Several House Republicans have requested testimony from NPR's new President and CEO Katherine Maher on the outlet's alleged liberal bias.
The request follows last month's op-ed by former Senior Business Editor Uri Berliner which alleged the outlet had lost its core audience after overwhelmingly assuming a progressive liberal bias in their reporting in recent years.
"The Committee has concerns about the direction in which NPR may be headed under past and present leadership. As a taxpayer funded, public radio organization, NPR should focus on fair and objective news reporting that both considers and reflects the views of the larger U.S. population and not just a niche audience," reads the letter penned by Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Virginia Rep. H. Morgan Griffith, and Ohio Rep. Bob Lotta. "As the nation’s leading public radio network with a weekly audience of 42 million listeners, it is unsettling to note that ‘[a]n open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR’ and that the news station is promoting strident left-wing views to the exclusion of alternative viewpoints."
The letter went on to cite Berliner's op-ed with The Free Press along with The New York Post's infamous October 2020 story on Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell," which led to the outlet's two week suspension by management at X, formerly Twitter.
The letter also noted NPR's dismissal of the COVID-19 pandemic's "lab leak theory" as racist and a "right-wing conspiracy theory."
"NPR’s reasons for squashing open dialogue on the lab leak theory was to suggest the search for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic was similar to the Bush administration’s search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," the letter continued. "Not only are the two issues entirely unrelated, but it is incomprehensible that the nation’s public radio—supported by taxpayer funding—would choose to allow political ideologies to override journalistic principles of truth, accuracy, and objectivity."
The letter also took issue with Maher's 2020 contention with The New York Times' publication of an op-ed by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton in which the NPR CEO referred to the piece as "full of racist dog whistles." The letter also noted an August 2021 TED talk delivered by Maher titled, "What Wikipedia Teaches Us about Balancing Truth and Beliefs."
"The Committee is therefore concerned that your personal views and opinions on matters of public interest heavily influence your decision making at NPR and may cloud objective reporting of the news at NPR," the letter continued.
The Republican representatives requested Maher to appear before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee on May 8 to answer aforementioned allegations of political and ideological bias within NPR. During the hearing, Maher will field questions on the amount of registered Republicans, Democrats, and Independents at NPR, as well as provide internal written work relating to a lack of political viewpoint diversity within the outlet.
