John,
Donald Trump, Fox News, and the far-right are trying to defund NPR for a supposed left-wing bias.
So why is the right going after NPR, and why now?
Last week, an NPR business editor penned an op-ed expressing concern that NPR now has fewer Republican listeners than it did a decade ago.
The editor failed to cite Trump's rise and the far-right politics behind the trend. Instead, he blamed a few cherry-picked NPR editorial decisions for the Republican decline.
Despite his critical views, he made it clear in his piece that defunding NPR wasn’t the solution.
Regardless, Trump and his cronies used the very flawed but good-faith critique in a full-on campaign to smear NPR as a “liberal disinformation machine” and a “total scam.”
Now, they’re calling on Congress to defund the organization.
Of course, we’ve seen this before. Right-wing conspiracy theories always take on a familiar pattern:
- Spread a lie (here that NPR is a “disinformation machine”)
- Watch that lie spread like wildfire through right-wing leaders, Fox News, and social media influencers, including QAnon and other far-right groups
- Once enough people believe the lie, attack your enemy as if the lie were true
At COURIER, we believe everyone deserves access to free, honest news. Publicly funded news services like NPR are vital to local communities.
When right-wing bad actors spread dangerous conspiracy theories about NPR, they are attacking our democracy.
At COURIER, our mission is to correct the record when right-wing bad actors attack. In addition, our ten newsrooms are on the ground in battleground states nationwide. Every day, they cover the local issues that matter in the communities we serve. The best part is that we make our coverage freely available to anyone who needs it in the social media feeds and inboxes where people actually get their news.
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Thanks,
The COURIER Team