Good, Gray NPR (Page 4)

The second camp of critics consists of people who object to the way in which NPR has ceded political space to the likes of Barnes, Irvine, Gingrich and Pat Buchanan (who once dubbed NPR "an upholstered little playpen of our Chablis-and-brie set"). These critics see NPR as too mainstream, too spineless and timid, too deferential to power. They point to a revolving door between the US government and NPR (president Kevin Klose, for example, was formerly the head of the International Broadcasting Bureau, which oversees Voice of America, Radio Martí and TV Martí); they lament the narrow range of political opinion on NPR (no current NPR commentator, they note, has the progressive credentials of the late Michael Harrington, who had a regular slot on NPR in the 1980s); and they point to NPR's campaign against low-power radio stations [see Rick Karr].

One does sense a creeping caution and conservatism at NPR over the past decade. In 1994 it engaged death-row inmate (and former WHYY radio reporter) Mumia Abu-Jamal to do a series of brief commentaries on prison life and the death penalty but soon reversed itself in the wake of a vigorous campaign from Senator Bob Dole and Philadelphia's Fraternal Order of Police ("A sterling parable for the new, mature NPR" was James Ledbetter's ironic description of the Abu-Jamal fiasco in his book Made Possible By...). In 1995 Andrei Codrescu, one of the few really pungent voices left on NPR, produced a commentary about Armageddon that drew 40,000 complaints from the Christian Coalition. To Codrescu's apparent dismay, NPR rushed to apologize for his segment, after which NPR executives informed Current, a trade newspaper, that they would step up their policing of the daily commentaries. In 2000 TV Guide and Current reported that NPR had allowed three officers from a specialized propaganda unit of the US Army based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to intern at its news programs over a nine-month period. At the time an NPR executive called the decision "a real goof."

Since 9/11 NPR's ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, has devoted a number of his columns at npr.org to the network's coverage of the Bush Administration and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's perhaps too early for a definitive assessment of NPR's reporting on these subjects, but what's clear is that quite a few listeners are dissatisfied with the coverage of George W. Bush and his foreign policy. Consider a recent missive from Richard Steinman, a research scientist at Columbia University. On the weekend of March 19, 2005, Steinman turned on his radio, looking for coverage of the demonstrations that marked the second anniversary of the Iraq War. In a subsequent letter to Dvorkin, Steinman recounted NPR's programming choices that weekend: "a 'patriotic,' feel-good West Point piece; sports fans' feelings toward a baseball player (yes, steroids); more feel-good filler about an Iraqi-American painter and her use of color; Bantu Refugees Adjust to New Lives in America. Quote from the story: 'we give the government of America the high five'; Army Chefs Battle for Best-Dish Honors; a singing physics professor."

NPR executives bristle at the implication that the programming is frivolous. "It is easy," says vice president of news and information Bruce Drake, "to carve out one small period or point of coverage and use it as a foundation for this kind of criticism--but it wholly ignores the large body of work that NPR has done over the last two years." Drake has a point: Much of NPR's Iraq reportage has indeed been of high quality, and he has the awards (including a Peabody) to prove it.

Yet listeners like Steinman are correct to ask searching questions about NPR and Iraq, especially since some of the network's luminaries have not been shy about expressing their own views on that subject. In October 2002 political correspondent Mara Liasson, in an appearance on Fox News Sunday, assailed two Democratic Congressmen for traveling to Iraq. "These guys are a disgrace," she said. "Look, everybody knows it's...Politics 101 that you don't go to an adversary country, an enemy country, and badmouth the United States, its policies and the President of the United States. I mean, these guys ought to, I don't know, resign." In the same vein, Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon--who was an antiwar activist at the University of Chicago in the Vietnam era--wrote a swaggering essay for the Wall Street Journal editorial page on October 11, 2001, titled "Even Pacifists Must Support This War," and, in a March 2003 speech in Seattle, he reportedly expressed support for the US invasion of Iraq.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.