NPR slanting IRS story in favor of Republicans, again

May 21, 2013

Several years ago, when I was working and thus getting up early enough to listen to NPR news in the morning, for about a year and a half I kept a log of things I was interested in and how, and whether, they were being covered, in order to check my observation that there was a blackout of any mention of anything that might suggest global warming was happening, or could have bad effects if it did occur. They started covering this problem only after their oil company sponsors admitted that human-caused global warming is real and is a problem. I verified that I was right. But I also found something that I hadn't realized. Almost all the time, when NPR covered something that the power elite would not want covered, like rising rates of inequality, the stories were aired either right before or during a pledge drive. I have seen this pattern continue. Not long ago (maybe a year?), after NPR started did not meet it's pledge drive goal, coverage of such topics noticable increased. In the most recent pledge drive, ending a few weeks ago, they asked for more sponsors, saying it might end the need for pledge drives. I would say that would be terrible, because then they would lose the pressure to serve the average listener. (For all I know, the employees at NPR might welcome the chance to present a more balanced view rather than being a genteel version of right-wing media.) Then they changed to asking people to become sustaining members, automatically-paid monthly deductions, that it might reduce the length of the pledge drives. That seems like it would retain the incentive to cover the news more fairly. This pledge drive was very successful. And now they are presenting the investigation of the tax status of some conservative political groups overwhelmingly with the standpoint of the Republicans. Without mentioning that only a few of from groups were investigated. Language to the effect that they were unfairly investigated, whereas they should have been investigated. The possible questionable behaviour was singling them out unfairly, and we are not given sufficient info to know if that was actually the case. W/o mentioning the many other groups that were investigated. W/o mentioning the names of any other of the many groups that were similarly investigate. Etc. And this has been going on for more than a week, so they have had plenty of time to investigate more deeply, and bring us more info than we could get from listening to Faux Noise.