Joe Conason explains the real reason the right hates NPR:
These same voices have reliably exploited every chance to damage public broadcasting, not because of any supposed liberal bias, but because they disdain the straightforward, probing journalism that the public network provides every day. What the NPR haters want to see and hear on America’s airwaves is the “fair and balanced mentality” of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage and nothing else. After all, they hate CNN, CBS, NBC, and ABC with almost equal passion, no matter how much those networks or NPR bend over to accomodate conservative viewpoints.
What the right dislikes about NPR, aside from its dogged effort to achieve ideological balance, is its devotion to actual reporting about real issues, from campaign finance and Congressional lobbying to the Supreme Court, the war in Afghanistan, and mine safety.
By the way, all the blustering about de-funding NPR is nothing more than election-year nonsense. Conservatives can jump up and shout all they want, but they don’t really want to have this discussion, because then we’d have to get into the subsidies and regulatory loopholes that make so much of their own media possible.