NPR’s lurch to the Left is a symptom of growing polarization

The most powerful newsrooms in the United States have grown astonishingly partisan in the past decade, loosening their standards to accommodate left-wing pieties.

But don’t be fooled into thinking this phenomenon is unique to just the news industry. The decline in quality and credibility is merely a reflection of an increasingly polarized country. 

It’s not just the news media — it’s everything. Everything has grown more hyperpartisan, from newsroom staff to the audiences they claim to serve. Traditional news media and conservative media have grown more radical as their respective bases have grown more radical. It’s like Congress. Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate have moved further to the fringes, according to data from the Pew Research Center, because voters have moved further to the fringes.

As the electorate becomes more polarized, so will our institutions — from Congress to cable news. 

Why would it be any other way?

You want to know why the New York Times and the Associated Press have become more left-wing? That’s because their staffers and audiences have become more left-wing. The shift in editorial choices simply reflects that change.

Consider the following examples of what passes for serious mainstream news coverage nowadays. 

At the Washington Post last week, staffers buried the fact that a black man who was shot and killed by Chicago police last month allegedly fired first on the police officers. In fact, Washington Post readers don’t even learn until the eighth paragraph that the man reportedly had a gun. That’s not just burying the lede. That’s an outright attempt to mislead readers. 

Meanwhile, the AP updated its style guide last week to instruct staffers that “the terms climate change and climate crisis can both be used in broad references. The terms often can be used interchangeably. … The term climate crisis may be used when describing the current situation.” That’s not a style choice. That’s an editorial one.

It’s worth noting here that the AP in 2021 issued a memo instructing staffers not to refer to the border crisis, which at the time saw an estimated 75,000 illegal border crossings per month, as a crisis. 

Elsewhere this year, a trans activist detonated a bomb outside the office of Alabama’s attorney general. At NBC News, pro-lifers are to blame. 

“The detonation happened one day after the state attorney general’s office said Marshall did not plan to prosecute in vitro fertilization providers or families after a controversial Alabama Supreme Court ruling,” NBC reported. “The motive authorities attribute to the suspect has not been released.”

Lastly, while we’re on the topic of major media simply giving up and hurling slop at their audiences, MSNBC’s Ari Melber this week interviewed convicted felon Michael Avenatti from prison to discuss Trump’s legal woes. There are few better examples of a media in decline than Melber turning to Avenatti (who, again, is in prison for fraud) for legal analysis. 

Longtime National Public Radio reporter Uri Berliner expressed dismay this week over the ideological capture in major media. Because of NPR’s embrace of progressive ideology, he writes, the once-beloved radio network’s listenership has dwindled to just hardcore white liberals. 

“Back in 2011,” Berliner writes in the Free Press, “although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the Left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23% as middle of the road, and 37% as liberal.”

He adds: “By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11% described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21% as middle of the road, and 67% of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.”

This is indeed troubling, but it also seems consistent with the general shift in voter sentiments. 

Lost in Berliner’s article is a broader understanding of the fracturing of GOP and conservative circles with the rise of former President Donald Trump. There was a great scattering between 2015 and 2016. The Right today is not the Right of the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign. There are people who happily identified as Republicans in 2012 who don’t feel the same way in 2024. Some even renounced their party affiliation altogether. 

NPR has indeed lost Republicans, yes, but the Republican Party itself has lost Republicans. The GOP didn’t hold steady post-2011. It changed in radical ways. Therefore, it’s fair to say that the audience shift at NPR is not one purely of NPR’s making. 

NPR’s listeners, like NPR, have changed.

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Becket Adams is a columnist for the Washington Examiner, National Review, and the Hill. He is also the program director of the National Journalism Center.