By distorting data and by omitting part of the story, NPR repeatedly and blatantly provides free advertising, under the guise of reporting, to the liberal-socialist party. This is hardly news, but here are two recent examples.
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In its Saturday morning, October 29, 2005, weekly news commentary, NPR recounted the history of events leading to the indictment of I. Lewis Libby in the Valerie Plame spy-outing case. Among other things, NPR described the sensationalist, anti-Bush charges made by Joseph Wilson, Plame’s husband, as if they were verified truth.
NPR failed to mention either that Mr. Wilson was a paid flack for Senator Kerry’s presidential campaign, or that the bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee report issued in July, 2004, refuted all of his major assertions.
It will be recalled that, in the midst of the 2004 campaign for the presidency, Mr. Wilson, in interviews with the press and in his op-ed article published in the New York Times, stated that his wife had nothing to do with his selection to investigate British intelligence reports about Saddam’s agents seeking uranium source materials for WMD in Niger and that, furthermore, the Bush administration had ignored his report discrediting British intelligence.
Wilson meanwhile was working on Senator Kerry’s team as an advisor supporting their campaign charge that the President had deliberately lied to the public about Saddam’s possession of WMD in his “mad rush” to invade Iraq.
Shortly thereafter, The Washington Post, one of the nation’s two premier liberal-socialist newspapers, blew Mr. Wilson out of the water with its report on the Senate intelligence committee report in the July 10, 2004, edition:
“Plame’s Input Is Cited on Niger Mission
Report Disputes Wilson’s Claims on Trip, Wife’s Role”
None of that, of course, has anything to do with whether Mr. Libby is guilty as charged. But it is a clear piece of one-sided political propaganda that might as well have been scripted by the Democratic National Committee, since it gives the public the unambiguous impression that the Bush administration sought to cover up its “lies” about WMD by attacking Mr. Wilson. In fact, the exact reverse is the truth: the administration’s intelligence information may have been inaccurate, but it was only Mr. Wilson who lied.
By presenting Joseph Wilson’s lies as if they were factual, NPR provided PR support for the liberals’ now-building 2006 Congressional campaign strategy.
The second example occurred later in the same news summary, and NPR’s reporting was again deliberately slanted to support the liberal-socialist line that the Iraq campaign has been a mistake and a failure. It involved an interview with an Iraqi psychological councilor who has been treating emotionally distressed Iraqis whose family members have been killed or maimed by terrorists.
NPR’s Linda Wertheimer asked the councilor if he had seen similar problems under Saddam’s regime. The councilor answered that, yes, he had in the few instances when Iraquis had risked retaliation by Saddam’s thugs by coming to him.
So, concluded Wertheimer, cutting off the Iraqi councilor and ending the interview, conditions for the Iraqi people are no better now as a result of our deposing Saddam than they were before.
Her interpretation ignores the obvious fact that there was no hope under Saddam for a better future, while there now clearly is. Why else would there have been massive voter turn-outs on two occasions, both at risk of life, to elect constitutional convention delegates and to approve the constitution?
The effect of NPR’s presentations in both examples is to make the network an agent for the Teddy Kennedy/John Kerry propaganda line that the Iraq invasion was a disastrous mistake and that the President is an untrustworthy liar.
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