Republicans Want to Defund NPR. To Survive, It Needs To Do Some Soul-Searching.

NPR's job is to produce news for every American. Its partisan lean is undermining that mission.

Photo by Eric Nopanen on Unsplash

The other day, I listened to an NPR podcast called Wild Card with Michel Martin. The interview-based podcast is pretty interesting. The host, Michel Martin, asks her guests a series of highly personal questions. It’s a fascinating way to examine the minds of leading writers, actors, and other public intellectuals.

The guest on the episode I listened to was Ramy Youssef, the rising star millennial comedian who also happens to be one of America’s most prominent Muslim actors (you might have seen him in Poor Things or the recent Mountainhead.)

One of the shows he himself has produced and starred in, Hulu’s Ramy, featurse a semi-biographical storyline of a young Muslim American grappling with his own crisis of faith. Although the character Yousef portrays isMuslim, I could easily see young Jews, Mormons, or other people from religious minority groups seeing themselves reflected in his scripts.

It was interesting, then, to see Martin get into the matter of faith with Youssef. She asked him a series of questions about how he approaches spirituality, what he thinks about the afterlife, and whether he believes in God.

These aren’t unusual questions to ask a public intellectual, but I was taken aback at how surprised Martin was that Youssef is a believer. When Youssef says that of course he believes in God, she exclaims, “Why of course?!”

The questions and responses weren’t rude, but they struck me as a little naive. Over 80 percent of Americans believe in some kind of divinity. That’s slightly higher than the percentage of Americans who are right-handed. Would you be surprised if you met someone who was right-handed?

Right now, a wing of the GOP is trying to defund grants to NPR and PBS, entities who are in part financed by government largesse.

It’s true that at least some of these Republicans are probably libertarian-minded: they don’t think the government should be in the media funding business to start with. But others would be OK with it if they felt that public media actually represented their constituents; their view is that NPR and PBS have a political bias against Republicans.

It would be easy to brush off these complaints as pure grievance mongering. But a few weeks ago I actually sat down and listened to a bunch of NPR after I rented a car and wasn’t able to instantly broadcast my battery of podcasts I normally listen to.

My public radio listening experience was eye-opening. It felt like I was listening to a broadcast version of BlueSky, the left-leaning social media network that became the site of a Twitter liberal exodus.

As one example, on one program I listened to, listeners were invited to submit questions as part of a Q-and-A.

In a section on Black Lives Matter, a listener asked if the fact that some of the funds allocated to this cause ended up being converted into a luxury mansion was a problem. The guest responded that it wasn’t a big problem because houses in California tend to be expensive.

This is not a one-off for NPR. If you turn it on at any point during your day, you will likely be barraged with center-left social and political viewpoints. Occasionally, you might hear an actual Republican or center-right independent point of view. But if someone told you that NPR was secretly run by a mix of Democratic operatives and liberal nonprofit funders, you wouldn’t be shocked.

And the network has been trending this way for a long time. When I worked at the Center for American Progress, a leading center-left think tank, I recall one of our senior executives being thrilled that some of our work had been covered by NPR. She referred to the network’s listeners as “our base.”

None of this is lost on your everyday Republican. One Pew poll from 2020 found that just 21% of people who identified as moderate or liberal Republicans or Republican-leaners trusted NPR. 13% of people in the conservative Republican camp felt the same way. And this polling was released in January 2020, months before NPR dismissively refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story, an episode which further polarized conservatives against them.

I’m not a libertarian. I think America needs public media because private media alone is insufficient. But public media needs to represent the public. If NPR wants to avoid getting its government grants axed, either this year or some other year, they need to think long and hard about whether the average American can actually see themselves reflected in their programming.

If NPR thinks it only exists for the ideological whims of Northern Virginia wine moms, it shouldn’t be surprised when one day the rest of America doesn’t want to finance it with their tax dollars.