At a recent House hearing, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the chair of the DOGE subcommittee, criticized NPR’s use of sources in its news stories as lacking in political diversity. Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio, mentioned repeatedly that there were "87 Democrats 0 Republicans" on NPR's team in Washington, DC, according to voter registrations, seemingly content that it proved NPR has a liberal bias.
This presented missed opportunities, such as the following:
Diversity of news sources
More homework: Despite the month long lead time for the hearing—it was announced in early February--both public media groups failed to do some homework. A simple check of a year's worth of stories likely would have revealed a more balanced choice of sources who were quoted on the air. NPR does talk to GOP politicians. So does PBS. Being ready with the numbers (and no, they need not be 50-50) would have helped, and it would have been relatively easy. Given today’s technology, it would have been possible to do these audits as small data projects inside newsrooms.
Use terms that stand the test of time
News media should avoid terms like “far right” and “far left.” The disproportionate use of these terms is a problem in journalism, generally, and for PBS in particular. Journalistic culture takes license to characterize people in politics in different ways. In doing so, they ought to use well-defined and uncontestable terms, not ill-defined terms, to identify people's positions.
"Far left "and "far right" signal extreme views on the political spectrum, but there are no objective definitions for these terms that can stand the test of time, and can be applied to people consistently.
The connotations of these terms shift in relation to political power (winners and losers). They also shift in how politicians use and abuse these terms to box opponents for their own audiences. Journalists ought not to need to characterize political actors with these terms at all! We ought to depict people for the tangible, expressed positions they take and avoid shortcuts.
There was a chance for the PBS and NPR CEOs to call out the labels and recognize that they're overused as shorthand in political culture. This misuse should prompt media organizations to back away from using them.
Uri Berliner's article about NPR
The Uri Berliner problem: It was fair game for the Republican House members on the committee to bring up Uri Berliner's explosive 2024 article on NPR’s culture. It also became a frame of reference to justify the hearing itself. Writing about the omissions and commissions at NPR in coverage (Hunter Biden’s laptop, Russia investigation, COVID origin theories) would have been one kind of critique. However, Berliner built an argument that went much deeper than errors on the factual plane. He critiqued the culture, and GOP politicians used it both as framing and fodder in this hearing.
The preparation required to respond to Berliner’s article seemed not to have been met on the cultural front. One option to openly and fairly address it was to expand the frames of reference or point out what was missing in Berliner’s article.
In building his allegations on “progressive group think” at NPR, Berliner did not cite his stances on the other winds of change blowing through journalistic culture and practice, and his thoughts of why those trends even arose in the first place, and how he might connect his critique to those trends too. The onus was for NPR and PBS’ leaders to call out alternative frames of reference on trust, different types of biases, elitism and anti-elitism.
For instance, Berliner wrote eloquently about trust and standards but did not refer at all to documented anti-Black racism (in sourcing and portrayal) in American news media history; nor did he acknowledge its consequences: that Black Americans have had a long history of distrust of local and national news media. Anyone making claims of falling trust needs to acknowledge that news media trust in a diverse, multicultural and multiracial society is more complicated than our dominant “failing trust” narrative.
Berliner also failed to refer to several new trends in democratizing sourcing in journalism that mitigate the kind of bias that traditional journalism had not been able to. For instance, the citizens agenda approach to reporting politics and elections; solidarity journalism to report on chronic issues by centering perspectives of affected communities instead of on political elites; and solutions journalism to showcase what is working, especially the value of community-led or supported reporting.
Berliner also neglected to write about how journalistic culture since the 1980s has carried deep sourcing bias against the working class and poor people. Class bias in sourcing and storytelling is a long-running issue, especially during coverage of election cycles.
These new trends and gaps complicate the goals, role, and meaning of journalism for the 21st Century. Bringing these into the discussion would have complicated the simplistic narrative of “liberal bias” that the DOGE subcommittee chairwoman and House members were framing their remarks around, using Berliner’s article.
No one ever defined 'liberal bias' in hearing
The entire hearing's announcement and framing was on "liberal bias", and anti-rural bias. But the NPR and PBS CEOs did a great job of showing why the NPR network and broadcast system approach, and PBS' educational content distribution approach, are not anti-rural. Even some GOP representatives tacitly admitted the value of PBS. But the witnesses avoided challenging the subcommittee’s framing of "liberal bias" and using the hearing to connect journalism to democratic culture.
A failure to challenge conservative panel members on their definitions of “liberal.” No politician - Democrat or Republican - on the subcommittee was willing to ask a question of the witnesses on defining "liberal" or "conservative" in relation to democratic values of liberty, equality, fraternity, dignity and solidarity. If journalistic culture (story selection, sourcing) is pro-liberty and pro-equality, does that make it "liberal" bias? What is an objective way to determine any type of bias? Those are hard questions and responding with confidence on these issues would have allowed the CEOs to complicate the narrative being foisted on them by the committee chair and others. They had already indicted public media and appeared to simply call them with the appearance of hearing them out and handing down predetermined verdicts.
There were several opportunities to discuss different types of bias that are valid in democracy and democratic culture. In Representative Burchett's question to Katherine Maher there was an opportunity to share data on how conservative viewpoints are sourced and cited in NPR's coverage.
There was a chance for the CEOs to respond with an actual discussion of why cultural biases are real in all humans and how they operate in journalism. Journalists are humans too. In such a discussion, they could have taken on the false binary of bias vs objectivity as the only way to decide the ethics of political and cultural stories. (Representative Fallon's questions to both Maher and Kerger was the quintessential false binary frame).