I’m not sure people realize just how egregious some of NPR’s “journalism” has been. Amid the debate about defunding the network, I wanted to walk down memory lane to revisit some of its worst coverage.
There’s a lot. ⤵️
First, perhaps the most egregious display of activist journalism: their response to the Hunter Biden laptop story of corruption involving a major party candidate on the eve of the election.
Not only did @NPR not cover it, they bragged about refusing to do so.
Insofar as @NPR did cover the Hunter Biden scandal, they actively tried to cover it up.
They applauded Facebook & Twitter strangling the story as part of a push against “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
The story, of course, turned out to be far from invented.
In particular, @NPR shamelessly went after @EmmaJoNYC for, of all things, doing real journalism.
Her doing so offended NPR so badly that they wrote an entire hit piece about her.
This wasn’t the only hatchet work from @NPR in defense of Biden.
When questions about Biden’s cognitive functioning started to bubble up in February 2024, NPR leapt Pravda-like to his defense.
The real problem? How such allegations would be “weaponized.”
Oh, and Biden’s pardoning of his son? No big deal, to hear @NPR tell it.
Partisan bias is one thing. Actively serving as stenographers of the administration, with your tax dollars, I would say is another.
Or how about @NPR begging voters to consider how good the economy allegedly was under Biden?
Early effort to insulate him — look at the headline! — from electoral attacks.
Such pro-government animus when a Democrat was in office contrasts sharply with @NPR’s breathless coverage of “Russian collusion.”
Despite (I get a kick out of this) claiming they weren’t going to discuss the sensational allegations, they were among the lead proponents.
Here are just a few examples of @NPR rushing to repeat the baseless narrative that Trump was compromised by Russia.
Here’s just a couple examples.
But of course this sentiment extended to all things connected to Trump.
The worst, in my book, remains their dismissal of the COVID lab leak hypothesis.
Not mincing words, @NPR claimed that the idea that Covid originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, had been “debunked.”
The lab leak theory, of course, is wasn’t debunked. It has since become the going theory not just in the U.S. but abroad.
I would like this @NPR side by side on my tombstone.
And @NPR had more bad Covid lab leak coverage, and coverage of the pandemic more broadly.
Perhaps my favorite is this, where they compared the lab leak theory to (I’m not joking) the “lead-up to [the] Iraq War.”
The rush to hit Trump has led to some other funny side by sides from @NPR, like this one about Covid’s danger.
And on some issues, @NPR has really taken on the role of advocacy organization, not media entity. As @MaryMargOlohan flagged earlier, NPR has been at the vanguard of promoting the merits of“gender affirming care.”
And then of course there are the seemingly endless examples of @NPR using your tax dollars to do “journalism” that, well, I’m not sure many people would pay for.
Are you concerned about worm emojis? How about policing emoji skin tone?
No? Anyone?
Are you interested in your tax dollars funding coverage of the symbolic dance protest of Trump’s actions toward the Kennedy Center?
Surely you’re okay with your tax dollars investigating whether the depiction of people with eating disorders is too white? Or camel caps attacks on capitalism?
This one presented without comment.
So, yeah, if everyday Americans look at the coverage @NPR produces and think, no, I don’t want my tax dollars going to this, I think that’s reasonable.
I can’t help but think that maybe those who are up in arms about the prospect aren’t really interested in journalism at all.
(I will always treasure my own mention in @NPR though!)
@NPR I’ve been sitting on some of these for a long time, so apologies if some of the screenshots (of my previous screenshots) aren’t as crisp as usual
@NPR If you’re interested in this kind of media criticism, you should check out my newsletter, @Holden_Court drewholden.substack.com
@NPR @Holden_Court and as ever, if you’d like to help finance the phone space required for these screenshots, and the beer to occasionally revisit them, you can kick me a couple bucks at my tip jar. paypal.com/donate/?busine…
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The new book “Original Sin” from Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson recounts the effort to cover up Biden’s cognitive decline ahead of the election. The authors point to many guilty parties.
The one glaring omission? Their colleagues in the corporate press. Follow along ⤵️
There are numerous dramatic reveals. The Biden team considered condoning him to a wheelchair? Maybe in his fog he forgot about the border?
But as I worked on a review for @commonplc, the one thought that I kept coming back to was that you can’t tell this story without the press.
Perhaps no one was more vital to the continued fiction that Biden had it together than the media.
Tapper and Thompson even highlight some of the telling moments.
Biden’s cancer diagnosis is a tragedy I know first-hand.
But our sympathy can’t silence questions about Biden’s cognitive decline, clarified just days ago by the Hur tape.
The media tried to bury the story then. They’re trying again now.
I’ve got the receipts. ⤵️
When the report first came out in 2024, outlets rushed to demean Hur, accusing him of serving as a Republican hatchet man.
Just look at this take from @USATODAY, who assembled sympathetic voices to make the case that Hur “crossed the line.” They found an expert to call it a “disgrace” and then featured the obviously unbiased Eric Holder to lead a section titled “Way too many gratuitous remarks.”
The audio makes clear that Hur, if anything, played down how alarming the claims were.
(If you haven’t listened to the Hur audio yet, you should.)
It should go without saying, but the media cultivating this type of baseless hysteria about an admin for partisan reasons is much more of a threat to the underpinnings of our democracy than anything Trump has actually done.
Quick 🧵⤵️
A couple quotes:
“If you think that there’s this thing out there called America, and it’s exceptional, that means you don’t have to do anything” to stop fascism.
What? What does that even mean??
That if you, like millions of Americans!, believe in American exceptionalism…you’re a fascist?
Really?
“The powers that be can do whatever they want to you”
Trump can’t even deport people who have deportation orders against them without a federal judge stepping in.
Many in the media are trying to claim that the press was merely duped by Biden’s White House about the former president’s cognitive decline.
That simply isn’t true. The media actively took part in the coverup.
Don’t let them forget. I’ve got screenshots. ⤵️
I’ve done a number of threads on this but putting some of the most egregious stuff in one place.
Perhaps the most damming: Two weeks before the debate made Biden’s cognitive decline inescapable, @washingtonpost gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to allegedly edited videos showing Biden clearly displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype” while quoting the White House to say the videos were “cheap fakes” — all to defend Biden against criticisms about his age and well-being.
That story came four days after a previous effort from @washingtonpost to write off these videos as Republican efforts to mislead voters: proof, the Post claimed, that “the politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories do not stop at the waters edge.”