Several people mentioned an article published at Free Press to me. The senior editor writes: “By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent [of NPR listeners] described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal.” And then he explains how it happened. Let’s take a look.

First thing, is that they reported on the Trump-Russia collusion story, and then when it was revealed that there was no collusion, and it was all just based on opposition research funded by Democrats, NPR forgot all about the story:

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

People noticed how NPR handled that story. And they didn’t do a good job of reporting how the fake Trump-Russia dossier came into being, and was used to get the surveillance warrant. People reasonably thought “listening to NPR is just listening to lies”.

More:

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.

Here’s my 2020 post about Trump-Russia collusion, which was better than anything that NPR wrote about it. I remember when you couldn’t even say these things, because the big social media companies, who were being guided by NPR misinformation, would ban your account.

He has another example:

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “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.”

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.

When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.

Here’s my 2022 post on the Hunter Biden laptop, which is, again, better than anything NPR wrote about it. If you told the truth about the laptop, then the social media companies who were influenced by NPR misinformation would ban your account.

And, like most of the Facebook-approved “fact checkers”, NPR opposed the lab-leak theory of COVID:

Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.

The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.

But that wasn’t the case.

My 2023 article on the lab leak theory was much better than anything NPR has ever done on it. But again, because big tech was relying on NPR misinformation, you would get banned on social media, if you told the truth about these things.

I think every conservative is conservative in part because they realize how they’ve been lied to by the secular left, and found out the truth later on their own. Whether it’s the “simple” origin of life in a “prebiotic soup”, the fossil record that supposedly shows a gradual increase in phylogenetic complexity, the “eternal universe”, global cooling / warming, etc., conservatives have learned not to trust the wordsmiths. We know that journalists are typically stupid people who don’t know anything about evidence-based subjects like science, math, or economics. They just believe what they want to believe – whatever will give them the largest epistemic distance from God, and the least felt accountability to a Moral Lawgiver.