NPR hasn't gotten more liberal. It's become more capital-D Democratic
If "liberalism" means anything more than "not Republican," there's no coherent case for NPR's sorry state being caused by a liberal bias.
I didn’t know NPR existed until I was in high school. The radio was never turned on within our home. While driving, my mom would listen to either a rock station or a well-worn Best of Warren Zevon cassette. If dad was behind the wheel, it was sports talk radio. We didn’t care much for the news, because the news didn’t care much for us.
My 11th grade civics teacher was easily distracted—the sort of guy where if you got him talking about cars or sports, he’d ramble on for so long we’d never have to discuss the boring stuff in our textbook. One day, a student complained about SNL’s “Delicious Dish” sketch. It didn’t make any sense, he said. What were they even making fun of?
Paraphrasing, my teacher said something like this:
NPR is a news and talk radio station that does not play ads. Instead, they get their funding from government grants and listener donations. This means their coverage is more boring than commercial networks, because they don’t need to worry too much about ratings. But it also means they’re more likely to talk about stuff other networks would ignore. Say, for example, a study finds that Coca-Cola contains an ingredient that causes cancer. Commercial networks would either ignore or downplay this finding, as they receive a ton of ad revenue from soda companies. NPR could cover it, because they won’t suffer any consequences for angering Coke.
That description has stuck with me for so long because it was the first time I had paid any thought to the fact that the news was influenced by external factors that had little to do with the news itself. The teacher was hardly a radical—he wasn’t telling us that mainstream news was straight-up lying or being used a tool of imperialism. He was just encouraging skepticism.
Pointedly, this encouragement was bereft of any ideological or partisan endorsements. The words “liberal” and “conservative” were not uttered. Back then, truth and honesty weren’t understood as a team sport. It was possible to acknowledge the unseemliness of corporate influence over the public discourse without devolving into name calling, absurdly insisting that your favored side in the culture war was somehow immune to the stark realities of an underregulated, profit-driven media economy.
In the 90’s, only perverts and weirdos enjoyed being yelled by bloated sub-literates for hours at a stretch. After the 9/11 attacks, cable news ratings skyrocketed, as Americans were desperate to gain some sense of understanding to assuage their fears, and they found solace in a 24-hour churn of conjecture and lies. The most successful of these networks, Fox News, was also the most nakedly partisan. They disguised their basis with a blunt and, frankly, brilliant strategy: they just repeatedly assured viewers they weren’t biased. Seriously. Their slogans were “Fair and Balanced” and “We Report. You Decide.” The clear insinuation was that the other guys must have been the biased ones, what with their tendency to fall short of outright endorsing one party over another. Real purveyors of truth are so sure of their positions they don’t feel the need to give credence to any counter perspectives.
By the time I moved to college, Bush had been president for two years and the Iraq war had begun. My new town had multiple NPR stations, and their news coverage was refreshing, to say the least. They were far more critical of the Bush administration—their rationale for the war, especially—and more likely to report inconvenient stuff like how the “intelligence” suggesting Iraq had WMD’s came from a man nicknamed “Curveball.” During the 2004 elections, the commercial media dedicated an immense amount of coverage to obviously fake stories that were obviously planted by Republicans, such as the deranged “Swift Boat Veterans For Truth.” NPR covered these mutants in appropriate terms, acknowledging their obvious partisan intentions and refusing to dignify their easily refuted claims.
Throughout the Obama years, the tenor of NPR’s news coverage stayed more or less within these lanes. Yes, they leaned “liberal,” at least in the relative sense of contemporary 21st century America. But they did not outright endorse candidates. They were willing to (at least occasionally) report on the incompetence and misdeeds of Democrats, and their coverage of foreign policy and labor issues were, at most, a degree or two less slavish toward corporate narratives than those of the commercial networks. Anyone who accused the network of being biased to a degree that disqualified their coverage was just pissed that they weren’t listening to a radio version of Fox News.
Even when they generally aligned with Dems and were more willing than the MSM to discuss the misdeeds and corruption of the GOP, NPR’s reporting still reflected the understanding that not every issue can/should be understood through the narrow lens of partisan American politics. In a broad and abstract sense, this is a liberal approach to news reporting: you can acknowledge that some degree of bias is inevitable while still seeking to minimize its presence in your reporting. You can accept the fact that didacticism is appealing only to those with narrow and diminished minds. Most importantly, you can admit that if your coverage doesn’t at least appear neutral, it’s not going to persuade anyone of anything unless they already agree with you about everything.
But the Obama years brought on broader changes, especially in regards to the makeup and messaging of the Democratic party. Under Obama’s leadership, the party starved downballot races to focus almost-exclusively on the executive branch. The relatively localized and grassroots efforts of the old Dems were replaced with topdown, uniform messaging strategies and a much stronger emphasis of culture war issues. Simply put: the Dems sought to emulate the success of the GOP. MSNBC became an inversion of Fox News: a corporatist network (the first two letters literally stand for Microsoft!) acting as a messaging organ of the party. The other side stopped caring about objectivity and persuasion decades ago, and it worked out for them. Why are we still playing by these old rules? Sure, this might lead to Tea Party nutjobs dominating races in areas we used to control, but that’s no big deal since we’re certain to retain the White House in perpetuity.
Then 2016 happened.
On the left, the commonsense (and, in the context of any other advanced democracy, pretty moderate) populism of the Sanders campaign held the rightward drift of the Obama Dems in stark relief. For the first time in decades, leftish voters were shown it was possible for a candidate to actually promise things that would improve their lives, that there was more to electorialism than being guilted into choosing the less-evil option.
How did the Dems respond? Well, they sure as hell weren’t gonna suddenly rediscover trustbusting or promise to reign in the security state. In order to tamp down the (mild) threat of (mild) populist reform, they had to go nuclear. All the old liberal values were flushed down the toilet. Their brand of politics had to become every bit as much of an empty team sport as those of the post-Reagan GOP.
8 year earlier, Hillary Clinton ran a primary campaign so unabashedly racist Lee Atwater would have told her to slow things down. In 2016, she reinvented herself an avatar of social justice. She cared deeply about bodies and spaces and the intersectional nature of oppressions. Never mind the direct role she had played in establishing those oppressions—asking questions about her record was sexist and somehow also racist. She was a woman, and so anyone who supported another candidate hated women. And also they hated black people. And also if we break up the big banks that won’t create more trans CEOs of color and so it’s bad to do financial regulation and if you disagree you are a toxic bro.
Policy became immaterial to politics. Hillary was the Most Qualified Candidate of All Time because she was Hillary, full stop. The ramifications of those qualifications were so immaterial that only a fascist would dare discuss them. She ran the least policy-focused campaign in history. And she lost. Narrowly, sure. But she lost.
For all intents and purposes, the Obama-Clinton era marked the end of the Democratic party’s associations with liberalism—at least, so long as we define liberalism in a manner more coherent than “not Republicans.” Hillary had been felled by populism, so any policies that benefit non-elites are now suspect. Democracy and majority rule likewise had to be reigned in. Free speech? Pfft. That’s a fascist lie exploited by dastardly Russians, a sort of red-brown atavism that serves only to oppress the marginalized. T—the real problem is that those selfish, evil voters wanted to improve their own lives. The only purpose of politics should be to exalt those who have been annointed as avatars of privileged identity classes. People—powerful people, especially, and Democratic politicians double especially—should not be judged by the consequences of their actions but by the manner in which they fit the correct aesthetic templates, superficially profess adoration toward the marginalized, and repeat the correct slogans. Only a nazi-adjacent voter would want a politician to do things that might make the world less awful. Decent people desire only that their political representatives make them “feel seen.”
The Democrat’s identity obsession is reactionary. I’ve written about this at length, but it bears repeating: wokeness is reactionary. Its purveyors disdain the vagaries of democracy and free expression and support the aggressive policing of both. They welcome the support of malignant entities as wide-ranging as Lockheed Martin and the Aspen Ideas institute, so long as those entities pledge fealty to their identity causes. They view race as fully deterministic of a person’s moral worth and even the factuality of their beliefs. They support racial segregation, owing to their belief that members of different identity groups do not share a common humanity and are therefore completely unknowable to one another. They have abandoned empiricism and scientific method as means of adjudicating truth because such methods do not unfailingly deliver their identity goals. And, in formal settings, without internal criticism, they openly fantasize about murdering people because of their skin color. On multiple occasions, their most revered laurette has claimed that white people are incapable of being human.
Feel free to call this leftism. I’d love to argue that it’s not leftism, but I really don’t know how else we can describe leftism as it actually exists without admitting that, well, this is it. I, however, prefer to think of it as something more like Democrat Reacitonaryism—hopefully some day I can think of a less-clunky phrase, but for now that’s all I got. But whatever we want to call it, this is the reality in which non-conservative entities must function in the America of the 2020’s. There is no such thing as neutrality. No such thing as principles. There’s a good side and a bad side, and you are required to pick one of them.
The people who run NPR had no choice but to sink with the broader tide. The people who fund them declared that debate, free expression, and attempts toward journalistic neutrality are all road to fascism. Had the network attempted to reassert these values, they would have been destroyed.
And so we wind up with the NPR that, by my account, was accurately described by Uri Berliner: one that’s hyper focused on identity issue and never, ever critical of establishment Democrats. They could do a story about the discovery of a new species of insect in Tasmania and they'd still shoehorn in a soliloquy about how Republicans have smaller brain pans or something. Videos of Joe Biden blowing his nose an infant could surface, and they’d either say it was a Russian deepfake or use it as proof of just how much of a lovable ol’ goof he is.
As the Dems have moved away from the basic tenets of liberalism, so has NPR. They'll do stories about how it's good to imprison whistleblowers, free speech leads to fascism, or how the brave men and women of the CIA work to keep us safe. And, of course, they've run a plethora of stories about how black people invented space travel in the 1400s or how all policing stemmed from slave catchers and other crap that has zero grounding in reality and never would have gotten past the pitch stage in 2015.
Call this what you will. Successor Ideology, Illiberalism, whatever. Semantics don’t matter. Whatever it is, it ain’t liberalism.