How NPR Covered the 10-21-2007 GOP Debate
On October 21st 2007 Fox News sponsored a GOP debate in Florida. If you read blog posts, you’ve probably got the impression many people don’t trust Fox News. Robert Greenwald with Brave New Films even did a film called Out Foxed.
Do people have a false sense of fair reporting from NPR? Next to NPR’s failure to cover the anti War Protests of October 27th 2007, I find this the most telling piece of news coverage NPR has ever done.
On October 22 NPR broadcast a misleading story by Mara Liasson: GOP Candidates Take Aim at Each Other (note there’s link on their page to listen to the broadcast).
If I hadn’t actually watched the debate, I would have thought nothing of it. But having actually watched the debate, I was left in total shock after I listened to the NPR report.
Was the radio station I once trusted and donated money to skewing news coverage beyond belief?
Listen to the NPR program GOP Candidates Take Aim at Each Other (it’s only 4 minutes long), and then watch these news clips.
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Mara Liasson managed to get the name Hillary Clinton in every sound bite. She never mentions Ron Paul’s name once. I have heard some people say this is a liberal bias. I argue NPR would be covering Dennis Kucinich if they actually had a liberal bias and wanted to support true liberals. As of date of this post, if you do a Google search on NPR for “dennis kucinich site:npr.org” you get just over 500 hits. If you do a Google search for “hillary clinton site:npr.org” you get nearly 2000 hits; “barack obama site:npr.org” well over 2000. Mara Liasson also contributes to Fox News.
If anyone has watched Orwell Rolls in his Grave, they know Michael Powell (Colin Powell’s son) got rid of equal access laws for political candidates when he was head of the FCC. As a publicly funded radio program we need neutrality from NPR to counteract this problem. We don’t appear to be getting it.
