Inside NPR’s Trojan Horse

by Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg

Santa Barbara residents may avail themselves of National Public Radio on KCLU, 1340 AM or KDRW 88.7 FM. The relative share of listeners as reported by the Neilson ratings show that in the fall of 2023 they achieved an AQH rating of 2.3 and 1.5 respectively, compared to 11.5 from KTYD. (The AQH or Average Quarter-Hour Persons estimate is expressed as a percentage of the population being measured.) Although there are fewer NPR affiliates in Santa Barbara now than a decade ago, a decent percentage of the population still contributes to NPR’s funding. This is problematic, all things considered.

In decades past, NPR produced what many thought were well balanced news reports and nearly sublime classical music programming. However, 20/20 hindsight will reveal that NPR was always a trojan horse. By the appearances of erudition, slick journalistic presentation, and the masters of the fine arts, the giant artificial media-mare rolled right past our intellectual gates of defense and became a welcomed peace offering from the enemies of our Republic. Inside this Trojan horse, the mind molders lay in wait for the cover of intellectual darkness to sack the collective soul of America with the weapons of leftist ideologies.

National Public Radio (NPR) is a nonprofit news organization whose stated mission is “to create a more informed public.” In an article entitled I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust, NPR insider Uri Berliner alleges there has been a radical leftist shift in the last few years, especially since 2016 when Trump was elected.

He claims that NPR adopted the mission to allow for Adam Schiff to be their muse and to only report things that make Trump look bad. He noted that NPR dealt dishonestly with the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, that they espoused scientism and false narratives with the Covid pandemic, that they jumped on the CRT, BLM bandwagon in the wake of George Floyd’s death and they have fully adopted DEI initiatives in the workplace.

Berliner also reports that in recent years there has been a dramatic liberal shift in NPR’s audience. His current lament is that “an open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.” NPR has never had an audience that reflected the vision of the American Founders, but always had an audience that reflected American Academia, and these are two radically different audiences. 

Berliner softens his critique of NPR by rationalizing that the leftist ideological activism “wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.” Far from considering “all things,” NPR’s focus is narrow and exclusive.

Consider Berliner’s startling admission that there is “an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless- one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.” This is hardly the stuff by which a public becomes “more informed.”

NPR’s responses to Berliner’s exposé have been destructive. The indictments he made evoked a strong rejection of his claims and a stronger defense of the kind of news NPR produces. The current woke CEO, Katherine Maher, remains indifferent to the reality that there are 87 Democrats and 0 Republicans on staff at NPR at the D. C. headquarters. Maher’s public response to Berliner’s revelations was to say that it is “profoundly disrespectful” of him to question NPR’s integrity. She proceeded to put Berliner on unpaid administrative leave for a trumped-up charge and he decided to resign shortly after.

Maher’s public record is enough to expose her as a woke liberal unfit for honest journalism. She criticized Hilary Clinton for using words like “boy” and “girl” because they marginalize the “non-binary.” She has posted several name-calling anti-Trump tweets. On June 1^st in 2020, she posted, “White silence is complicity. If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community.” Maher touted “friction,” different perspectives, and the value of disagreement in a TED talk and yet, she consistently tries to silence her opponents, even if those opponents assert the truth. Most absurdly she said, “seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done!” Watch the full Ted-talk to remove all doubt about her lack of intellectual integrity.

The denial of what is obvious at NPR and on public record is how broken trust proliferates. What may not be so obvious is how NPR’s mission statement is wildly inaccurate. As Berliner illustrates, NPR reports misinformation on the most important issues of the day and at the same time asserts the contradictory mission to “create a more informed public.” We must ask ourselves, “how can NPR report major misrepresentations and at the same time contribute to a “more informed public?” 

Uri Berliner deserves credit for trying to “create a more informed public.” Fulfilling this stated mission cost him his job of 25 years. It is doubtless that the irony is lost on NPR. They ousted one of their oldest employees for fulfilling their stated mission. We ought to be concerned when we consider that NPR has an audience of 23.5 million people a week. NPR has been increasingly distorting reality for many years. They have indeed destroyed public trust, but do we as the public even know it? Worse still, do they even know it?

It is long past time to expel (or at least defund) the Trojan Horse of NPR before more damage is done.

Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg is a graduate from UCSB. He is the founder of City of Truth, an organization to help families recover an authentic Liberal Arts and Sciences education to become the first educators of their own children. Cityoftruth.co