FIRST ON FOX: Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the rating member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, pressed Nationwide Public Radio (NPR) CEO Katherine Maher to show that Variety, Fairness, and Inclusion (DEI) objectives and rich, left-wing donors aren’t influencing editorial selections contained in the newsroom.
“As a recipient of federal funding from the Company for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Nationwide Public Radio (NPR) is required by legislation to stick to ‘objectivity and stability in all packages or collection of packages of a controversial nature.’ The group is falling in need of that mandate,” he wrote in a letter to Maher.
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Cruz famous that NPR receives funding from the Company for Public Broadcasting (CPB) within the type of grants. The CPB itself receives federal funding.
Nonetheless, he identified that NPR additionally receives donations from rich and infrequently left-leaning benefactors.
“Because it seems, NPR’s selective reporting could also be pushed not solely by preexisting political bias inside the group but additionally by its personal donors,” the senator claimed. “The timing and content material of sure NPR articles align with earmarked, multi-million-dollar donations from left-wing nonprofits trying to advance their very own narratives within the press.”
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He pointed to a number of examples of particular donors and protection from NPR that appeared to align with every contributors’ beliefs.
“If the American taxpayer goes to finance a public broadcaster, then they deserve nothing lower than honest and unbiased reporting,” Cruz mentioned.
In keeping with the Texas Republican, NPR “has strayed removed from its ethos of ‘impartial journalism within the public curiosity’ by permitting its liberal donors to purchase desired ‘information’ protection.”
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An NPR spokesperson instructed Fox Information Digital in a press release, “NPR’s newsroom is impartial and free from outdoors affect; our supporters haven’t any enter into our editorial selections and no entry to our journalists. We’re grateful to all who assist public media’s mission to ship neutral, fact-based information and reporting to the American public.”
NPR got here beneath renewed scrutiny earlier this yr when longtime editor Uri Berliner penned an essay within the Free Press, publicly airing criticisms of his employer. He expressed considerations over NPR’s protection of assorted occasions, together with allegations of former President Trump’s collusion with Russia within the 2016 election, Hunter Biden’s laptop computer and the speculation that COVID-19 really started in a lab in China and was leaked. He was suspended by NPR for the essay earlier than resigning from the outlet fully.
Within the wake of the scandal, which shed new mild on its editorial decisions, Republican lawmakers made contemporary threats to the funding for CPB, which is then funneled to NPR.