(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) National Public Radio’s announcement that it was launching a “disinformation” reporting team backfired after the taxpayer-funded network was widely mocked for its own far-left bias, according to Breitbart.
NPR producer and politics podcaster Casey Morell posted the announcement in a tweet that included a link to the article from their official website.
some great company news: we’re launching a disinformation team https://t.co/LWzxt5yIjL
— casey morell (@csymrl) July 15, 2022
But Mollie Hemingway, the editor-in-chief at The Federalist, was among those who made fun of Morell and his network, noting the irony saying that a platform that has been spreading disinformation for many years is launching something that would destroy them in theory.
“What are you talking about?” she said. “You’ve been little other than a disinformation team for many years.”
What are you talking about? You’ve been little other than a disinformation team for many years. https://t.co/VfpgJ57GKO
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 16, 2022
NPR’s overt bias came to the forefront in 2020 after the New York Post released its breaking news story about the Hunter Biden laptop.
Like almost every other mass media outlet, it remained silent to protect Joe Biden’s chances of winning in the presidential elections of 2020 by covering up the story about his son’s corrupt foreign business deals and depraved personal life.
To justify the network’s leftist agenda and present it as “journalism,” Kelly McBride, a public editor, released a newsletter in which she said that the Post’s discovery was not a real story.
Why haven’t you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story? Read more in this week’s newsletter➡️ https://t.co/CJesPgmGvo pic.twitter.com/jAi7PnpbZf
— NPR Public Editor (@NPRpubliceditor) October 22, 2020
“[T]he biggest reason you haven’t heard much on NPR about the Post story [on Hunter Biden] is that the assertions don’t amount to much,” she said.
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” she continued. “And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”
Subsequent reporting, much of it driven by conservative media outlets, confirmed the story to be true. With Hunter Biden facing a deepening grand-jury investigation, the New York Times sheepishly acknowledged its veracity in April.
But that wasn’t the first instance that the network’s propagandist tendencies came to the surface.
After the 2016 elections, the NPR ombudsman declared that the network should stop releasing live interviews with conservatives, suggesting that the interviews should be pre-recorded.
To avoid the backlash, NPR released a statement in which the network reassured its audience that the policy on live interviews was not going to be changed.
The taxpayer-subsidized network’s bias has been a sticking point for conservatives spanning back more than a decade, when then-President Barack Obama mocked campaign rival Mitt Romney for wanting to defund Big Bird over his calls to hold NPR and its television counterpart, PBS, more accountable.
Since then, the outrageous coverage has continued to generate periodic calls from Republicans that it be defunded, but to little avail.
As Fox News host Tucker Carlson noted in early 2022, it only appears to be growing more brazen.
