and people who give birth instead of women having babies, and Latinx instead of Latinos, I intuited that NPR has taken too much of a turn for me. I’m not that kind of a Democrat. I do believe we should have national public radio, but they should stick to objectively reporting the news and then the opinion folks should give a variety of opinions that mainly focus on the center right, the center left, and the actual center (!), but given today’s intense polarization in our culture, and therefore also our politics, I don’t think that’s going to be a reality. And that’s a shame.

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