James Lynch writes for National Review Online about an interesting admission from a taxpayer-funded media outlet.
The head of National Public Radio now admits that the taxpayer-funded media outlet was wrong to refuse to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story when it broke just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
NPR CEO Katherine Maher testified Wednesday at a hearing held by the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency meant to address the left-wing bias displayed by publicly funded news outlets NPR and PBS.
“NPR acknowledges that we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner,” Maher said in response to a question from Representative Michael Cloud (R., Texas).
Maher, who joined NPR as CEO in January of last, year has a long history of left-wing activism, which Republican lawmakers highlighted during the hearing. Members of the panel also cited former NPR editor Uri Berliner’s scathing editorial in the Free Press last year about how the outlet lost America’s trust and become overtly partisan. Berliner gave an inside account of NPR’s failure to adequately cover the Hunter Biden laptop and Covid-19 origins as the outlet became more overtly left-wing beginning in President Donald Trump’s first term.
When the New York Post first reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive ahead of the 2020 presidential election, NPR ignored it “because it could help Trump” and disregarded the facts at play, Berliner recalled.
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR’s then-managing editor Terence Samuels said in October 2020. Four years later, NPR’s public editor claimed it did not cover the laptop story because of its “tabloid nature” and belatedly expressed concerns about social media companies suppressing the Post’s reporting.
