NPR controversies

NPR, full name National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to 797 public radio stations in the United States.

NPR has been criticized for perceived bias in its coverage of Israel and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), an American media monitoring organization based in Boston, has been particularly critical of NPR. CAMERA director Andrea Levin has stated, "We consider NPR to be the most seriously biased mainstream media outlet," a statement that The Boston Globe describes as having "clearly gotten under her target's skin." NPR's then-ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin said in a 2002 interview that CAMERA used selective citations and subjective definitions of what it considers pro-Palestinian bias in formulating its findings and that he felt CAMERA's campaign was "a kind of McCarthyism, frankly, that bashes us and causes people to question our commitment to doing this story fairly. And it exacerbates the legitimate anxieties of many in the Jewish community about the survival of Israel."

CAMERA organized a boycott in 2001–2002, costing member station WBUR-FM between $1 and $2 million. The CAMERA boycott also extended to The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Anti-Defamation League and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee both criticized specific NPR reports as unbalanced, but neither accused the news organization of a consistent underlying bias. Other observers have also accused NPR of pro-Israel bias, including Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. NPR hired a group to do outreach with both Jewish and Arab communities. An outside expert was appointed to perform quarterly self-reviews of its Israel-Palestine coverage from 2003 to 2013, finding "lack of completeness but strong factual accuracy and no systematic bias" and citing reasons why Palestinians were heard on-air less than Israelis, but overall voices from Arab countries were heard more. The 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict brought a fresh round of complaints to the ombudsman from both sides that NPR was not assigning blame to the other side, or that a particular story focused on an event or guest favorable to one side (to which the ombudsman responded that complainants ignored other balancing stories that featured the other side).

A 2004 FAIR study concluded that "NPR's guestlist shows the radio service relies on the same elite and influential sources that dominate mainstream commercial news, and falls short of reflecting the diversity of the American public." Further studies published in 2015 by FAIR demonstrate a lack of diversity in NPR's board members. The study found those occupying board seats of NPR and its member stations disproportionately have corporate affiliations such as investment funds, banking, consulting firms and corporate law firms with 75 percent of board members falling into such categories, with other non-corporate affiliations being current or former government officials, academia and the like. Seventy-two percent of individuals are non-Latino white males. According to NPR, it receives 35% of its funding from local member station dues and fees, 33% from corporate sponsorships, and 13% from grants from non-profits. For many member stations, funds for NPR programming dues and fees are raised from listener contributions and grants.^{[citation needed]} In 2014, NPR acknowledged a lack of cultural and ethnic diversity among guests, viewpoints and topics covered as well as the composition of their newsroom and board members.

Noam Chomsky has criticized NPR as being biased toward ideological power and the status quo. He alleges that the parameters of debate on a given topic are consciously curtailed. He says that since the network maintains studios in ideological centers of opinion such as Washington, the network must carefully consider what kinds of acceptable dissenting views. Thus, political pragmatism, perhaps induced by fear of offending public officials who control some of NPR's funding (via CPB), often determines what views are suitable for broadcast, meaning that opinions critical of the structures of national-interest-based foreign policy, capitalism, and government bureaucracies (entailed by so-called "radical" or "activist" politics) usually do not make it to air.

Consumers of information from NPR contend that NPR does its job well. A study conducted in 2003 by the polling firm Knowledge Networks and the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (University of Maryland at College Park) showed that those who get their news and information from public broadcasting (NPR and PBS – Public Broadcasting Service) are better informed than those whose data comes from other media outlets. In one study, NPR and PBS audiences had a more accurate understanding of the events in Iraq versus all audiences for cable and broadcast TV networks and the print media.

On April 9, 2024, The Free Press published an essay by NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner in which he criticized NPR for having "coalesced around the progressive worldview", and that the publication had sought "to damage or topple Trump’s presidency". Berliner was given a five-day suspension without pay on 12 April for failing to secure approval for outside work. He resigned from NPR on 17 April in an email to NPR CEO Katherine Maher accusing Maher of holding "divisive" views. He then started work at The Free Press in June 2024.

In 1994, NPR arranged to air commentaries by convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal on All Things Considered, but canceled them after the Fraternal Order of Police and members of the United States Congress objected to the airing.