On NPR and at elite universities, liberals should openly admit their biases

I am a professor at a major research university. You'll be shocked to learn that I'm also a liberal Democrat.

And here's another surprise: I listen to National Public Radio.

Everyone knows that NPR caters mainly to liberals, just like our elite universities do. We just don't usually say it out loud. That's because we're afraid we might corroborate President Trump, who has repeatedly distorted what we do. But the only way to fight his lies is to be honest ourselves.

Back in May, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which Congress created in 1967 — to stop funding NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service. According to a White House social media post that accompanied the order, NPR and PBS "spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as 'news.'"

That's a propaganda statement in its own right. There is no evidence — none — that NPR spreads "radical" falsehoods in its news coverage. But it does have a liberal bias. 

Indeed, it caters to people just like me. According to a 2019 Pew survey, 87 percent of people who name NPR as their main source of news are Democrats. Only 12 percent are Republicans. That's not a skew — it's a chasm.

And yes, audience-capture influences NPR's news coverage. In a blockbuster piece last year, business editor Uri Berliner showed how the network's political blinders affected how it reported on allegations of collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign, the origins of COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop controversy.

Berliner was placed on leave and resigned shortly after that.

NPR did damage control. Instead of acknowledging the problems Berliner identified — and pledging to correct them — his bosses charged him with aiding and abetting the enemy.  

"The next time one of our people calls up a Republican congressman ... they may well say, 'Oh, I read these stories, you guys aren't fair, so I'm not going to talk to you,’” said NPR managing director Tony Cavin.

Unfortunately, Cavin was right. A month after his executive order, Trump asked Congress to take back the $1.1 billion it had set aside for public broadcasters for the next two years. Next week the Senate will probably take up the proposal, which will expire if it isn't approved by July 18. But it is likely to pass, because Republicans hold a majority.

But if NPR had just come clean last year instead of circling the wagons, things might be different now. It's not a radical propaganda outlet, but it definitely does lean Democratic. If we just admitted that, perhaps we could buy more credibility among the skeptics.

Ditto for our elite universities, which continue to pretend that they're politically neutral. But everyone knows that's not true, either.

At Harvard, which has faced the most brutal attacks from the Trump administration, 77 percent of faculty members identified as "liberal" or "very liberal" in a 2023 survey. Only 2.5 percent called themselves conservative. At Yale, likewise, liberal professors outnumber conservatives by 28 to 1.

And if you think that doesn't influence the way we teach, you just haven't been listening. In a recent study of college syllabi collected by the Open Syllabus Project — which has amassed over 27 million syllabi from around the world — scholars at Claremont McKenna College showed that professors who assign left-leaning texts rarely couple them with readings that are critical of those interpretations.

Between the World and Me, the best-selling memoir by African-American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, has been assigned in over 2,500 syllabi in the OSP database. But almost none of those syllabi also require readings from John McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, or the other prominent Black authors who have taken issue with Coates' claims about race, criminal justice and more.

None of that means that universities are "dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics," as Trump has falsely alleged. Over half of the undergraduates at my university enter careers in finance or management consulting. If we're trying to make them into Marxists, we're doing a very poor job of it.

But we are promoting a version of political liberalism. If we want to stave off Trump's lies — and, especially his vindictive cuts to our research grants — we need to tell the truth ourselves.

I know some of my fellow Democrats will bridle at the idea of making any concessions in this battle. Admitting the political imbalances at NPR and at our universities can only feed our MAGA foes, or so the argument goes.

But that gets things backwards. The job of journalists and academics is to critique the world, openly and honestly. And that includes critiquing our own institutions.

If we stop doing that, to save our skins, we'll be granting the ultimate concession to Trump. He wants to stifle inquiry, debate and the free exchange of ideas. It would be a tragedy of we did the same, all in the guise of resisting him.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.