Former CEO of NPR Spends a Year With Conservatives — and Discovers Anti-Conservative Media Bias

By Nancy Flory Published on October 24, 2017

A former CEO of NPR spent a year with conservatives out of a fear that “red” and “blue” America were “drifting irrevocably apart.” He — a Democrat and no fan of the president — found media biased against conservatives. The media, he declares, have “failed us.”

“I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show,” said Ken Stern, in a New York Post essay. “I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (‘cling to guns or religion’) and presidential candidates (‘basket of deplorables’) alike.”

Stern has written a book about the experience, “Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right.

A Very Different Impression

He even embedded himself in religious America. Stein He didn’t know what to expect when he attended InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Urbana missions conference. He heard Evangelicals talk about racial equality and refugee issues. He saw lives lived for charity and spreading the Gospel. It left him with a “very different impression of a community that was previously known to me only through Jerry Falwell and the movie Footloose.”

Not everyone agrees with Ken Stern. “You’re not the first one to pull this stunt,” complained Brian Mann, who reports for a NPR station in rural New York. “For decades city folk have been pulling on a pair of suspenders and spending a few Sundays in church with The Conservatives and then writing books in which you declare yourself shocked — shocked! — to find that they read books and talk in complete sentences and think about race in America.”

He insisted that Stein had lived in a bubble. “I’m not sure how you were spending your time when you served as NPR’s CEO,” he says.

“NPR and public radio writ large have the largest team of journalists and media professionals active in rural conservative areas of any media network in America.” He and his colleagues “grew up in these places. We went (and some of us still go) to these churches. We shop in these Piggly Wigglies and these Dollar Generals.”

— David Mills

He began to realize, little by little, that the media did not report on conservatives or issues that mean the most to them. “I … tried to consume media as [conservatives] do and understand it as a partisan player. It is not so hard to do.”

He gave guns as an example. The mainstream media fail to report positively on the rights of gun owners. Stern found a video of a man who successfully defended his business with a gun. “You simply won’t find many [stories] like it in mainstream media,” he said. The editors and reporters are “obsessed with the gun-control side and gives only scant, mostly negative, recognition to the gun-rights sides.” He had to find the video on Reddit.

That neglect makes conservatives see the media as “hopelessly disconnected from their lives.” The media has “opened the door to charges of bias.”

Still a Democrat, he’s careful to qualify his criticism of the media. The media’s bias doesn’t justify Trump’s attacks, he says. Those “are terribly inappropriate coming from the head of government.” 

The Media’s Failings

However, he tells the media to admit “its own failings in reflecting only their part of America. You can’t cover America from the Acela corridor, and the media need to get out and be part of the conversations that take place in churches and community centers and town halls.”

The media don’t mean to treat conservatives so negatively. They just don’t see the positive stories. Those “don’t reflect their interests and beliefs.” They live in a bubble. “When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate and what the narrative of the day will be.”

Please Support The Stream: Equipping Christians to Think Clearly About the Political, Economic, and Moral Issues of Our Day.

The answer is that “the media should acknowledge its own failings in reflecting only their part of America.” The media need to get out and meet people in their communities, their town halls, their churches and community centers, said Stern. “I did that and I loved it,” he said. If the media fail to do so, “It is the public that is the long-term loser.”

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Like the article? Share it with your friends! And use our social media pages to join or start the conversation! Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, MeWe and Gab.

Inspiration
The Scarcity Mindset
Robert Morris
More from The Stream
Connect with Us