A road sign with the NPR and PBS logos on it pointing left.
It's fitting that in the same week that Uri Berliner's spot-on critique of what has become of NPR appeared, Robert MacNeil passed away. Berliner, an NPR news editor for 25 years, expressed what a lot of NPR listeners like me have been thinking for a long time. The network used to give us food for thought, now it tries to force feed us.
MacNeil, who died on April 12, created the PBS NewsHour and its forerunners because he was repulsed by the state of network news in the 1970s. There's no record of what he thought of what it has become today. Maybe he stopped watching it altogether, as I have just recently.
I stopped watching NBC's TODAY show and its Nightly News because it was making me nervous. Everything is breathless. Things are always "breaking overnight!" When some forgotten actor from a middling 1980s sitcom dies, it is covered at length as if it had been the passing of Sir Laurence Olivier. We are told that "tributes are pouring in" for somebody we had long forgotten or who we thought was already dead. When NBC spent days covering the death of Bob Saget a couple years ago I had one vital question I wanted them to answer: who the hell is Bob Saget? A common winter snow storm puts "40 million people at risk!" It is literally true that there is not a single airing of the Nightly News that does not contain at least one case of someone crying. It's so obvious that this is intentional that I imagine that producers ask themselves if they've made sure to "get the cry in" before they go on the air. Tabloid journalism is now the standard for network news.
This was exactly the kind of thing MacNeil battled against. “I cannot stand the theatrical, prosecutorial interview, the interview designed to draw attention to the interviewer, full of either mawkish, false sentiment or theatrically belligerent questioning,” MacNeil told The New York Times in 1995, when he retired from the daily newscast.
PBS used to be my refuge, but now I doubt MacNeil would recognize that either. His own creation, the NewsHour, while certainly more serious and better than the networks, has been taken over by the same activism that Berliner so accurately describes over at NPR. It is as he describes public broadcasting, "the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population." The NewsHour, as well as PBS' once great documentary series, American Experience, is now suffused with a campus activist bias. It's as if these programs are edited from the Middlebury College faculty lounge. Producers seem to believe that their job is to change the world, not to simply report accurately on what is happening in it while allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions.
Worse, there’s a belief among some leftist activist journalists that they are telling the truth because their worldview and reality are one and the same. I pray for their souls.
There's not any point in going into FOX News, MSNBC or CNN. Those outlets don't even pretend to be unbiased. But I confess to once being a cheerleader for MSNBC. For years I bemoaned the fact that Rush Limbaugh was out there every weekday providing conservatives with arguments and selective facts and there was nothing comparable on the left. I now regret that I got what I asked for. Or rather, I don't regret that so much as I regret the loss of objective journalism to supplement it and to act as a fair referee.
What's left is tabloid on the one hand or left or right activist reporting on the other. I can’t think of a single national broadcast news source that I trust.
Print and digital news still has some credibility. The Associated Press and Reuters are still pretty good. The Wall Street Journal does a nice job of keeping its grumpy editorial opinion off its news pages. The New York Times was always left-leaning in its reporting and much of the activist journalism cancer that afflicts NPR and PBS is now apparent there, but it still does provide at least some balanced reporting.
At the local level, I'd say the Wisconsin State Journal still does a good job of providing objective journalism. The Cap Times labels itself a "progressive" news source so give them points for honesty and, actually, most of their news stories are pretty fair and reasonably balanced. Isthmus, like most alternative papers, leans left but isn't afraid to poke a sacred cow now and then. Among the more niche outlets, Wisconsin Watch is quite good, while the Wisconsin Examiner also provides solid journalism, though from what feels like a more liberal perspective.
At least as big a problem as bias is the loss of firepower. Newsrooms continue to be decimated. There just aren’t enough bodies to show up at as many city council, school board, county board and other meetings as there used to be. As a result too much official action happens without scrutiny.
The NewsHour and the NPR news shows were, in their best days, the gold standard for what broadcast journalism — or any journalism — should be. But they’ve squandered the trust that people like Robert MacNeil worked so hard to earn for them.
I have been an NPR listener for 40 years and I still listen to as much of it as I can stand. But there is simply no question that the network has lost its way and Berliner was simply saying what a lot of us have been thinking. As a group, NPR listeners are curious people who want reliable information so that we can form our own views. We do not want to be part of a study circle.
Not surprisingly, Berliner resigned less than a week after his article appeared, hounded from his job by NPR management and by his own colleagues. They had a chance to take Berliner’s thoughtful criticisms to heart and to take a hard look at their own biases. But it turns out that at NPR all things won’t be considered.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
