NPR Defends The Broken Shards Of Its Credibility
NPR Defends The Broken Shards Of Its Credibility
NPR suspends its Twitter account because it was labeled, correctly, "government funded media." Claims it has "complete editorial independence."
NPR’s Chief Executive Officer John Lansing is a former chief executive of U.S. Agency for Global Media, a government agency that oversees Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
In other words, Lansing came to NPR in 2019 after four years at the helm of an agency that effectively distributes U.S. government propoganda* to other countries.
Coincidentally, a year after Lansing’s arrival at NPR, the media organization engaged in one of the most blatant examples of media censorship in U.S. history.
After The New York Post reported on the discovery of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop in October 2020, a month before the U.S. presidential election, NPR and other mainstream media outlets dismissed the report as Russian propoganda.
NPR’s Washington Desk Senior Editor Ron Elving reported the Post story was “discredited by U.S. intelligence and independent investigations by news organizations.”
NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride said there were “red flags” in the New York Post investigation and “the assertions don’t amount to much.”
Terence Samuels, NPR’s managing editor for news, said: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions".”
But the laptop was real and it could have altered the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The laptop showed that now-President Biden, while vice-president, was the focal point of an influence peddling scheme that enabled his son to earn tens of millions of dollars in contracts with foreign businesses, including ones linked to China’s government.
The so-called U.S. intelligence sources cited by NPR to justify ignoring the story were vague and not compelling at the time. In April 2021, NPR corrected its assertion that the laptop was “discredited by U.S. intelligence.”
It is not clear what sources NPR referred to when it said the laptop story was discredited by “independent investigations by news organizations.” They were wrong. And why didn’t NPR conduct its own independent investigation?
The success of propoganda has a direct relationship to the perception that it is not propoganda.
So it was ironic Wednesday when NPR announced in a huff that it is “stepping away from Twitter” because it was labeled “government-funded media.”
Tesla founder Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter last year, initially slapped a label of “state-affiliated media”on NPR’s Twitter feed. Several days later, he conceded he might have gotten it wrong and changed the label to “government-funded media.”
It is an unassailable fact that NPR is government funded media. But NPR apparently does not want listeners to know that NPR receives at least $30 million a year from the federally -funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting plus revenue from other grants and fees. The implication is that this unfairly impacts NPR’s credibility.
NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, who is among those who dismissed the Post’s Hunter Biden story, wrote the Twitter label is “inaccurate and misleading, given that NPR is a private nonprofit company with editorial independence.”
Folkenflik writes: “By going silent on Twitter, NPR’s chief executive (Lansing) says the network is protecting its credibility and its ability to produce journalism without a ‘shadow of negativity.’”
Lansing also says he “would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility.”
Hmmm. So the Hunter Biden thing didn’t risk NPR’s credibility?
Lansing says he won’t go back to Twitter right away even if Musk changes NPR’s label to “publicly funded” because "[a]t this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter. I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again."
The problem isn’t Twitter but NPR. Can it ever be trusted again?
Musk released thousands of historical Twitter files to select independent journalists for review. The review produced evidence the government sought to shape, control and censor opinion on a variety of issues, including the Hunter Biden laptop story. Unsurprisingly, NPR has ignored this embarrassing evidence.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger reported on Dec. 19, 2022 :
The “FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and ‘before’” the New York Post story.
There was “an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community, aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published.”
A Sept. 2020 meeting with Twitter executives at the Aspen institute featured an exercise to discredit a potential “hack and dump” of evidence relating to Hunter Biden. The organizer was Vivian Schiller, the former CEO of NPR, former head of news at Twitter, former general manager of the New York Times and former Chief Digital Officer of NBC News
After the Post fiasco, one might have expected NPR’s Board of Directors to dump Lansing, McBridge, Elvin, etc., and to revamp NPR’s news operation to restore its credibility. NPR basically did nothing. NPR has continued it’s relentlessly sunny coverage of the Democratic Biden administration, while taking every opportunity to vilify the GOP and declared GOP Presidential candidate Donald Trump.
At what cost?
Lansing sent out a staff memo last month announcing that NPR was reducing its workforce by 10 percent due to a “sharp decline” in sponsorship revenue. He blamed the global economy for a projected $30 million budget shortfall.
But is it the economy or has NPR underestimated the intelligence of the American public?
Millions of Americans once tuned in to NPR to hear the news, not propoganda.
As for Musk, he says he is trying to be “accurate” in identifying NPR.
Musk told an NPR reporter that he was relying on a Wikipedia page dedicated to "publicly funded broadcasters" to determine which accounts should receive the label. When told NPR has “complete editorial independence,” Musk said: "If you really think that the government has no influence on the entity they're funding then you've been marinating in the Kool-Aid for too long."
*The USAGM says its mission is to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.”