Blogging on how May 4 and 5 broadcasts "feature NPR continuing its function of justifying and sanitizing the U.S. torture regime," dedicated public radio critic Mytwords (NPR Check, 5/5/09) plumbs the depths of NPR's aversion to "human rights or international law advocates or experts"--instead preferring "members or former members of various U.S. government agencies," even "the very ones implicated in formulating and carrying out torture":

For a long time NPR news has minimized (June 2006), dismissed (February 2007), ignored (April 2007), covered over (October 2007) and collaborated with (December 2007) the use of torture by agencies and agents of the U.S. government. You can search NPR news in vain for any original investigative work on exposing torture or on any serious elucidation of the laws and conventions that prohibit the U.S. from committing torture and require prosecution for violators.

See the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Tortured Justifications for Bad Journalism" (12/07) by Jim Naureckas & Candice O'Grady.

Slate's Jack Shafer (5/1/09) has had his fill of NPR senior news analyst Cokie Roberts' "four minutes of on-air blather about politics, the economy and world events with whichever unlucky Morning Edition host has drawn the short straw" on Mondays. Shafer writes of how, "drained of controversy and conflict, the Cokie minutes provide perfect editorial balance if your idea of balance is zero":

I can think of no comparably sized media space that's as void of original insight and information as Roberts'. Her segments, though billed as "analysis" by NPR, do little but speed-graze the headlines and add a few grace notes. If you're vaguely conversant with current events, you're already cruising at Roberts' velocity. Roberts doesn't just voice the conventional wisdom; she is the conventional wisdom.

Initially wanting to "blame NPR for the segment's wretchedness or Morning Edition hosts Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep for pitching her nothing but giant, slo-mo softballs," Shafer then reconsiders: "No, softball isn't the right sports analogy, if only because Roberts never puts wood on the questions. The segment really unfolds like a brief set of air tennis, with Roberts and a host play-acting a vigorous volley"--which might in some sense be lucky for listeners, considering what comes out when Roberts actually tries to say something....

Critiquing the April 24 edition of NPR's "increasingly vacuous and self-indulgent" Planet Money show, blogger Brian (NPR Check, 4/24/09) notices that the "five long minutes" spent discussing "how long it would take to count to 165 million (the AIG executive bonuses), 45 billion (Bank of America's bailout so far), and 1.2 trillion (total estimated federal bailouts of banks so far)," came right after "a long week of severely deficient coverage of actual financial news" like "40 seconds Morning Edition spent pararaphrasing a New York Times article on the looming Chrysler bankruptcy":

The sad thing is that it actually might have been helpful to provide some real context for the scale of the federal bailouts. However, rather than counting to 1.2 trillion, it would be much more useful to place the bailout figures into contexts that matter, such as comparing the AIG bonuses to the median U.S. household income ($50.2 K in 2007); comparing the $45 B to BOA's ownership equity ($146 B); or comparing the $1.2 T in bailout funds to the U.S. GDP ($14.3 T) or the annual U.S. federal spending (approximately $3 T).

Admitting that these examples are "still not exciting, to be sure," Mytwords considers them "perhaps a little more meaningful than counting for 39,000 years."

NPR watchdog Mytwords (NPR Check, 3/28/09) would just "love to know what it costs NPR to station Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in Afghanistan," from where she dispatches to U.S. public radio such "news" as U.S.-installed Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai telling reporters "that he welcomes the increased American focus on Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan,"  that "the plan will help restore Afghans' faith in western efforts in their country" and--in an actual soundbite from Karzai--"It's exactly what Afghan people were hoping for and seeking, therefore it has our full support."

Nelson also reported, "Meanwhile in the southern province of Helmand, Afghan and coalition forces killed 12 militants Friday night."

Nelson's report has Mytwords thinking it's a

good thing she's actually there and can verify what Karzai said, including that awesome, exclusive voice recording of Karzai himself speaking--wow! And it's amazing that she was able to scoot down to Helmand province to confirm that those 12 Friday night "kills" were actually "militants." I mean, seriously, if she weren't actually there, I might think that she was just reading this crap on Voice of America and Stars and Stripes.

Proving that the Washington Post is not the only purportedly "liberal" outlet interested in whitewashing the dark history of U.S. involvement in Latin America, Mytwords (NPR Check, 3/23/09) has blogged NPR's March 21 episode of Weekend Edition Saturday, in which the show

returned to the scene of the crimes of El Salvador's 1980s bloodbath--a U.S.-nurtured extreme-right orgy of torture and murder against organized labor, the poor, church leaders and leftists (and their families, friends, associates or potential associates).

There were a few problems with the report. Jason Beaubien's reporting isn't great; he does a little plastic surgery on history, claiming "the Reagan administration jumped into the Cold War conflict, spending billions of dollars to fight the Marxist guerrillas while Cuba and other communist states backed the FMLN." That's a rather tidy and truncated version of the long history of U.S. support for the murderous right in El Salvador--gathering steam and corpses especially in the 1960s.

Mytwords notes how Beaubien's segment conveniently "also ignores the historical record of who killed most of those 75,000-plus civilians in the 'Cold War conflict.'"

When NPR ombud Alicia Shepard commented on an NPR blog that "we can all take a lesson from" Jon Stewart because "he holds people in power accountable for what they say"--this being her "definition of a good journalist"--Matthew Murrey, AKA NPR Check blogger Mytwords, couldn't resist asking "So when will Shepard hold the NPR journalists to such a standard?" Mytwords' challenge of Shepard "(or anyone for that matter) to show any examples in the last 10 years where NPR's main news shows... 'held people in power accountable'" was met by one reader (3/15/09) who had

only heard one instance of NPR actually standing up to spin by an interviewee: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15046448

I've never heard anything like it since, and I listen almost every day.

As I recall, there were tons of people who wrote in letters showing support and calling for more: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15198525

Mytwords is encouraged "that listeners seem to be hungry for a higher quality of reporting even though it's rare on NPR"--but the sad fact is that after "carefully critiquing NPR for almost three years," Mytwords has found "NPR News consistently echoes and champions the opinions and assertions of the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and free market corporatism."

National Public Radio watchdog Mytwords (NPR Check, 3/3/09) is moved to declare the network's Palestine/Israel coverage "worse than worthless" after "yesterday morning first featured Michele Kelemen redelivering Secretary of State Clinton's talking points (Hamas is a terrorist organization, blah, blah, blah, Hamas has to renounce violence, blah, blah, blah, U.S. is giving tons of money to Gaza, blah, blah, etc.)":

After that four-minute-plus State Department summary, what does NPR offer? Who would you go to for expert analysis? How about someone who has "has advised six American secretaries of state." Yep, NPR serves up the stale ideas of Aaron David Miller--again....

Miller mentions Netanyahu's negotiations with Arafat at the Wye River and the Hebron withdrawal. Throughout the interview, Linda Wertheimer just nods along like a bobblehead. I think she forgot to see how the actual settlement policies went under Netanyahu back when he was Prime Minister. Nothing about what that great Hebron concession really meant for Palestinians. Nothing about Netanyahu's provocations that even an editor from the rightist WINEP takes note of. Nothing about Netanyahu's Jerusalem expansionist efforts.

Mytwords imagines "it would be hard to do more pro-Likud, pro-Zionist coverage of the Palestine conflict." Indeed, you can read about NPR's long history of biased reportage on the region in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Illusion of Balance: NPR's Coverage of Mideast Deaths Doesn't Match Reality" (11-12/01) by Seth Ackerman.

Characterizing an "Incredibly Bad Economic Piece on NPR" as having "helped a blackmail effort," blogging economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 2/27/09) says "the piece concluded by telling listeners that 'the problem is us,' that we had borrowed too much and therefore we have to pay the cost in the form of big taxpayer bailouts":

Okay, this is wrong, wrong and wrong. First, the excessive borrowing wasn't just shear frivolity, it was attributable to something that got very little notice from NPR at the time and unfortunately still gets very little notice from NPR: an $8 trillion housing bubble.

People borrowed against this bubble wealth because the experts that NPR and other media outlets present to the public all said that this run-up in house prices was real and would persist. Economists who warned about the housing bubble were almost completely excluded from NPR.

That "these reporters now want the taxpayers, rather than the bankers who profited from the bubble, to pay for this failure" has Baker thinking the NPR segment's name, Planet Money, "may be appropriate because most listeners probably would not think it belongs on Planet Earth."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11-12/08) by Veronica Cassidy

"A rather major problem with nearly all of NPR's reporting" has been identified by NPR Check blogger Mytwords (2/18/09) and named the "history scrub." The definition: "If the essential background history to a story reflects poorly on the actions of the U.S. government--that history will be deleted, scrubbed, sanitized--sent down the memory hole." The key example given is a February 17 All Things Considered in which host Michelle Norris "blandly explains that thousands more U.S. troops are headed off to Afghanistan and doesn't even chuckle in noting that the United States Institute of Peace [tee-hee] released some new policy recommendations for Afghanistan":

To discuss the report, Norris interviews Seth Jones, co-author with Christine Fair of the report. (Both authors are connected with the RAND Corp.) In fairness, a lot of what Jones says comes off as fairly informed and reasonable.... He even offered corrective to Michelle Norris' knee-jerk assumption that the answer to all problems in Afghanistan is more U.S. troops and military might....

What I found so stunning is that neither Norris nor Jones ever mentioned that the baseline of stable functioning "legitimate" local leaders was essentially destroyed and replaced by the most ruthless, fanatic and illegitimate leaders that the U.S. could recruit and train in its 1980s campaign to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. Even U.S. News & World Report acknowledges this basic history.  On NPR, though, it's as if this nasty little chapter of U.S. involvement in the sorrows of Afghanistan never even happened--or that it had no continuity with the current configuration of the U.S.-Afghanistan project.

Suggesting that NPR consider "airing the views and opinions of people who got it right for a change," Mytwords takes a "hop into the way-back machine" and links to "cartoonist Ted Rall's piece on Afghanistan written at the time when most were crowing about the stunning U.S. victory over the Taliban." The title of Rall's "disturbingly prescient" 2001 Village Voice article?: "How We Lost Afghanistan." For more on major media's unquestioning acceptance of the need for U.S. troop escalation in Afghanistan, listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Ann Jones on Afghanistan" (1/23/09)

Noting that "news organizations often encourage their journalists to appear on other platforms for promotional purposes," former TVNewser Brian Stelter reports (New York Times, 2/15/09) that, "when the National Public Radio analyst Juan Williams speaks on the Fox News Channel's highest-rated program, the radio network doesn't want any attention":

Mr. Williams, a longtime political analyst and author, is a paid contributor to both NPR and Fox News. His voice is a prominent one at Fox; he was a panelist for the network's coverage of election night and Inauguration Day. When he appears on the cable channel, he is regularly described as a "senior correspondent for NPR." While that title is accurate, NPR has asked Mr. Williams to ask Fox not to identify him that way when he appears on the O'Reilly Factor, the network's 8 p.m. opinion program.

The request was made after Mr. Williams said on the Factor that Michelle Obama has "got this Stokely-Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing going." The allusion to Mr. Carmichael, a leader of the black power movement of the 1960s, spurred dozens of angry e-mail messages to Alicia C. Shepard, the NPR ombudswoman, and resulted in conversations between Mr. Williams and the radio network's editors.

Shepard's response was one of concern that Williams "tends to speak one way on NPR and another on Fox"--while Fox itself took a condescending shot at NPR when announcing it would happily deceive its own viewers: "Fox swiftly said that it would drop the radio references--not only on the Factor, but on all the network's hours of programming. 'We were doing NPR a favor by even plugging them.'"

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Field Guide to TV's Lukewarm Liberals: How to Spot Centrist Pundits Served Up As the 'Left'" (7-8/98)