In a whiny but insightful 1,900-word story, NPR correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben describes her frustration after she attempted to score an on-the-spot interview with several Republican candidates in Wisconsin back in June.
The topic: abortion.
Those repeated attempts failed, she recalls, after campaign staffers blocked access to their bosses and refused to return her phone calls.
“Long story short: I heard back from the Democrats but not from the Republicans,” she wrote.
Much like a wily used car salesman wondering where all the customers went, Kurtzleben wrote a self-consoling story that concludes the right-wing plan is “delegitimizing media." That plan is predictably described as a danger to democracy.
Responding to the NPR story, Tim Graham of the Media Research Center says famously liberal NPR – and most of the rest of the mainstream media – seem oblivious to the rampant bias in their own reporting.
“It is amazing,” Winters observes, “that reporters come at this with, well, it doesn't matter how abusive I am with you. It doesn't matter whether I call you a racist. I can throw anything at you, I can throw you all kinds of names, and then you need to take my questions.”
In the NPR story, the story is sprinkled with red-flag words such as “election denier” for people who question if Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Never mind that Donald Trump was called an "illegitimate president" by prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and former president Jimmy Carter.
The NPR story repeatedly mentions “right-wing media” to complain about its influence. The term “left-wing media” is never mentioned or defined, even though NPR itself would fall under that category.
The story does mention the issue of “liberal bias” in the media but, oddly, Kurtzleben writes that the issue “isn’t something we can settle in a small section of one article…”
Back in the Wisconsin abortion story, the one Kurtzleben wrote about Democrats, NPR’s own bias is displayed on its own website: A sidebar that lists NPR’s abortion stories labels the topic “Reproductive Rights in America.”
According to Graham, in a Republican primary, the voters want to hear the candidates discuss issues such as jobs and the economy, inflation, and illegal immigration.
“There's lots of things to discuss,” he says, “And reporters are going to want to ask about ‘January 6, January 6, January 6, election deniers, Trump.’”
