Representative Press Blog

Complaining about NPR

Jim Miller complains about NPR wrote that on NPR there is, "... a nearly complete exclusion of more than half of the American public from the schedule. ... they do not think that Republicans deserve to be on the same schedule."

Wait a minute Jim, what percentage of Americans do you think are Republicans?

"Generally, slightly more Americans consider themselves a Democrat than Republican. Still, about a third of Americans identified themselves as a Democratic supporter with a slightly smaller percentage as Republican. The rest, again about a third, supported a minor party, didn't know their partisan affiliation or call themselves independent." - usconservatives.about.com

Jim Miller wrote, "Slightly more than half of the voters voted for Bush last November, and the Republican House candidates also received slightly more than half of the two party vote."

But Jim, number of voters is not the same as the number of Americans or the number of eligible voters. A dysfunctionally small percentage of eligible American voters actaully vote, roughly half.

It should be noted that shamefully large percentages of Americans went to the polls actually believing false information fed to them. We are not truly a free people voting freely if we are ignorant, you can not be ignorant and free.

In response to Rich who tried to play the ignorance off as simply people holding opinions:

Rich,

You are off the wall. I talked about false information not opinions. And NO, not everything is an opinion, there are such things as facts.

"75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. "

That is a God damn disgrace and the mainstream media helped make these people ignorant. Before the election I was trying to get the so called "liberal" media to report the results of this PIPA poll that revealed the startling large percentage of ignorance, the media refused to report it

And the basic premise of Miller's post is wrong. You guys really need to examine your assumptions. NPR is simply not doing what you claim. NPR's One-Sided "Liberal Media" Debate

Your claims about NPR are simply wrong, there is in fact a tilt towards Republicans: "little evidence has ever been presented for a left bias at NPR , and FAIR’s latest study gives it no support. Looking at partisan sources—including government officials, party officials, campaign workers and consultants—Republicans outnumbered Democrats by more than 3 to 2 (61 percent to 38 percent). A majority of Republican sources when the GOP controls the White House and Congress may not be surprising, but Republicans held a similar though slightly smaller edge (57 percent to 42 percent) in 1993, when Clinton was president and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. And a lively race for the Democratic presidential nomination was beginning to heat up at the time of the 2003 study. Partisans from outside the two major parties were almost nowhere to be seen, with the exception of four Libertarian Party representatives who appeared in a single story.

Republicans not only had a substantial partisan edge, individual Republicans were NPR ’s most popular sources overall, taking the top seven spots in frequency of appearance." How Public is Public Radio? A study of NPR’s guest list