(Daily Signal)—A House subcommittee on Wednesday discussed the increasing left-wing bias at National Public Radio, a taxpayer-funded news and features network.
The hearing stemmed from a debate sparked by an online essay a month ago in The Free Press by longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner, who alleged that the network was both extremely biased and had abandoned its commitment to quality journalism.
Berliner, who considers himself a liberal, wrote in his essay that NPR had become deeply biased and that its news coverage had alienated all but a narrow, left-wing audience. He said the network needed to change or it would erode not only its own credibility, but the credibility of media in general.
Berliner resigned about a week after the controversy erupted.
NPR’s CEO, Katherine Maher, was asked to appear before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Wednesday. However, the day before, she said she couldn’t make it because she didn’t have enough time to prepare. Maher also said that she had an NPR board meeting to attend.
“NPR respects the Committee and its request, and has offered to testify on a date in the near future that works for the Committee and Maher,” an NPR spokesperson said, according to Fox News.
A spokesperson for the committee responded to Maher’s absence.
“It speaks volumes that Ms. Maher has chosen not to appear [Wednesday] to answer for how her taxpayer-funded news outlet discriminates against the viewpoints of millions of Americans,” the committee spokesperson said, according to Fox News.
Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., who was to chair the hearing, said in his opening statement that the committee was investigating whether allegations of ideological bias and censorship of conservative and moderate voices were true.
Griffith said that the subcommittee had invited Maher and that he hoped she would appear before the committee in the near future.
“The only reason not to appear in front of this committee at some point in the near future is if the allegations are both true and NPR doesn’t care,” the Virginia lawmaker said.
Democrats on the committee were dismissive of the hearing, and said that allegations of NPR’s bias are baseless.
Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., said that NPR isn’t biased at all, that its reporting is valuable and objective, and that Republicans listen to too much conservative media.
“Despite the clear benefits of public radio, Republicans have brought us here to discuss an alleged bias at NPR,” she said. “Republicans say that NPR is biased against conservatives, but what they point to are examples of objective journalism. Disagreeing with reporting does not mean that the information is biased.”
Democrat Rep. Kathy Castor seriously believes NPR is unbiased journalism.
"Republicans say NPR is biased against conservatives, but what they point to are examples of objective journalism." pic.twitter.com/ENUsE6UjIf
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) May 8, 2024
The Florida Democrat suggested that the committee should instead focus on covering the gun deaths of children, preparing for the next pandemic, what she said were the successes of the Biden administration-backed Inflation Reduction Act, or climate change.
“Members may want to step out of the right-wing echo chambers, which have routinely peddled lies and conspiracy theories,” Castor said.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., said that it was crucial to conduct oversight of NPR, which receives taxpayer dollars, and that there is no free-speech right to get taxpayers’ money to fund a media organization.
“It is a fundamental principle under the First Amendment for news agencies to report on stories however they see fit,” she said. “It is not, however, a fundamental principle for news organizations to receive public funding to express their viewpoint.”
McMorris Rodgers said that the hearing was to be about discussing accusations from within NPR that the news network is “actively censoring viewpoints” while taking taxpayer money.
“Note for the record that we invited NPR CEO Ms. Maher to participate in today’s hearing,” McMorris Rodgers said. “She declined to do so, stating that she needed more time to prepare and that she had a conflict with an NPR board meeting.”
The Washington congresswoman said that it was “especially troubling” that an organization funded with taxpayer money has “mocked, ridiculed, and attacked the people who fund their organization.”
McMorris Rodgers pointed to the Berliner essay and said that it was telling that NPR declined to report stories that could help President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, no matter “how true and important to the public conversation they were.”
She cited how Berliner wrote that an editor at NPR thought the news network shouldn’t report on the Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election because it could help Trump.
It was also revealing, she said, that Berliner said he found 87 editors registered as Democrats, but no Republicans.
“Today’s NPR has strayed from their core mission,” McMorris Rodgers said. “When an entity that was created by Congress and receives taxpayer funding strays from their core mission, there needs to be accountability and oversight.”
Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., said that the hearing was a waste of time. He said that it was unfair for Republicans on the committee to call in the NPR CEO to testify, given that she only had a week to prepare and that she had a board meeting scheduled at the same time.
The New Jersey Democrat also said that, given that Maher had only been the CEO for six weeks, she shouldn’t have to answer for a “former, disgruntled employee,” referring to Berliner.
Pallone said that NPR plays a “vital role in democracy” in providing information. He said that public funding for the network goes to support mostly local programming that provides the last line of defense in “news deserts.”
He said that instead of investigating the publicly funded NPR, Congress should investigate “the vast landscape of right-wing media” that he said promotes “misinformation.”
Pallone said that investigating NPR hearkens back to the days of “McCarthyism.”
Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who had served on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, testified that he wanted to remind the committee of where public broadcasting began.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is the organization that oversees NPR.
It began with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, he said, and of particular relevance is the mandate from Congress that “public broadcasting from radio and television should, it says, be ‘responsive to the interests of people both in particular localities and throughout the United States.’”
Husock said that that’s where he has concerns about NPR. He pointed to a poll by the Pew Research Center that found “87% of NPR listeners describe themselves as Democrats, 12% as Republicans.”
He said that contrasts sharply with commercial television newscasts, “which are close to 50/50.”
The AEI fellow said that NPR doesn’t act like a “national taxpayer-supported service.”
NPR’s audience is not the product of limited reach, he said, “instead, it produces a product which seems not to attract a broad swath of America.”
That’s largely because of the selection of stories NPR reports. He suggested that changing the outdated Public Broadcasting Act would help alleviate the crisis of the decline of local newspapers.
Husock said that direct funding does not account for most of the taxpayer dollars NPR receives. Instead, “31% of revenues” come from fees charged to local affiliates. That means, he said, that federal money sent through grants to local NPR affiliates is recycled back to the national network.
Media Research Center Executive Editor Tim Graham said in his testimony that bias at NPR isn’t a recent phenomenon and that reporters at the network have intentionally tried, for instance, to derail Republican presidents’ Supreme Court nominees going back decades and that they continued that with the 2018 nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
“In March, between ‘Morning Edition’ and ‘Fresh Air,’ Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford was granted an hour of taxpayer-funded airtime to reiterate her unproven charges of teenage sexual assault,” Graham said.
Yet, the network has failed to cover stories that might damage Democrats. He cited the case of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the salacious contents of which were dismissed by many “so-called mainstream media” outlets as “Russian disinformation.”
Graham said that many media outlets were biased when it came to covering that story, but “NPR stood out.” NPR’s public editor dismissed the story as a “politically driven event,” even though the network gave extensive coverage to Blasey Ford’s unproven allegations.
The MRC editor pointed to other examples of what he called bias at the network.
“NPR covered the [former House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi-picked House Jan. 6 Committee live for every minute, and then it couldn’t do a two-minute story on the Biden impeachment inquiry,” he said.
NPR has also “encouraged chaos and disorder in society,” Graham said:
In 2020, NPR’s blog ‘Code Switch,’ with the slogan ‘Race in Your Face,’ posted an interview promoting a new book titled ‘In Defense of Looting.’ On ‘The NPR Politics Podcast’ in 2021, they promoted a book by Yale law professor Elizabeth Hinton saying that protests against policy shouldn’t be called riots; they should be called ‘rebellions.’
On NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ on April 15, 2023, the movie critic John Powers praised the movie ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline,’ hailing it as ‘hugely timely.’ You know, this is what NPR is doing.
That’s what NPR is doing with taxpayer dollars, Graham said, “getting behind looting, rioting, and blowing up pipelines. And yet, NPR represents the Republicans as uniquely extreme.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.