NPR

And Speaking of Fake News: NPR!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

See? “I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says! I’m smart, and I want respect!“

Excuse me while I gleefully gloat over pointing out once again what a rotten, biased, disgrace of a news organization NPR is (and has been for a long while) right before it beclowned itself spectacularly yesterday by breaking the imaginary story that Justice Samuel Alito was retiring from the Supreme Court.

No, you can’t excuse this putrid example of the variety of fake news I call “Wishin’ and Hopin’ News” (in honor of the late, great Dusty Springfield) with the rationalization (#19 on the list) “Anyone can make a mistake!” For a professional news organization that has any scruples or legitimate editorial procedures literally never makes a mistake like this. NPR didn’t check its “facts” with the subject of the story. It didn’t get confirmation from the Supreme Court. It literally broke a story that didn’t exist because the Axis and the Axis propaganda network and the Trump Deranged and so, so many fans of NPR wanted this to be true so badly that NPR decided that Ethics Don’t Matter….though, to be fair, NPR decided this long, long ago, as when, oh, just to pick a random example out of the air, they blacklisted me as the network’s go-to ethics expert after a woke hostess deemed my 100% accurate explanation of how celebrities are vulnerable to late-hit sexual harassment accusations intolerable because, she told me, “I thought you were trying to defend Donald Trump.”

I may use the Alito episode from now on as my routine example of confirmation bias. The fiasco is so wonderful for Ethics Alarms in so many ways!

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Today’s “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Note, NPR Division

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This is hack, bottom-of-the-barrel journalism at its worst.

The statistics show that the “The United States almost certainly had the lowest murder rate ever recorded in 2025” according to crime data analyst Jeff Asher. “And the available evidence suggests that we’re going to go even lower this year,” he predicts based on the numbers and trend so far.

Here is how NPR starts its story:

“As the U.S. nears its 250th birthday, it’s doing pretty well by at least one measure: the national murder rate.”

That’s not news reporting. That’s partisan damnation with faint praise, while also engaging in deliberate misrepresentation. The story states that President Trump has achieved the best result in reducing the murder rate since at least 1960. That’s not, by any reasonable use of the English language, doing “pretty well.” It is an extraordinary success, and should be reported as such.

Then there is “at least one measure,” because, you see, everything else is terrible, but NPR’s Trump Deranged listeners assume that, so a major Trump accomplishment has to be minimized in the reporting. The technique is called “poisoning the well” and it isn’t journalism, it is pure bias. NPR, like the rest of the Axis, can’t tell a straight news story fairly, directly or honestly without applying a negative spin if President Trump is involved. You can almost hear the sneers: the outlet might as well had written,

“Well, how about that, the asshole did something right!”

“Look! Trump lucked out this time!”

“Hey, I guess everything the President does can’t blow up in his face!”

“Even a blind squirrel will find a nut now and then!”

As Clarence Darrow memorably said at the end of his closing argument in the Sweet case,

“I am the last one to come here to stir up race hatred, or any other hatred. I do not believe in the law of hate… I believe in the law of love, and I believe you can do nothing with hatred.”

So I am wrestling my brain to the ground to fight hating these awful, arrogant, unprofessional, smug and destructive people. They refuse to extend even moderate respect and decency to the President of the United States. They do everything in their power to distort facts, data, reality and analysis to confuse the public and turn it against their own leader. They will not give credit when it is due, and they will not assign responsibility where it belongs, if there is any way to twist the facts to impugn President Trump.

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Unethical Quote of the Week: Bob Greene, Board Chair for Rocky Mountain PBS

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“A nice stroke that turns him into a drooling, pooping blob in a wheelchair unable to speak.”

——Bob Greene, Chairman of the Board of Rocky Mountain PBS, on the station’s X account when asked about his birthday wish for President Trump, who turned 80 last week,

Nice! On the Rocky Mountain PBS website, Greene is described as “an experienced senior executive with over 35 years in sales, marketing and operations in the entertainment, interactive and broadband industries” who is “responsible for developing new revenue platforms and partnerships that leverage and enhance the global scale of Liberty.”

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Responding to this pure verbal hate, a spokesperson for Rocky Mountain Public Media said that it had “only recently become aware of this post in question” and that it violates their social media guidelines, which state that “Personal views and political positions should be kept separate from the station’s content, and should not appear on any RMPM-operated platform or dedicated page/stream” and ” that “when using the internet or social media in your personal life, please make it clear and conspicuous that all of your statements are on your own behalf and are not RMPM’s. Disclaimers such as ‘opinions are my own’ should be used whenever appropriate.” And Greene’s post magically disappeared.

But the official disclaimer doesn’t change the fact that the individual at the top of the station’s management pyramid felt comfortable posting his vile opinion because it was completely consistent with the bias and toxic culture at the station. Hiding that kind of deranged hate doesn’t solve the problem of programming being filtered through such attitudes and such irresponsible leadership.

The episode serves as a vivid reminder of how much NPR and PBS deserved to have their Federal Funding eliminated. I had another discussion with a Trump Deranged friend who was bemoaning the loss of the two Leftist propaganda organs, which bring essential services to remote rural communities, or so the story goes. All NPR and PBS had to do was be fair, objective and non-partisan to have a strong argument that they performed an important function for the public regardless of citizens’ political affiliations. They couldn’t do it. They allowed themselves to be co-opted and dominated by progressives and Democrats who proved unable to restrain their objective of using NPR and PBS to advance a partisan agenda and to indoctrinate listeners. Greene openly expressed that bias, which he was supposed to keep under wraps like the rest of the staff. Yet the NPR and PBS broadcasts are evidence enough.

These people have such contempt for the intelligence of Americans,

Exit Question: Has any previous POTUS been the object of such unrestrained verbal calumny?

Ethics Quote of the Week: Citizen Free Press

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Bwaaahaha, perhaps you should have cut out the bias, bitches.”

—Citizen Free Press, on all the whining and breast-beating from public television and radio talent and execss over NPR and PBS finally losing taxpayer support.

Citizen Free Press is the successor to the Drudge Report as the go-to conservative news aggregator. It’s a bit too unprofessional for me most of the time, with links headlined “Nancy Pelosi should have shut her pie hole!” and such, but this time, its colloquialism hit the mark.

The arrogance of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been offensive for decades. It has been a hard left propaganda machine, the automatic foe of Republican Presidents and the reliable enabler of Democrats since anyone can remember. NPR’s Supreme Court commentator Nina Totenberg was a buddy of the late progressive SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a clear conflict of interest, but she didn’t care and neither did NPR: after all, the idea was to bash the conservative decisions anyway. Ken Burns disgracefully turned his documentary on the Jews and the Holocaust into a Trump-bashing screed, and PBS just nodded its metaphorical head in agreement. There are too many examples of both networks spinning reality to support Woke goals and narratives to tote up.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“As far as the accusations that we’re biased, I’d stand up and say, ‘Please show me a story that concerns you.’”

The infuriatingly dishonest, smug and biased Katherine Maher, head of NPR, on CNN yesterday.

Social media and others, like Senator John Kennedy and Instapundit, are going wild picking obvious examples. Hell, I have a lot of them; here’s one you may have forgotten (I had).

If Congress doesn’t finally strip public funding from NPR and PBS, there is no reason to trust those people to do anything. The Democrats love them because they are permanent propaganda mouthpieces for their party, but what’s the Republicans’ excuse?

Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

—NPR CEO Katherine Maher

Elon Musk posted the video of Maher saying this…

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1856343280344010803

I can’t find the date of that speech or the context of the quote, but what possible context could justify it? If that isn’t pure Big Brother, what is? “Can’t let the truth get in the way of progress!” This is the totalitarian mindset that (I hope) was one of the things enough voters rejected a week ago. This is the ends justifies the means ideology embraced by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including the news media that lied, dissembled, covered up and broadcast false narratives during the campaign and, of course, long before.

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No, NPR, Trump Was 100% Right About Kamala Harris’s Race, And You Are The Liar

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

In the process of being grilled at yesterday’s conference of black journalists, Donald Trump noted the constant fluctuating of Kamala Harris’s racial identification according to what audience she’s addressing and what will best serve her ambition at the time. In the cooking show segment above, for example (I apologize for Juanita’s vulgarity), Kamala pronounced herself “Indian.”

Ethics Alarms generally refers to her as “sort-of black” [I now see that WordPress’s AI bot presumes to challenge my use of the term “generally.” It can bite me.] Trump said, “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black.”

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Dispatches From the Great Stupid: NPR Unmasked (Cont.)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I know I should be writing about the college campuses revealing to administrators and faculty that they have successfully indoctrinated their students into being anti-Semites, bigots, and fascists while remaining ignorant of history and ethics. I’m really tired today, however, and for a while, at least, I’m going to indulge myself elaborating on an earlier ethics mess: the revelation that National Public Radio has become a malign force in American culture, and will lie, obfuscate and spin to disguise its true nature and objectives.

I found two notes worth pondering. From the Times (I’m not making this up)—

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Update on NPR’s Unmasking

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

That is kind of a fanciful title, I guess. The only people who didn’t realize that NPR has been strongly biased leftward over the last, oh, two decades or more would be those who agree with that bias, so naturally think the taxpayer funded radio network is just “telling it as it is.” Selective editing to make, say, Ted Cruz sound like a far-right nut case, or having a Supreme Court correspondent who is pals with the most liberal justice on the Court are just, you know, “mistakes.”

But having an insider who is obviously a progressive Democrat himself blow the whistle and announce that “the nonprofit radio network had allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage” (Ya think???) meant that attention must be paid, and the furious reaction of NPR’s leadership to that statement of the obvious–-“How DARE he! We’re NPR!”—gave instant credibility to his indictment, again, not that it should have needed any more, if people were paying attention.

Now comes the news of the obvious other shoe dropping: Uri Berliner, the senior business editor who blew said whistle, has been suspended by the network but for just for five days. In an interview with NPR earlier this week, Berliner revealed that NPR said he would be fired if he violated the policy against unapproved work for another media outlets again. Apparently NPR figured out that the Streisand Effect applies, and the more they go after Berliner and deny, deny, deny, the more visible the network’s progressive propaganda proclivities will be.

They figured it out too late, unfortunately. The mask, which was hanging anyway, is off now. NPR can blame any future criticism on Republicans and conservatives “pouncing,” but as long as it is led by a woman whose social media comments mark her as an extreme anti-American social justice activist, the strategy is unlikely to work. Fine, let NPR preach to the metaphorical choir—but I shouldn’t have to pay for it.

Meanwhile…

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WHAAAAT? NPR is Politically BIASED??? How Could That Be? [CORRECTED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Oh for heaven’s sake. National Public Radio’s cronies in Woke Journalism Land are stunned that Uri Berliner, a senior business editor who worked at NPR for 25 years, wrote in an essay published on Substack that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.” Seldom has the “Die Hard” clip above from the Ethics Alarms archive been more appropriate.

Here’s the Ethics Alarms NPR tag, which mostly catalogues the examples of NPR bias and unethical journalism Ethics Alarms has covered, and I’m sure it is still a drop in the metaphorical bucket. NPR was an Ethics Dunce recipient—again— just a few months ago.

NPR is extremely biased; its bias is flagrant and undeniable and has seeped into it programing on virtually every topic for decades. The only thing shocking about an NPR editor publicly admitting this is that anyone who was marinated in the organization’s dishonest and untrustworthy culture would be capable of telling the truth.

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