Liberal Democrat

Liberal Democrat
Individual Freedom For Everyone

Sunday, August 12, 2012

FORA-TV: Tom Friedman Interviewing Gary E. Knell- ‘A Leftist Bias? NPR Seeks Truth Not Balance’

Source:FORA-TV- Gary E. Knell is the head of National Public Radio.
Source:The Daily Journal

“Gary E. Knell, President and CEO of NPR, acknowledges that the station has a certain perspective, but declares that the news coverage is driven by truth rather than strict balance.”

From FORA-TV 

First of all, I’m not a fan of NPR National Public Radio, because their reporting does look somewhat slanted to me. Their reporters and anchors sound like a combination of both reporters and analysts and that’s not the job of reporters.

The job of reporters is report on what they cover and report the facts that come up. Not make an assumption of what’s going on and report the facts that back up their case, but to actually report on what’s going on. Which is also different from not knowing anything about what you are covering, but to understand the issues you cover and report the facts that come up.

The job of analysts is to analyze what these facts mean and how they’ll effect whatever the issue is. For example a reporter would report let’s say 120K jobs were created last month and then the analyst, hopefully an economist or someone with a background in economics or business, will analyze what the jobs report means. Whether it’s a good sign for the economy or not or somewhere in between. What you get with NPR are reporters that have an ideological slant. People with leftist leanings who cover stories and report the facts that back up what they think about the story.

I’m not saying the NPR is the Fox News of the left, because with NPR you do get a lot of factually based info. You just don’t get most or all the info many times and you get the info that backs up how left-wingers feel about these issues. Where except for a few exceptions with Fox News, you get the right-wing slant and a lot of right-wing commentary.

The closest thing to Fox News from the left, would be MSNBC, but their audience is not nearly as big and they do have real reporters and anchors. Whereas Fox News except for Shep Smith and Chris Wallace, you have right-wing commentators playing the role of anchors and reporters.

Fox News has essentially become the official mouthpiece of the Republican Party and right-wingers in America. But the difference being that Fox News is a private organization funded through advertising and the private sector. Whereas NPR is funded through tax revenue.

If NPR wants to be a left-wing mouthpiece when it comes to politics and current affairs and other issues they see as important, then they should be allowed to do that, but they should have to fund their own operations and business. Instead of taxpayers being forced to subsidize their left-wing voice. And then we’ll truly see how much support there is out there for this type of media coverage.