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The Voice of NPR
- Abstract
National Public Radio (NPR), America’s premier tax-supported radio network, with a budget of $59 million in 1993 and an audience of more than fourteen million listeners per week through 458 affiliated stations, operates under a federal statutory mandate of “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” Yet it has consistently violated this mandate by an anti-Israel tilt in its Middle East coverage.
A recent segment, broadcast September 16, 1992, is emblematic. Here NPR, marking the tenth anniversary of the slaughter of Palestinian Arabs by Lebanese Christian Arabs at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, dug up and replayed an interview taped just after the 1982 events. In that interview the NPR host, Noah Adams, is heard to ask Loren Jenkins, the reporter on the scene in Lebanon, “Do you have any doubt now of the complicity of the Israel defense forces there?” To which Jenkins responds, “There is no doubt in my mind that Israel aided and abetted the whole operation.”
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